Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari
Certain ideas about the history of food are part of the general culture. We all know, or think we know, that pasta originated in China, that it was brought back to Venice by Marco Polo, and that it spread from there first throughout Italy and later to the rest of Europe. Or that Charles VIII, returning to France from an expedition to Naples in 1494, brought the melon back with him. Or that Catherine de’ Medici, who was crazy about artichoke hearts, made them fashionable in France. Or that the basic techniques of French haute cuisine were developed by Italian cooks working in France. Or that flaky pastry dough was invented by Claude Gellée, better known as Claude Lorrain (1600–1682), who was an assistant pastry maker before going on to make his mark as a painter. Or that pâté de foie gras was invented in Strasbourg in 1788 by Marshall de Contades, governor of Alsace. Or was it his cook, Jean-Pierre Clausse, who made a fortune on his discovery? Histories of this sort invariably manage to come up with a specific inventor and date for every famous dish.
If there is a model for this type of history, it is probably the “Catalog of the Inventors of Things That Are Eaten and Drunk” (1548) by Ortensio Lando.1 This bizarre work, a triumph of fancy and fabrication, is, despite its impressive show of erudition, a catalog of improbable gastronomic and enological inventions. It is an extravagant application to the realm of food of what Marc Bloch called the “myth of origin.”
Yet histories that confidently repeat widely held opinions often neglect contradictory evidence. For example, the sources show that pasta did not come to Italy from China by way of Venice but spread northward from the Mezzogiorno, where noodles were eaten long before Marco Polo traveled to the Orient. Furthermore, the fact that Italian pasta is now well known throughout Europe tends to make us forget similar foods that originated in other countries, such as the Polish kluski, or that came overland from the east, such as the Tartaric-Lithuanian kolduni. Other evidence similarly flies in the face of time-honored tradition: melons were grown in the gardens of Avignon as long ago as the end of the fourteenth century; French cuisine bore less resemblance to Italian cooking in the age of Louis XIV than it did in the Middle Ages; Lancelot de Casteau, who cooked for the prince-bishop of Liège, gave a recipe for flaky pastry in his Ouverture de cuisine (1604), a recipe that he probably took from Spanish bakers who may have learned it from the Arabs; and as long ago as 1739 one could read, in Les Dons de Comus, about petits pâtés de foye gras, as well as a pâtés de Périgord that may have been a foie gras of duck and a pâtés de Toulouse that shared with it the honor of being the most expensive of eighteenth-century dishes; Le Cuisinier gascon, moreover, mentioned petits pâtés de foyes gras aux truffes in 1740.
To be sure, some of the putative inventors of our most famous dishes may deserve some of the credit that has been bestowed on them. Illustrious personages sometimes did encourage the adoption of certain foods, cooking techniques, or novel flavors. But there are other ways to study the history of what we eat, less sketchy, more fruitful approaches that are not only better suited to our purposes but also more closely aligned with current historical practice, now that history has broadened its horizon beyond the deeds of great men. This is particularly true in regard to the history of everyday life, of which the history of national dietary customs is a part.
The routines of daily life have a structure, and within that structure even the most insignificant events have a necessary place and a precise significance. These structures are relatively static compared with other historical phenomena, which in the jargon of historians are known as events (of short duration) and conjunctural cycles (of medium duration). Structures are not really static, however; they do evolve, but slowly, over a much longer duration than events or cycles. This tripartite division of historical time (events, cycles, and structures) is an idea first proposed by Fernand Braudel. It serves to warn us against the error of assuming that the structures of everyday life have no history, that people’s daily routines have always been pretty much what they are today. In fact, daily rituals do change, and so does everything connected with them. Historians can therefore study the history of everyday life. To take just one example, the Greeks and Romans used to lie on couches at banquets. This custom persisted for centuries. But at some point in the early Middle Ages, people in the West began to sit upright at formal dinners. This change in posture was closely related to other changes that occurred at roughly the same time: the upright position freed the left hand for cutting large pieces of roasted meat using knives that became part of the standard dining equipment at this juncture. It is probably no accident, moreover, that it was the same people who used both hands to cut and eat roasted meat and who sat at high tables in high chairs who also invented the fork. Nor was it an accident that the fork did not become a regular table utensil until after the Black Plague, between the fourteenth and the eighteenth century, when the use of plates, drinking glasses, and individual place settings tended to increase the space between diners.
Why are the same foods prepared differently in different countries? Not for whimsical reasons but because of specific technological, economic, and social differences. Take grains, for example. In traditional African societies, where communal activities are common, grains are nevertheless hulled and ground individually by women, who devote much of their time to these chores. And since these societies lack not only grain mills but also ovens, they generally eat their cereals in the form of porridge or mush. By contrast, in medieval Europe landlord-owned mills and ovens saved women a great deal of time but allowed the landlord to dominate his subjects more effectively and made bread the primary staple. Bread is also an important staple in the Muslim world, where some ovens and mills are owned by individual families while others are operated by artisans who sell their services to the public. The bread eaten in this part of the world is very different from European bread, however: loaves are smaller, flatter, and more quickly consumed. Nowhere in the Muslim world do we find large, round loaves suitable for lengthy conservation of the kind that have existed in rural Europe from the Middle Ages to the present.
And why do we eat grains at all? Not because someone at some point had the idea of growing cereal plants that might be good to eat. Grains were consumed for thousands of years before agriculture began. Moreover, the development of agriculture is a complex phenomenon in which religion played a significant part. It was neither an accident nor the invention of some genius. Besides, it is well known that introducing a new plant or animal species into a region does not ensure that the people living there will automatically eat it. While it is true that European aristocrats began eating turkeys as soon as the birds could be bred on the continent, it took centuries for the potato and the tomato to gain acceptance, even though these vegetables now play a far more important role in European cooking than the turkey does. To put the point in the technical jargon of historians, Europe’s alimentary structures (in which every item of food has a definite place and function) were for a long time not receptive to American products even though those products had been acclimatized to the Old World. But then, in the eighteenth century, these alimentary structures were disrupted by demographic growth, so the new foodstuffs became part of the European diet.
Finally, consider a more recent example—the triumph of the so-called nouvelle cuisine in the 1970s and 1980s. This was not just a vogue launched by the food writers Gault and Millau. The changes in diet advocated by these journalists turn out to have manifested themselves before the two men wrote about them, in many cases long before. For example, short cooking times were linked to the discovery of the importance of vitamins by nutritionists. Similarly, the growing presence of vegetables on restaurant menus, the turn away from flour-based sauces, and the reduction in the quantities of butter and sugar used in both cooking and baking are all phenomena linked to advances in dietetics.
In truth, we are still quite ignorant about both the reasons for these fundamental changes and their precise timing because historians have mainly been interested in other matters. Until well after World War II, they concentrated on the famines of the past and showed how these could be correlated with economic cycles, price movements, agricultural production, and demographics. Owing to the nature of the early modern economy and the state of European agricultural technology at the time, bad harvests tended to recur regularly, leading to food shortages, higher food prices, famines, and staggeringly high mortality.2 Historians asked why this happened: did people die of hunger as such, of diseases brought on by dubious substitutes for bread, or of epidemics such as the plague, against which malnourished bodies were defenseless?
In the 1960s and 1970s, many historians went even farther, looking into the kinds of physical deficiencies and dietary imbalances that existed even when food was not in short supply. Following the lead of modern nutritionists, they compared the diets of different social groups, of men and women, and of different age cohorts. They figured out how many calories each group consumed on average and what proportion of the diet consisted of starches, proteins, and fats. Finally, they looked into the presence of vitamins and minerals that modern science considers vital to a balanced diet.
Unfortunately, the calculations involved in this kind of work were open to a variety of criticisms. For one thing, the archival sources were often incomplete or imprecise or both. For another, conversions to our modern system of weights and measures were not always easy. Most serious of all, it was pointed out that certain fundamental assumptions were unlikely to be true, since there was no reason to believe that the foods of the past were comparable to the foods of today in nutritional qualities or that people’s dietary requirements were similar then and now.
The research in question focused mainly on fourteenth- to eighteenth-century Europe. Reliable results appear to have been obtained concerning the diets of sailors, soldiers in transit via ship, students at boarding schools, and hospital patients. In these institutional settings diets appear to have provided an adequate number of calories and to have been reasonably well balanced.3 In the absence of adequate sources, however, it proved impossible to gauge what peasants ate, except where they were employed on large estates as hired hands or conscript laborers and fed by the lord of the manor. In western Europe, however, the independent peasantry long constituted the vast majority of the population. There is reason to believe, moreover, that peasants were at times very badly nourished, forced to survive on diets that provided too few calories and virtually no fats or proteins, and this may have been true not just in ancient times but in the relatively recent past.
As for the diet of the wealthy, less is known than one might imagine. Even the wealthiest people seldom bought everything they ate at markets, so the household account books of aristocratic and bourgeois families are unlikely to tell us everything we want to know. Fruits and vegetables were sometimes homegrown, as were grapes for wine. Wheat for bread might be grown on the family estate or come in the form of seigneurial dues, which might also include game. Furthermore, account books rarely distinguished between what was purchased for the masters and what went to servants of various ranks. Yet diet was in those days an essential mark of class difference, so it is meaningless to compute statistical averages in the absence of clear sociological data.
Furthermore, cooks frequently stole from the pantry and sold what they could on the black market. Their masters never ate everything that was served at the dinner table; yet we know very little about what became of the leftovers. Some were served up again at subsequent meals, while others went to the servants, the poor, or the dogs. Hence we are no more capable of using kitchen accounts to gauge the extent to which the wealthy overindulged or suffered from dietary imbalances than we are of measuring the dietary deficiencies of the poor.
Although historical studies of caloric intake and consumption of starches, proteins, and fats are therefore to be treated with caution, other work done in the 1960s and 1970s yielded more reliable and useful results. For example, scholars were able to compile a historical atlas showing where different crops were cultivated.4 Others looked into the relative density of butchers in various rural areas and calculated per capita meat consumption in medieval and modern cities.5 Such studies extended the earlier work of two German historians, Schmoller and Abel. Still other historians studied the peasant diet by examining notarial records.6 Finally, the study of military records has shown that the size of conscripts has increased noticeably since the end of the eighteenth century owing to improvements in diet.7 While historians were doing quantitative research on nutrition, ethnographers and anthropologists were working on dietary choices, the symbolic significance of different foods, dietary and religious taboos, culinary practices, table manners, and, more broadly, the relation between myth, culture, and social structure.8
Among historians, these approaches at first attracted the attention only of a group of Hellenists, who explored the relation between diet and myth, religious sacrifice, and politics in ancient Greece.9 It was not until the late 1970s that specialists in medieval and early modern history also moved to a culturalist approach of a somewhat different sort. They studied the dietary choices of different countries and social classes as an assertion of social identity.10 To that end, they compared the culinary techniques and the likes and dislikes of different groups over time, and they examined the influence of religion and dietetics on the selection and preparation of foodstuffs.11
As perspectives proliferated and scholars with various interests began to compare their findings, a new history of food began to emerge, a history quite different from the “petite histoire of the picturesque and the tragic” that the pioneers of the Annales school of historians attacked in the early 1960s. The new history was no longer petite. On the contrary, its ambition was to touch on all aspects of human action and thought. Nor was it, first impressions to the contrary notwithstanding, an “alternative” to traditional history. Humbly but firmly, historians of food insisted on the centrality of their subject, on the strategic role of food as both activity and value in various societies and hence on the possibility of using the history of food to examine a whole range of crucial variables in a manageable way. Clear evidence for the validity of this approach can be seen in the many colloquia and seminars of the 1970s and, especially, the 1980s that brought together scholars of diverse interests from a variety of disciplines around the subject of food. The history of food has demonstrated its ability to unify many different approaches. The old distinction between mind and body, intellect and substance, seemingly vanished in the face of the need to understand the complexity of human behavior with respect to food.
Turning its back on yesterday’s myth-begotten histories of food and gastronomy, this book is a compendium of the results of these last thirty years of research. Since many gastronomic myths came into being only because people were ignorant of the periods prior to the time of this or that supposed innovation, we have chosen to begin this history at the dawn of mankind and to follow it right through to the present. And we have asked writers on more recent periods to take account of the results obtained for earlier eras.
The organization of the work is chronological. Part One deals with the prehistoric period and the first great civilizations of the Middle East. Part Two deals with the Greeks and Romans of antiquity. Part Three deals with the crucial epoch of the barbarian invasions and the early Middle Ages (from 400 to 1000) Part Four is concerned with three cultures that had a major impact on medieval Europe: the Hebraic, the Islamic, and the Greek Orthodox. Part Five takes up the middle and latter part of the Middle Ages (from 1000 to 1400). Part Six deals with the early modern era (from 1400 to 1800). Finally, Part Seven is concerned with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Rather than adopt the narrative style of the old myth-filled histories of food, we have chosen a thematic approach. For most of the periods examined, we have included studies of, among other things, economic and demographic factors (that is, the relation between the production of food and its consumption), differences between urban and rural areas, culinary arts, dietetics, meals and table manners, and symbolic aspects of eating.
We have also made an effort to avoid the narrow national outlook that shaped most of the gastronomic myths. To that end, we have called upon historians from many different countries who have contributed in one way or another to recent progress in the history of food, and we have asked them to look beyond their own countries and treat their subjects insofar as possible from a European perspective. Given the current state of knowledge, this is not an easy task.
By and large, we have confined our attention to Europe. However, in order to clarify the nature and inception of the European diet, we do occasionally glance at non-European societies: the reader will find chapters on Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Hebrew society in early antiquity as well as the Byzantine, Arabic, and Jewish societies that were the partners and adversaries of Europeans in the Middle Ages. In addition, the age of discovery and the subsequent opening of markets beyond Europe and the formation of colonial empires on other continents subjected European cuisine to influences from the four corners of the globe.
NOTES
1. Published as an appendix to Commentary on the Most Notable and Marvelous Things in Italy and Other Places.
2. A good recent bibliography can be found in M. Lachiver, Les Années de misère: La famine au temps du Grand Roi (Paris: Fayard, 1991).
3. The main results are summarized in J.-J. Hémardinquer, Pour une histoire de l’alimenation in Cahier des Annales, no. 28 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1970), and Histoire de la consommation in Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations, March–June 1975, pp. 402–632.
4. J. Bertin, J.-J. Hémardinquer, M. Keul, and W. G. I. Randles, Atlas des cultures vivrières (Paris: Mouton, 1971). See also Fernand Braudel’s interesting thoughts on the relationship between the dominant food crop, the density of population, and social and political structures in Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme, vol. 1 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1967), pp. 78–133.
5. On butchers and meat rations, see chap. 2 of the pioneering study by L. Stouff, Ravitaillement et alimentation en Provence aux XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris: Mouton, 1970), and Stouff, La Table provençale: Boire et manger en Provence à la fin du Moyen Age (Avignon: Barthélemy, 1966).
6. R.-J. Bernard, “L’alimentation paysanne en Gévaudan au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, November–December 1969, pp. 1449–67; and, more recently, J.-M. Boehler, Une société rurale en milieu rhénan: La paysannerie de la plaine d’Alsace (1648–1789), 2d ed. (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1995), 2:1679–1730.
7. J.-P. Aron, P. Dumont, and E. Le Roy Ladurie, Anthropologie du conscrit français (Paris: Mouton, 1982).
8. The tone was set by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques, 3 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1964–68). For France, see Y. Verdier, Façons de faire, façons de dire: La laveuse, la couturière, la cuisinière (Paris: Gallimard, 1979).
9. Marcel Détienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, La Cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec (Paris: Gallimard, 1979).
10. See M. Montanari, L’alimentazione contadina nell’alto Medioevo (Naples: Liguori, 1979); Montanari, Alimentazione e cultura nel Medioevo (Rome: Laterza, 1988); Montanari, La fame e l’abbondanza: Storia dell’alimentazione in Europa (Rome: Laterza, 1993) [The Culture of Food, trans. Carl Ipsen, The Making of Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)]; and A. Grieco, “Classes sociales, nourriture et imaginaire alimentaire en Italie (XIVe–XVe siècle)” (thesis, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1987).
11. J.-L. Flandrin, “La diversité des goûts et des pratiques alimentaires en Europe du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, January–March 1983, pp. 66–83; “Le Goût et la nécessité: Sur l’usage des graisses dans les cuisines d’Europe occidentale (XIVe–XVIIIe siècles),” Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations, March–April 1983, pp. 369–401; Chronique de Platine: Pour une gastronomie historique (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1992). B. Laurioux, “Manger l’impur: Animaux et interdits alimentaires durant le haut Moyen Age,” in Histoire et Animal: Actes du colloque “Animal et Histoire,” Toulouse, May 14–16, 1987, 1:73–88; and “Le lièvre lubrique et la bête sanglante: Réflexions sur quelques interdits alimentaires du haut Moyen Age,” Anthropozoologica, special issue. J.-L. Flandrin, “La viande: Evolution des goûts et des attitudes,” Entretiens de Bichat, September 27, 1989, Centre d’Information des Viandes; and “Alimentation et christianisme,” Dossier: Religions et alimentation. Nervure, Journal de Psychiatrie 8, no. 6 (September 1995): 38–42; J.-L. Flandrin, “Médecine et habitudes alimentaires anciennes,” in Pratiques et Discours alimentaires à la Renaissance, ed. J.-C. Margolin and R. Sauzet, proceedings of the colloqium of Tours, 1979 (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1982), pp. 85–95. P. Jansen-Sieben and F. Daelemans, Voeding en Geneeskunde: Alimentation et médecine, proceedings of the Brussels colloquium of October 12, 1990 (Brussels: Archives and Libraries of Belgium, 1993), pp. 177–92. M. Weiss Adamson, Medieval Dietetics: Food and Drink in Regimen Sanitatis Literature from 800 to 1400 (Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang, 1995).
