Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present

FOOD and SOCIAL CLASSES in LATE MEDIEVAL and RENAISSANCE ITALY

Allen J. Grieco

According to a medieval commonplace, human beings were believed to survive by drinking wine (or ale and beer in northern Europe), eating bread, and eating “all those other things” that could be eaten with bread. This third category of foodstuffs was usually referred to by a highly significant Latin term: companagium (companatico in Italian, companage in French). When dealing with medieval food history, this ubiquitous trio turns out to be both a useful and a fundamental way to subdivide human fare, especially when examining the diets of the poor. Economic considerations, but also economic imperatives, limited both the choice of what people ate and how much they ate. This was particularly true in a society where the surplus produced tended to be very limited indeed. Furthermore, even slight price differences seem to have put certain food items beyond the reach of the lower social classes, thus making these products appear as something more linked to the realm of the desired than to what was actually eaten. These very reduced margins within which to make choices, encountered by economic historians whenever they compare the incomes of the working classes to the cost of wheat, would seem to have brought about a very different price structure in the realm of foodstuffs than the one we are familiar with at present.

Grain Consumption and Social Hierarchies

By present-day standards, it might come as a surprise to know that in late medieval and Renaissance Italy the cost of wheat flour—from which bread, the real staff of life, was made—seems to have been abnormally high, especially if we compare its cost to that of meat products. In late-fourteenth-century Florence, for example, one pound of the cheapest meat (pork) cost only twice as much as the best-quality flour, whereas the most expensive meat (veal) cost only two and a half times as much as wheat flour. Today, of course, we are used to a much greater price differential since meat is usually ten to fifteen times more expensive than flour, depending on the kind of meat and the cut. What might seem to have been only a slight price difference must not, however, be underrated since, as I have suggested, it constituted a major discriminating barrier in the eating habits of a large segment of the population, especially in those areas of Europe where wheat and other grains either were used to make bread or were boiled to make a dish of gruel.

It is a commonplace to point out the clear link between bread consumption and social rank. The lower a person’s social rank, the greater the percentage of income spent on bread. For example, historians have found that the percentage of the dietary budget devoted to bread on one of King René’s properties in 1457 varied from a minimum of 32 percent for the overseers to a distinctly higher figure (47 percent) for the cow herders and mule drivers; it reached a maximum of 52 percent among the shepherds, who were considered the lowest-grade workers. The percentage devoted to wine, on the other hand, was less variable, ranging from a minimum of 28 percent for the overseers to a maximum of 34 percent for the shepherds. The most radical discriminant was, however, the percentage devoted to the companagium, the various kinds of food that brought a bit of variety to what was otherwise a diet consisting of vast amounts of bread or gruel. Only 14 percent of the lowly shepherds’ dietary budget was devoted to this item, whereas the overseers, responsible for managing the property, were able to devote as much as 40 percent of their budget to something other than bread and wine. In short, bread occupied an increasingly conspicuous percentile share of the diets of the lower social classes; inversely, this proportion shrank as one rose through the social hierarchy.

This state of affairs does not seem to have been limited to Mediterranean Europe. Christopher Dyer, in Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages, has shown that the importance of grains (wheat, barley, and oats) was just as fundamental in English peasant diets, even though these were integrated, as in most other European countries, with large quantities of vegetables (onions, garlic, leeks, and cabbage being the most often mentioned) and small quantities of meat and cheese.

In a society where social distinctions were made manifest in a variety of ways, food was an important distinguishing element not only between the different social classes but also between rural and urban culture. Literary texts are particularly sensitive indicators of the social value attributed to different foods and therefore allow us to penetrate the social code with which foodstuffs and meals were invested. For example, any number of literary texts can be found that underscore the fact that the daily use of white bread distinguished the city dwellers from the rural populations, who were more likely to eat bread made with a mixture of grains (wheat or millet, for example) or who, more simply, boiled their grain and ate it in this less refined form. That this distinction was not a purely literary one can be seen from the fact that social and dietary differences were also recognized in the confined spaces of fifteenth-century ships, where at least two different tables existed. According to Benedetto Dei’s report to the Consuls and Masters of the Sea of Pisa in 1471, there was a strict scale of salaries respecting the hierarchy of the men on board ship, just as there were distinctions made in the food served. The owner of the ship and the “officers” were served white bread whereas the rank and file had to be satisfied with rations of dry biscuit.

Literary texts also draw attention to the importance given to the proper choice of foods, especially on public occasions when banquets and meals commemorated an important event linking a given family to the community at large (birth of a child, marriage, knighthood, death). There was, in fact, a fine line between what was considered to be good enough and yet not excessively lavish and, on the other hand, food that could only be considered too poor and therefore not becoming the status of the family and the occasion on which it was being served. An excessive display of wealth was controlled and sanctioned by sumptuary laws promulgated not only by the Italian city-states but also elsewhere in Europe. These laws, an interesting source for food historians, fixed with great precision what foods could be served, how much at a time, and to how many guests. The opposite extreme, too poor a meal, seems to have been a rare occurrence that was usually condemned by the community (only morally speaking, of course) and was considered as reprehensible as excessive luxury.

The diets of the wealthier members of the community, a rather complex but interesting problem, have to be examined using a more sophisticated approach than that of calculating the percentile incidence of bread in their general intake. In fact, for the classes other than the laboring ones, it would seem that social distinctions on the basis of diets became apparent primarily in their choice of foodstuffs other than bread. In this case, however, it is not advisable to use literary texts as a source since they can always be suspected of enunciating rules and regulations that were not observed. There are many other sources—such as letters, travel accounts, and private memoirs—that allow us to penetrate into an everyday world where the direct link between food quality and social status moves from a more theoretical plane to a perfectly explicit one.

An excellent example of this link between food and social status can be found in a letter written in 1404 by Ser Lapo Mazzei, a Florentine notary known to us for his voluminous correspondence with his friend and mentor Francesco de Marco Datini, a rich merchant who lived in the city of Prato. In one of these letters, he wrote thanking his friend for what was meant to be a handsome gift of partridges, but reminding him in no uncertain terms that those birds were not food for his sort of person. In fact, Lapo complains to his friend, saying, “You will not leave me in peace with your partridges and God knows I do not like to destroy so many all at once, considering their price, and I would not give them to the gluttons, and it would grieve my soul were I to sell them.” He then proceeds to explain that, were he still a servant of his people (a euphemism by which he meant sitting in the governing body of the city of Florence), it would then have been his duty to eat such fowl. This statement might seem curious to the present-day reader, but his comment should be taken quite literally. The Signori of Florence were, in fact, required to eat great quantities of partridges and fowl in general, since this was seen as an outward sign of the civic and political power they wielded. Such food, however, was not considered fit for normal people, both in a moral and in a medical sense.

Morally and medically speaking, it was dangerous to eat food that was thought to produce excessive overheating in the human body and therefore lead those who were imprudent enough to eat this way directly from the sin of gluttony (gula) to the closely associated and even more dangerous sin of lust (lussuria). This was something that Lapo must have believed to be true, as most of his contemporaries did, since in another letter to Francesco he only needed to remind him of the partridges he had eaten in Avignon in order to allude to a mistress he had had in that city as a young man. Even a great theologian and preacher like Bernardino of Siena believed that eating fowl could be dangerous; he made a point of telling the assembled crowd in the Piazza del Campo that widows, the subject of this sermon, had to be careful in choosing their food. He reminded them that they had to avoid foods that “heat you up since the danger is great when you have hot blood and eat food that will make you even hotter.” In particular, he pointed out: “Let me tell you, widow, that you cannot eat this or that…. Do not try to do as you did when you had a husband and ate the flesh of fowl.”

In any case, Lapo made it clear that such presents were not welcome, but that if his wealthy friend wanted to give him some coarser foods, fit for working people, this he would accept with pleasure. Lapo, it must be said, had not changed much over the years; in a letter he wrote some fourteen years earlier, when he first met Francesco, he told his new friend, “I like coarse foods, those that make me strong enough to sustain the work I must do to maintain my family. This year I would like to have, as I once had, a little barrel of salted anchovies.”

The nutritional guidelines followed by Lapo did not apply to everyone. In fact, his friend Francesco was quick to break these rules, and his diet continued to be, even after the Avignon interlude, the diet of a man who was anything but temperate. From the study by Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato, it is quite obvious that for Francesco di Marco Datini, as for many of his contemporaries, food was not a neutral matter and that his social status was seen to be closely linked to the kind of food he managed to buy. Thus, meat that was not worthy of him could unleash what seems to us to have been an excessive reaction. On one occasion he was sent some veal that was not up to par (probably from an animal that was too old). His reaction was to write to the agent and tell him, “You should feel shame to send such meat to as great a merchant as I am! I will come and eat it in your house, and only then shall we be friends again!”

The notion of “good” meat being fit mainly for the higher social strata and lower-quality meats being fit for the less elevated members of society (considered to be a “scientific” fact even by the doctors writing about diets) is borne out by another of Datini’s letters. In this letter he asks a man by the name of Bellozzo to go to the market “where there are most people and say, ‘give me some fine veal for that gentleman from Prato,’ and they will give you some that is good.” For a man that was so conscious of his status and the food that went with it, it became a matter of some importance if he managed (or, for that matter, did not manage) to buy the same food that was allotted to the priors of Florence whose high table (mensa dei signori) saw the best food to be had in Florence. On various occasions he either complained that the Signori of Florence had bought up the best fish available or was able to boast to his wife that he had bought the same veal that was reserved for the priors.