Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present

Culinary history has moved to the front burner, joining proliferating recipe collections, cookbooks, and celebrity chef albums as hot items for our age of pluralistic cultural studies. Publication of this English-language edition of Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present could not have come at a more opportune time. “Food is such a powerful dimension of our consciousness as living things,” the distinguished anthropologist Sidney Mintz said, “to omit it from the study of human behavior would be egregious.”

The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts, located in Napa, California, and financed by the Mondavi Winery, has broken ground for a 2001 opening. The annual scholarly Oxford University Food Conferences, organized by historian Theodore Zeldin, have long since established the legitimacy of the field in Anglo-American intellectual circles. Alan Davidson’s Petits propos culinaires, the American Institute of Wine and Food’s Journal of Gastronomy, and the Cornell-based review Food and Foodways provide ongoing scholarly outlets. The Oxford Book of Food is soon to appear, and Barbara Haber, director of the culinary collection of the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, not complacent with her own spectacular holdings, is compiling a Web-site directory of relevant materials in other American libraries and private collections. Various “foodie” professional organizations now routinely appoint such learned “visiting scholars” as Dr. B. H. Fussell to educate their membership in historical perspectives.

Culinary history is slowly but surely entering the curriculum as a respectable academic field. Three hundred anthropologists in the United States list food studies as their specialty; courses in food and culture are increasingly widespread at the University of California-Berkeley, Emory University, and the Johns Hopkins University. There are degree-granting programs burgeoning at Boston University, Cornell University, and NewYork University, even reaching into the ever expanding cooking schools (careers in food services are at the top of job opportunities). With the popularity of historically based “theme restaurants” (one thinks of the historical research in the works of Apicius preceding the opening, say, of Joe Baum’s Forum of the Twelve Caesars), and the fashion of recherché fusion cuisine in London and the Zagat-driven cities of America, serious would-be chefs are turning to history to seek out the origins and secrets of the exotic savors of the past. An American chef could now, in theory, open an Etruscan restaurant—thanks to historical research: the authenticity may not be in his blood, but it might well be in his files. Contemporary restaurant criticism, long looked to primarily for excessively personalized hyperventilation leading to a planetarium of quantified stellar ratings, is responding to Chef Mark Miller’s stricture: “Most lack intellectual weight, because few critics have the knowledge or experience to put restaurants into a larger historical and social context. The best art, music, and theater critics provide insight that restaurant critics rarely do.” But the writings of Mimi Sheraton, Raymond Sokolow, and Jeffrey Steingarten show how historically valid restaurant criticism can become. Even the daily press has moved beyond seasonal recipes and nostalgic reminiscences, enlisting the services of such erudite American food historians as Charles Perry, who might very well hold forth to devotees of the Los Angeles Times food section on the philology of yogurt as it relates to the lactic cultures of the Asian steppes!

Food is perhaps the most distinctive expression of an ethnic group, a culture, or, in modern times, a nation. “If you tell me what you eat, I’ll tell you who you are” has become a virtual cliché in an age of mass international tourism. Armies travel on their stomachs, to be sure, as Napoleon ruefully learned in his Russian campaign, but the need for food, for condiments to flavor or preserve it, for access to crops and to markets has always driven history, politics, and economics. And now, though we have not yet attained Grimod de la Reyniere’s ideal of an endowed professorship of gastronomy in every school, the present volume consecrates the range and depth of culinary history. The historians contributing to this remarkable collection have surveyed feeding strategies from prehistoric times to the era of the Big Mac, from medieval table manners to today’s finger food, and in so doing have created cultural history from a new and essential perspective.

“France is a country where they talk about eating. Every country talks about eating but in that country they talk about talking about eating,” Gertrude Stein wrote in Everybody’s Autobiography. The statesman Prince Talleyrand suggested that after one sampled wine with eye, ear, and nose, the next step was not to drink it but “to speak of it.” It should therefore come as no surprise that the roots of modern culinary history lie deep in the terroir of France. French historians had always been addicted to the vast synthesis, the artfully constructed prose narrative of the past, exemplified by Michelet for politics or, in gastronomy, Brillat-Savarin. Inevitably the focus was philosophical, theoretical, wide, and event-oriented, as befit the numerous French disciples of Hegel and Marx. Long excluded were the supposedly boring and quotidian facts of life lived by the faceless manswarm; these lay buried in forgotten documents gathering dust in obscure provincial archives, in church and state registries. In the 1960s the historians grouped around the Cahiers des Annales found a fertile and until then fallow field in “alimentation,” documentation of the whole range of practical and theoretical considerations of a particular society with regard to planting, harvesting, marketing, and consuming food and drink. What the Annales’ most illustrious scribe, Fernand Braudel, termed “the structures of everyday life” led from purely quantitative sociological methods (statistics of the consumption of meat over time or in particular locales) to larger questions of cultural approaches and contexts (witness Jean-Louis Flandrin’s series of historical gourmet columns in the journal L’Histoire).

What had been proposed tentatively in 1970, by J.-J. Hémardinquer in “Pour une histoire de l’alimentation,” was to be carried forward by Jean-Louis Flandrin, a historian of collective mentalities often dealing with the early modern family, who, from his perch at the University of Paris VIII-Vincennes, became the leading proponent and exponent of serious, scholarly culinary history for a nation in whose collective consciousness food has been characterized as “perhaps the distinctive ingredient of French identity.” As much as his own publications, it was Flandrin’s role as one of the founders of the review Food and Foodways, as Director of Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Social Sciences (EHESS), and as mentor of a generation of culinary historians that gave him the network to collect the essays for the original Franco-Italian edition of this book. He was joined in this formidable task by the medieval historian Massimo Montanari, professor at the University of Bologna and author of works on peasant and urban eating habits and culture in the Middle Ages.

Readability and utility have been the guiding principles of this English-language edition of a monumental historical compendium. To the ever growing public of world travelers, restaurant patrons, cookbook collectors, fascinated by the origins and cultural dimensions of food, this volume offers a veritable feast of diversity. As editor, I suggest that a superb historical overview, from the caveman and antiquity to the democratic dream fulfilled today as a nightmare of universal fast food, can be gleaned by reading in sequence the richly elegant introductions by Flandrin and Montanari to each of the seven sections. Thereafter, the table of contents should be viewed as a menu for pleasurable grazing. The reader can contrive a full gamut of continuities and availabilities: food as medicine would take one from the dietary rules of the ancient Hebrews (Chapter 4) to the link of diet and medicine in the ancient world (Chapter 12), for example, leading to today’s taste and health. If now we are cautioned against abuse or even use of alcohol, tea, tobacco, and strong spices, these were once part of a medically virtuous pharmacopoeia. If we know that in the Great Chain of Being, earthbound products—potatoes, onions, leeks—were, as Samuel Beckett well knew, poor people’s fodder and that those closer to the heavens acquired the poultry wings of nobility, we can study the relationship of food to class structures from prehistoric banquets through the diets of peasants, warriors, and priests (Chapter 15) to those of society in late medieval and Renaissance Italy (Chapter 24). The focus, to be sure, is on Mediterranean culinary traditions leading from the classical world to the feasts and diets of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and on to our own secular restaurants and banqueting halls.

In the original collection, many of these essays, inspired by the Annales historians’ methodology, contained elaborate documentation: graphs, lists, and statistical charts that made for less than fluent reading. I have eliminated such impedimenta as the page-long count of per-acre yield for artichokes in the Finistere in sixteenth-century Brittany. Overlap and repetition, inevitable in a collection of autonomous essays, gathered rather than culled, have been subjected here to the editorial scissors, and some essays were deemed not worthy of the first cut. The result is, for most English-language readers, a more harmonious and readable volume and less of an omnium gatherum. At the same time, the needs of culinary historians, restaurateurs, and food critics could not be neglected. The invaluable bibliographies have been preserved to encourage researchers and readers alike, and all deletions have been made with a fierce eye to integrity of thought and documentation as well as to continuity and readability.

My challenge has been to be both an editor worthy of the original, noble scholarly efforts of Flandrin and Montanari and an abridger mindful of the almost forty contributing authors. I am, however, primarily responsive to the general reader’s need for accessibility and readability. To edit is to absorb a book totally and to rearrange and recalibrate as necessary. Abridging is a form of aesthetic surgery: the patient may cry out in pain under the excising knife, yet the streamlined result makes it worthwhile—responsible, attractive, and pleasurable as well as informative.