Jean-Louis Flandrin
More than anything else, it is spices that draw our attention to the question of seasoning. At no time in European history did spices play as great a role as in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, and at no time were they as important in cooking, to judge by their variety, frequency of use, and the quantities utilized. This is true of all European aristocratic cuisines, even though they differ greatly in other respects. Moreover, spices achieved their height of importance in international trade at this time, whether we measure that importance in terms of the value of merchandise transported or the efforts of the great maritime powers to monopolize this traffic. It was in the search for spices—as much as gold and silver—that Europeans went out to conquer the Seven Seas and the other continents and thus changed the course of history.
Why Spices?
What justified such an expenditure of energy? Little attention has been paid to this question, and no satisfactory answer has been forthcoming. To begin with the least convincing explanation: spices were used to preserve meat or to hide the foul taste of poorly preserved meat. On close inspection, this answer does not hold up.
First of all, the substances used in the preservation of meat and fish were mainly salt, vinegar, and oil, not spices. Although some sources are unclear on the matter and although pâtés prepared for shipment to distant places were indeed more highly spiced than those intended for immediate consumption, spices were never really in competition with salt, and it was not for their preservative powers that people were willing to pay much more for them than for salt.
Second, leaving salted meats aside, meat in general was consumed sooner after slaughter than it is today. As evidence for this, we have municipal regulations prohibiting the sale of meat slaughtered more than one day previous in summertime and three days previous in winter as well as statistics concerning the number of animals slaughtered daily. Louis Stouff has compiled and graphed these data for an entire year for the city of Carpentras in the fifteenth century, and from his work it is clear that animals were generally killed not three days before their meat was sold or two days or even one, but on the very same day. If medieval gastronomy is to be criticized, it has to be for consuming meat that was insufficiently aged rather than rotten.
Finally, if anyone did eat preserved meat or meat that had gone bad, it wasn’t the wealthy nobles and bourgeois, who consumed spices, but the hapless poor, who couldn’t afford such luxuries. Indeed, salted meat turns out to be quite rare in the recipes found in treatises on cooking; they frequently mention salted fish, especially for Lent (eel, herring, cod, trout, salmon, sturgeon, whale, dolphin, shad, whiting, mackerel, mullet, and even pike), but salted meat and fowl (pork, boar, beef, venison, goose, coot, and, very rarely, mutton and marmot) occur much less often than fresh meat and fowl. Furthermore, salted meats were almost always eaten with mustard and almost never with spices.
Other explanations, though not as egregiously misguided, are nevertheless unsatisfactory. Several good historians have argued that the use of spices was a means of achieving social distinction. It is true that people lower down on the social ladder could not afford to buy these expensive luxuries, and it is also true that as wealth and social rank increased, so did the use of spices in terms of both quantity and variety. Nevertheless, the argument does not take us very far because spices were certainly not used primarily as a status symbol. Indeed, the rarity of a commodity has never been enough by itself to make people covet it or treat its possession as a mark of distinction. In order to serve that purpose, the commodity in question must also be perceived as superior to other commodities capable of fulfilling the same function. Beer may have been as rare in grape-growing regions as wine was elsewhere, yet nowhere was beer more coveted than wine, which was seen as an “aristocratic” beverage. In fact, for complex cultural reasons, beer was everywhere regarded as inferior to wine. Likewise, the fact that exotic spices were rarer than domestic herbs is not enough to account for the higher price of the former or for their value as a status symbol. Before people could covet imported spices, they first had to learn of their existence and have reasons for believing them superior to garlic or parsley.
A third argument takes us a bit farther than the first two. It holds that the West learned about spices from the Arabs, whose civilization they came to admire during the Crusades. Recent proponents of this thesis, such as Toby Peterson, maintain that the cookbooks that popularized spicy cooking in the West were all inspired by Arabic precursors.
Indeed, the sophistication of Arab civilization is well known, and there can be no doubt that it enjoyed considerable prestige in medieval Europe: the West learned from the Arabs in many areas. Furthermore, Arabic cooking is indeed spicy, and Maxime Rodinson has shown that certain western dishes borrowed directly from Arab recipes. Finally, Arabs controlled the trade in spices between the places where they were produced and the Egyptian and Syrian ports to which Venetian, Genoese, and Catalan traders came to buy them. Stated succinctly, the argument is that what accounts for the use of spices in western Europe in the Middle Ages is the cultural and commercial dominance of Arabic civilization.
The trouble with this argument is that spices were used well before the Crusades (in the tenth to thirteenth centuries)—even before an Arab empire existed (that is, before the seventh and eighth centuries). We know from Apicius’ culinary treatise that Roman high cuisine already used spices: 80 percent of the recipes it contains employ pepper. Although the range of spices used in the Middle Ages was wider, Bruno Laurioux has shown that the basic pattern was set by the end of antiquity, and Europe continued to import spices throughout the early Middle Ages.
Medicinal Virtues of Spices
Traditionally, the word “spices” referred not to just any aromatic substance used in cooking but only to exotic substances imported from abroad. Many of these oriental imports were used for therapeutic purposes rather than cooking. All the spices used by cooks also had medical uses. For example, according to Le Thresor de santé (1607), pepper “maintains health, fortifies the stomach,…[and] eliminates winds. It facilitates urination,…cures chills from intermittent fevers, and also heals snake bites and hastens the expulsion of stillborn infants from the womb. If drunk, [it] is good for coughs….Ground up with dried grapes, [it] purges the brain of phlegm and stimulates the appetite.” Cloves were good “for the eyes, liver, heart, and stomach.” Oil of clove was “excellent for treating toothaches….It is good for stomach fluxions due to cold and for cold maladies of the stomach….Two or three drops in bouillon of capon will cure colic. It is of considerable help in digestion if boiled with fennel seed in good wine.”
Every spice was supposed to possess analogous virtues. Not only were spices more commonly used for medicinal purposes than as condiments, but the former use also predated the latter historically. Bruno Laurioux has shown that every spice used in the medieval kitchen was originally imported as a medicine and only later employed as a seasoning.
The question remains whether these pharmaceutical products were employed in the kitchen for medicinal purposes or purely as flavorings. This is a question worth asking, since most of the drugs that we nowadays abuse against medical advice were originally used on the advice of physicians for medicinal purposes. Included under this rubric are sugar, coffee, tea, tobacco, and alcohol, to name a few. In the fourteenth century Magninus of Milan warned readers of his Opusculum de saporibus against abusing sauces specifically because of their medicinal value: “Sauces…have a medicinal nature, hence the wise man excludes them from a healthy diet, for in order to preserve health one should abstain from consuming all things medicinal.”
Be that as it may, physicians from the thirteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth century repeatedly recommended using spices to make meat more digestible. Aldobrandino of Siena wrote in his Regimen corpus (1256) that cinnamon was good for “fortifying the liver and the stomach” and “cooking meat thoroughly.” Similarly, ginger was “good for fortifying a cold stomach…and cooking meat well,” while cloves “fortify the stomach and body,…eliminate flatulence and evil humors…due to cold, and help to cook food thoroughly.”
In this period everyone conceived of digestion as a form of cooking. The essential agent in this process was animal heat, which gently cooked food in the stomach, a sort of natural cookpot. Accordingly, spices that were used as seasoning, all of which were considered to be “hot” (and for the most part dry), had the virtue of counterbalancing the “coldness” of the foods with which they were served, thereby assisting the digestive cooking process. Pepper was said to be “of the fourth degree” of hotness and dryness. Cloves, galanga, cardamom, and curcuma were of the third degree; cinnamon, cumin, cubebe, and nutmeg were of the second degree; and so on.
In fact, numerous native flavorings and condiments were also thought to be hot and dry. As noted in Aldobrandino’s book, garlic and mustard were of the fourth degree, just like pepper; parsley, sage, pennyroyal, leeks, garden watercress, and mountain hyssop were of the third degree; fennel, caraway seeds, chervil, mint, roquette, and river watercress were of the second degree; and so on. In general, all aromatic plants were considered hot. But spices, which came from the hot countries of the East, had been seen since antiquity as more refined and subtle and therefore medically more reliable than indigenous aromatic plants.1
A condiment’s degree of hotness was not its only virtue. Beyond the third degree, foods and spices were considered dangerous. The fourth degree of coldness included the poisonous mushrooms. As for the fourth degree of hotness, garlic was thought to be suitable only for the crude stomachs of peasants. And pepper, the strongest of spices, vanished from French aristocratic cookbooks in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when its use was confined to lower levels of society. When cooking for the delicate stomachs of the social elite, French chefs used only “long pepper” (a hot spice of the third degree), and they always took the edge off by mixing it with other, less searing spices.
Cooking for Digestibility
In general, seasoning served two broad purposes: it made food more appetizing by improving its taste, and at the same time it made food more digestible. While some cookbooks presented themselves as manuals of practical dietetics, most treatises on dietetics included recipes along with medical explanations of their health benefits.
For example, Magninus of Milan’s Opusculum de saporibus dealt systematically with the major meats, fowl, and fish. It began by summarizing the “physical” characteristics of each food—its degree of hotness or coldness, dryness or moistness, crudity or subtlety—and then explained the best way to cook it together with recipes for the most appropriate sauces. For example, beef, a dry meat, was only to be eaten boiled, and because it was crude and “cold,” it called for a “hot” sauce to warm it up and tenderize it: a saffron pepper sauce, a sauce made with roquette, or a white garlic sauce. The fact that indigenous spices are prominently featured in two of these sauces probably indicates that beef was still an unsophisticated food eaten by people of low status.
The same was true of goose, whose meat, according to Le Thresor de santé, was “highly excremental…and hard to cook…. There is no other domestic bird whose flesh is as crude, cold, and moist.” The author recommends eating it “with a sauce made of bread roasted in the oven, soaked in good bouillon, and strained with six cloves of crushed garlic (to taste), mixed with ginger, and all boiled together on a stove…. It is also good to lard and stuff the goose with sage, which should not be eaten. On the fire this draws off some of the excess viscosity. Crushed pepper may also be added.”
The flesh of the crane was another matter. Like beef, its meat was “hard, cold, dry, and stringy, and its crude juice is hard to digest and can lead to congestion of the blood and melancholic humor.” Since the meat of the crane was served to aristocratic diners, however, Le Thresor de santé recommended that it be eaten “with cloves, salt, and powdered pepper.” Aldebrandino of Siena recommended serving it with “black pepper sauce,” a preparation that involved a number of precious spices.
Aldobrandino, perhaps because he was writing for a princess, also prescribed spices for more common dishes such as brains and tongue. Brains were said to be “cold and moist…[and] viscous…producing abomination and corrupting easily in the stomach,” which was why they were to be eaten “before all meats” and “flavored with vinegar and pepper and ginger and cinnamon and mint and parsley and other things of the same nature.” Tongue was a “mixture of cold and hot, but…stands closer to coldness than to hotness,” so it was to be eaten “flavored with pepper and cinnamon and ginger and vinegar and other such spices.”
As for salt, the most common condiment, Joseph Duchesne, writing early in the seventeenth century, gave an apt description of the dual function of seasoning, gastronomic as well as dietetic: “Salt is hot and dry by nature, hence its virtues are cleansing, dissolutive, purgative, constrictive, and astringent; and that is why, by consuming the superfluous and excremental moisture in many things, such as flesh, fish, and fruit, it preserves them from corruption. As such, salt is among the things most necessary to human consumption, which no one can do without…. Salt alone is useful as a seasoning for all meats, which would otherwise have an unpleasant taste or flavor and be more subject to corruption in our bodies.”2
Two and a half centuries earlier, Magninus of Milan had pointed out salt’s dual virtues in his Regimen sanitatis: “Salt…adds goodness of flavor to comestibles and removes the harmful influence…of a certain aqueous and indigestible moisture. Hence these foods are cooked and digested more fully with salt than without it.” But not all foods required it: “Foods that are moist and excremental as well as crude [such as pork] need salt more,” whereas “foods that are dry or without excess moisture and delicate [such as chicken and partridge] need very little salt when seasoned.”3 Later he notes that when cooking legumes and other herbs, “salt and water are not sufficient: we need oil, butter, or fat. Because legumes and other herbs are by nature melancholy and earthy, it is good to season them with something fatty, which tempers their earthiness and makes them smoother and more delectable and therefore more digestible and nourishing.” Cold condiments such as wine and cider vinegar also had dietetic value. In De saporibus he recommends that “summer sauces be made with cider vinegar or juice from grapes taken from the top of the vine, vinegar, lemon juice, orange juice, or grenadine.” The same “cold” ingredients could be used in any season to moderate the heat of other spices so as to transmit their beneficial effects to all parts of the organism, thereby allowing their “aperitive virtue,” or sharp, biting taste, to reach into the body’s tiniest conduits.
In the early seventeenth century Duchesne, commenting on the “qualities of vinegar,” noted that “it is one of the primary stimuli of the appetite” as well as
useful for cutting into and opening up the liver [and] dampening the ardor of the bile. It also prevents corruption and aids digestion in stomachs…which are too hot…but it should be used with discretion, if necessary correcting and moderating its effects with sugar and other things. Cider vinegar may also be used to stimulate the appetite and moderate the blood and bilious humor and is therefore useful in treating choleric complexions and people afflicted with maladies of heat.
Cooking techniques were also designed to make meats more digestible. Fatty (and therefore moist) cuts were roasted to “dry” them out, whereas lean and “dry” pieces were boiled. Thus suckling pigs and fresh pork were roasted, as were leg and shoulder of lamb, quail, and fatty capons; beef was always boiled. Pork was also salted to lessen its “moistness.” This was the theory, at any rate, but some recipes seem to contradict it: Platine en français, for example, recommends boiling breast of veal and roasting its spine as well as roasting hare and pheasant on a spit. But these exceptions only confirm the rule.
Le Thresor de santé recommends numerous ways of eating oysters, some of which were better than others from a dietetic point of view. Oysters, we are told, “are difficult to digest…if one swallows them raw with their water in the manner of the Ancients,” for “their flesh is very soft and not very nourishing and yields a raw, moist juice that does not go down easily.” It was better “to cook them in the shell over coals with butter and crushed pepper.” Since “their salty juice makes them hard to digest,” though, “a better method is to boil them with correctives. Remove them from the shell, wash them well in their own water filtered through cloth, and boil them with butter, spices, and Corinthian grapes. When half-cooked, add finely chopped marjoram, thyme, parsley, and savory, along with onions, saffron, and cider vinegar.” All things considered, however, “oysters roasted over a slow fire are even healthier, because the heat corrects their excessive moisture.”
Tastes
Dietitians generally offered several recipes for cooking each type of food they discussed, and cooks and consumers no doubt chose among them based not only on dietetic considerations but also on availability of ingredients and taste. Indeed, physicians themselves considered the gastronomic function to be just as important as the dietetic function: improving the taste of food was also a matter for dietetics.
Magninus of Milan explains this at several points in his Regimen sanitatis. The condiments and sauces used in seasoning foods “are of no small value in a healthy diet, because condiments make food more delectable to the taste and therefore more digestible. For what is more delectable is better for digestion. Condiments add nutritional value and correct for harmful properties.” He discusses this theme in connection with each of the most common condiments: salt, oil, lard, and butter.
Physicians complained that achieving sophisticated tastes sometimes took precedence over medical considerations. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that gastronomy and dietetics were systematically opposed. On the contrary, medieval tastes were largely shaped by dietetic beliefs.
Although physicists and physicians did not always agree about the number of simple flavors, all acknowledged nine basic tastes that were distinguished from one another by quality, substance, and relation to the four elements as summarized in the chart opposite.
Each flavor could be transmuted into the one above it in the table by the action of heat, as Ambroise Paré pointed out in the sixteenth century:
Nature generally…adheres to a certain order in the coction of flavors…. The first to appear is the acerbic flavor, which is still quite crude; then with a certain amount of concoction it becomes austere and then acidic. With still greater concoction it becomes mild and oily, and if the heat is increased still further it will turn salty, after which the salty becomes bitter, until finally, if the heat is increased too much, it becomes acrid, the flavor whose nature is entirely that of fire.
There was no shortage of examples of such transmutations. Green fruits, for example, tasted acidic or even acerbic, but as they ripened under the action of the sun, they acquired a sweet or oily taste. Honey and sugar, which tasted sweet, turned bitter when caramelized by the effects of heat. Finally, it was the action of the tropical sun that gave pepper and other spices the hottest of all flavors—acrid, or, as we say nowadays, “hot” or “spicy.”
Any food that was nourishing was supposed to have something of “sweetness” in it, implying that it contained at least some degree of heat. Substances that had only cold flavors (austere, acerbic, or acidic) or hot flavors (bitter, salty, or acrid) were useful not as foods but only as medications or condiments. They were also quite useful for balancing the flavor or temperament of foods that were too hot or cold or insufficiently sweet.
THE NINE BASIC FLAVORS BY QUALITY, SUBSTANCE, AND RELATION TO THE FOUR ELEMENTS
| Quality |
Flavor |
Fire |
Air |
Water |
Earth |
Substance |
| |
Acrid or pungent |
X |
|
|
X |
Subtle |
| Hot |
Bitter |
X |
|
|
X |
Gross |
| |
Salty |
X |
|
|
X |
Medium |
| |
Oily |
X |
X |
|
|
Subtle |
| Temperate |
Sweet |
X |
X |
|
|
Gross |
| |
Insipid |
|
X |
|
|
Medium |
| |
Sour or acidic |
|
|
|
X |
Subtle |
| Cold |
Austere |
|
|
|
X |
Gross |
| |
Acerbic |
|
|
|
X |
Medium |
Recommendations for Eating Fruits
To what extent did actual eating practices conform to the prescriptions of the dietitians? To judge by what they themselves said, the answer is “not entirely,” since they were quick to denounce the slightest transgression, much as preachers denounced moral failings from the pulpit. Nevertheless, medieval dietary prescriptions, like Christian moral preachings, left an indelible trace on European customs.
According to Platine en français, Galen is supposed to have said that he never had a fever because he never ate fruit. Yet we know that fruits were consumed in large quantities by the social elite. Gourmet fashions (or social conformism) thus had an impact, but when it came to the way in which fruit was eaten, all the recommendations of the dietitians were scrupulously observed in order to counteract the deleterious consequences.
One recommendation had to do with when fruit should be eaten. Those fruits that were considered “cold” or “subject to putrescence,” such as sweet cherries, plums, apricots, peaches, figs, blackberries, grapes, and especially melons, reputed to be the most dangerous of all, were to be eaten at the beginning of the meal. Others, including apples and pears, quince, chestnuts, and medlars, were better eaten at the end of the meal because they had the virtue of preventing other foods from “coming up”; indeed, they had the opposite effect, hastening what was consumed toward the exit in the manner of a press.
Physicians also recommended that certain fruits be eaten in conjunction with other foods and condiments. In Le Thresor de santé, for example, we read that “it is recommended that melon be followed by a mild cheese or a small amount of meat seasoned with either salt or sugar in order to keep the melon from putrefying.” This is probably the basis for the current Italian custom of eating melon with prosciutto. The French tradition, for which we find evidence from the sixteenth century to the present day, was rather to season melon with salt and pepper and to drink a glass of clear wine along with it.
Pears, “being quite windy,” according to Le Thresor de santé, were to be “braised with anise, fennel, or coriander” before eating, and afterward it was recommended that one “immediately drink a good glass of old wine.” Indeed, pears became “good and beneficial when cooked in good red wine, larded with cloves, sugar, and cinnamon, and served hot with quantities of fresh butter and creamy cheese with sugar on top.” They were often served cooked with sugar and spices.
What the Cooks Tell Us
In the preface to Le Cuisinier françois (1651), we read that the recipes in the book are designed “to preserve and maintain a healthy condition and good disposition by teaching [cooks] to corrupt the vicious qualities of meats by contrary seasonings.” The editor concludes by saying that, like Le Médecin charitable, his book belongs in the library of everyone concerned about health since “it is much more agreeable to spend a modest amount…on ragouts and other meaty delicacies in order to preserve life and maintain health than it is to spend vast sums on drugs, herbs, medicines, and other unwelcome remedies in order to regain health once lost.”
We need not take the editor at his word. Nevertheless, his sales pitch proves that even at this late date a cookbook could be presented as a practical treatise on dietetic hygiene. Furthermore, a statistical analysis of recipes shows that, in practice, cooks by and large conformed to the recommendations of the dietitians.
While a treatise on dietetics such as the Opusculum de saporibus gave precise indications about what sauces to use for each type of meat, fowl, and fish and included detailed recipes for each sauce, few cookbooks of the period, like Le Viandier de Taillevent, went into such matters. This may have been because meats such as boiled beef and port were too vulgar for Taillevent to concern himself with. Often it seems that we are dealing with two different cuisines, no doubt because of the nationalities of the authors.
Nevertheless, Taillevent and other cookbook authors were by no means cavalier about matters of dietetics. To begin with, they respected the taboos laid down by the dietitians. For example, the taboo against mixing milk with fish, which we find in the Spanish physician Petro Fagarola’s Regimen conditum, is honored in all eighty-five fish recipes in Le Viandier de Taillevent, where only almond milk is ever mentioned in connection with fish. The same is true of Platine en français.
Furthermore, while the sauces discussed by Magninus of Milan and other dietitians are not totally identical to the sauces that we find in medieval cookbooks, the overlap is significant. For instance, De saporibus asserts that “roasted turtledove, partridge, pigeon, and quail need no sauce other than salt and lemon juice,” whereas Taillevent, a fourteenth-century French chef who was not yet familiar with lemons, recommends seasoning roast partridge, pigeon, turtledove, pheasant, plover, woodcock, and other birds with salt only. Magninus recommends camelina (a type of mustard plant) for roast rabbit and small chickens, while Taillevent suggests using it not only for these meats but also for roast rabbit, kid, lamb, mutton, and venison. Finally, the way in which, say, Le Ménagier de Paris recommends preparing camelina sauce (with vinegar during the summer and wine during the winter) follows exactly the recommendations of Magninus and other dietitians.
In general, the “coldest” and “crudest” meats were the ones served with the hottest, spiciest sauces. With chicken all that was necessary was jance, a mixture of white wine, cider vinegar, and ginger, along with cloves and burnt rather than white bread. Jance was also used on fried fish kept hot with boiling oil. With boiled fish, which was always cold and moist, green sauce made of vinegar, cider vinegar, ginger, and various hot herbs was served, or else camelina, which was more stimulating and penetrating. The latter sauce, served frequently with the “crude” flesh of quadrupeds, was made with vinegar or red wine or both, toasted bread, and a mixture of four or five spices, including ginger, grain of paradise, clove, and even “long pepper” along with the dominant cinnamon. Cinnamon was supposed to be the “subtlest” of the spices, hence it was no accident that it figured prominently in a sauce that was served with “crude” meats. Hot sauce included the same spices, but the dominant ingredient was cloves, to which long pepper was sometimes added. The solvent was vinegar uncut by wine or cider; burnt bread, hotter than browned bread, was used as a binder. It will therefore come as no surprise that this very stimulating sauce was served with venison and boar, which were particularly hard to digest, as well as with “viscous” fish such as the lamprey and large eels and “crude” fish like “sea hogs,” dolphin, and porpoise. These “gross” meats were also served with black pepper sauce, another very hot sauce made of ginger, pepper, burnt bread, vinegar, and cider.
The total absence of spices from recipes intended for the sick is as significant as their presence in recipes for the healthy. Anyone suffering from a fever was forbidden to eat spices, because these, being hot and dry, could only make the fever worse. Food for the sick was still cooked, however, but it was always boiled—never roasted. Instead of spices, two-thirds of these dishes were seasoned with sugar, the most “temperate” of condiments.
We are now in a position to sum up the relation between dietetics and cooking in the Middle Ages. Then, as now, snobbery and ostentation drove some wealthy people to eat dangerous foods such as fruit, venison, river fish, lamprey, and porpoise. These abuses were denounced by hygienists and moralists alike. Nevertheless, dangerous foods were seasoned and cooked so as to correct their “vices.” This was typical of medieval and Renaissance cooking, and not only of the recipes found in dietetic treatises (which may or may not have been used in practice) but also of those in ordinary treatises on cooking.
Dietetics and Oral Culture
Does this mean that cooks were founts of scientific knowledge and preoccupied above all with dietetics, as the editor of Le Cuisinier françois suggested? Or that they worked closely with physicians, as Terence Scully has argued? Perhaps, but the main point lies elsewhere. Because the concepts of ancient medicine were not far removed from common experience, the principles of dietetics could be propagated by means other than books. Everyone in medieval society learned those principles by eating, as we see even today in various societies where spices are eaten from the Antilles to China.
What is more, venerable proverbs attest to this oral circulation of certain prescriptions of the old dietetics. Many such proverbs warned against the danger of eating fruit—not just green fruits (“Mauvais est il fruiz qui ne meüre,” late thirteenth century) but all fruits (“De bon fruit, méchant vent et bruit”). Pears were a particular target: “Après la poire, le vin” (fifteenth century); “Sur poyre vin boire” (1577); “Après la poire, prestre ou boire” (1578); “Après la poire, le vin ou le prestre” (1579, 1611); “After a pear, wine or a priest” (1584, 1607, 1611, 1659); “Water after figs and wine after pear” (1659, 1666). Peaches, too, were sometimes included, and even that comparatively well-balanced fruit, the fig: “La pêche aime le vin”; “The peach will have wine, the fig water” (1573, 1577, 1629, 1659); “Al fico l’acqua ed alla pesca il vino.” As for the melon, although it caused physicians more worry than any other fruit, we find no mention of it in proverbs before the sixteenth century, no doubt because it was a latecomer to non-Mediterranean regions.
By contrast, ancient proverbs warn against salad, which, like raw fruit, was believed to be cold and difficult to “cook”: “De la salade et de la paillarde, si tu es sage donne t’en garde” (Meurier, 1578); “A good salad is the beginning of an ill supper” (1659, 1664, 1670, 1732); “Qui vin ne boit après salade est en risque d’être malade” (1578); “Qui vin ne boit après salade est en danger d’estre malade” (1579); “He that drink not wine after salad is in danger to be sick” (mentioned fourteen times between 1552 and 1755). To counter the coldness and moistness of salad, people relied on salt (“Salade, bien salée”) and oil, which was thought to be hot like salt, rather than on vinegar: “Salade bien lavée et salée, peu de vinaigre et bien huilée.”
Old cheese, deemed to be hot but heavy, was also thought difficult to digest. It was used as a kind of medicine to facilitate the digestion of other foods: “Cheese digests all things but itself” (1566, 1584). In this it was like the pear, and it was recommended that the two be eaten together: “Oncques Dieu ne fit tel mariage comme de poire et de fromage” (God made no better marriage than pear with cheese; thirteenth century). As much as the pear, if not more, cheese was thought to make a fitting end to a dinner: “After cheese comes nothing” (1623, 1639).
The third type of dangerous food was salted meat: “De chair salée, de fruit ni de fromage nul ne s’en fie tant soit prudent et sage.” To be sure, salt improved cold meats such as beef and especially moist meats such as pork. But salted meats were blamed as a cause of scurvy and therefore regularly served with a seasoning believed to protect against scurvy—namely, mustard, as both proverbs and cookbooks attest: “De chair sallée sans moutarde/Libera nos Domine.” “De plusieurs choses Dieu nous garde/de toute femme qui se farde/d’un serviteur qui se regarde/…et d’un boeuf salé sans moutarde” (sixteenth century).
Proverbs also warned against fish, which was believed to be cold and moist, like water (“Tout poisson est flegme”), and therefore dangerous: “Chair fait chair et poisson poison” (1578). If some ancient proverbs recommended not eating fish in months ending in r (as for oysters today), the reason was that fish were difficult to keep during the summer. But other sayings recommended eating fish only during the summer, probably because it was too “cold” a food for winter: “Si les mois sont errez, le poisson ne mangerez.” “Poisson au soleil et chair à l’ombre.” Since the peak month for fish was March, during Lent, these proverbs went unheeded, but they are nonetheless significant. Another reason why fish had to be well cooked, preferably by frying, was its “phlegmatic temperament,” which also called for serving it with wine and following up with dried fruits: “Veau, poulets et poissons crus font les cimetières bossus.” “Le poisson qui naît dans l’eau doit mourir dans l’huile.” “Poisson, goret, cochon ou cochin, la vie en l’eau, la mort en vin.” “Après poisson, noix est contre-poison” (1578). “Après poisson, noix en poids sont”—this meant, according to Gabriel Meurier, that walnuts were “esteemed and prized” after fish.
To sum up, cooking, then as now, was a matter of preparing foods so as to make them taste their best—but best in the terms of a particular culture whose taste differed from ours because it was shaped by different dietetic beliefs and culinary traditions. Because every flavor had a precise dietetic significance, anything that was done to enhance flavor also had implications for the digestibility of the food in question. Every cook might have his own style, just as artists and writers had theirs. But the cook exercised his creativity within the bounds of rules defined by the complementarity of temperaments and flavors, rules that were at once gastronomic and dietetic. We find the same duality today outside of Europe in many cultures with spicy cuisines, such as China and other countries of the Far East as well as in the Caribbean, where popular thinking about diet is directly inspired by the western medicine of yesteryear.
NOTES
1. See Marcel Détienne, Les Jardins d’Adonis: La mythologie des aromates en Grèce (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). [The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology, trans. Janet Lloyd. Mythos: Princeton/Bollingen Series in World Mythology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).]
2. J. Duchesne, Le pourtraict de la santé.
3. Magninus of Milan, Regimen sanitatis.
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