Part 2: Food, taste, literature

Food, Taste, and Literature

MFK Fisher’s work positions itself in a long tradition of literary writing, as these quotes Links to an external site.from famous books indicate. At times, as these literary meals Links to an external site. suggest, food is not all about celebration, but can also express darker aspects of the human experience.

Since antiquity, various cultures have dedicated noticeable attentions to food. Many texts were dedicated to cooking and recipes, from the Roman collection usually known as Apicius to Chinese manuals. Until a few centuries ago, those texts were often strongly connected (and at times virtually indistinguishable) from scientific works consecrated to diet and health. Galen, Celsus, Avicenna are some of the names that echoed throughout antiquity around the Mediterranean, and books with a similar approach can be found in Indian and Chinese literature.

We can also identify a genre of works that concentrate rather on taste and connoisseurship, discussing the merits of different kinds of cuisines, the value of ingredients, and even the skills of chefs from the point of view of the final consumer.

One of the first texts of this kind in Western Culture is Deipnosophistai Links to an external site.(The Philosophers at Dinner) by the Greek-Egyptian Athenaeus, writte in Roman Imperial times, which in turn refers to the older poem Hedypatheia (The Life of Luxury) by the Sicilian Archestratus who lived in Gela, Southern Sicily, around the time of Alexander the Great’s conquests.

Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, in five books, edited by Isaac Casaubon, 1657.(Credit:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Athenaeus_Deipnosophists_edited_by_Isaac_Casaubon.jpg Links to an external site.)

From the fragments of his text that we have access to, it would seem that Archestratus traveled extensively, identifying the best places for each ingredient and dish and providing information about their preparation. For the first time, he embraced a concept that will often acquire relevance in the history of Western gastronomy: a direct connection between quality and specific place, which guaranteed authenticity.

It would take a whole course just to highlight the most important works in gastronomic literature, but one that deserves mention is the 1474 book De honesta voluptate et valetudine (Honest pleasure and health) by Bartolomeo Sacchi, also known as Platina, a food connoisseur and a librarian at the Vatican, who wrote in Latin and acquired fame all over Europe.

Platina, engraving by Theodor de Bry (1528-1598), from Bibliotheca chalcographica by Jean-Jacques Boissard, 1669 (Credit: http://www.summagallicana.it/lessico/p/Platina%20-%20Bartolomeo%20Sacchi%20detto%20il%20Platina.html Links to an external site.)

While he incorporated recipes from a previous book by the famous chef Mastro Martino, Platina, trained in the study of classic literature, shows his originality by stressing the cultural aspects of dishes and products, giving cuisine a new status. Nevertheless, Platina still embraced the association of food and taste with the medical and philosophical theories of his time. He gave a new interpretation to the concept of culinary pleasure, far from the excesses of gluttony, while highlighting the relevance of local dishes and ingredients. Platina’s Latin work was translated into many vernacular languages all over Europe, helping to make Italian courtly cooking the culinary standard of the time and the center of all innovation in the culinary arts and culture.

Drinking and eating in excess became the themes of a whole genre of literature that developed in the European Middle Ages and turned very popular in the Renaissance, which features fantasies about food abundance and imaginary places where eating has no limits, like in the Land of Cockaigne. These texts appear connected with the tradition of Carnival, the time of the year before Lent where the lower classes could let go, enjoy food and wine, and even poke fun at the elites. A masterpiece that is somehow connected with this genre is the sixteenth century novel The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Francois Rabelais, the story of two giants with an enormous appetite.

As we mentioned in Unit 3 of the course Innovators of American Cuisine (LINK), from the XVII century the French become the trendsetters in all things food. Cuisine and recipes were also discussed in terms of merit, innovation, and originality towards the middle of the eighteenth century the idea of nouvelle cuisine, in the sense of a modern sense clearly perceived as different from the traditions of the past, became popular. This concept, which has been used cyclically in the debates within French cuisine, first appeared in Les Dons de Comus (1739) Links to an external site. by François Marin. The introduction to Marin’s book, attributed to the Jesuits Brumoy Pierre and Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant, supported the superiority of nouvelle cuisine compared to that in the past, causing reactions summarized in a pamphlet, Lettre d'un Patissier Anglois (1740) Links to an external site., attributed to Count Desalleurs, where proponents of nouvelle cuisine were satirized as pretentious and really not very original.

The positive evaluation of culinary refinement and all the debates that originated from it were heavily criticized by Louis de Jaucourt in his entry about cuisine in the foundational text of Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie, edited by Diderto and D;Alembert For Jaucourt, culinary excesses, decadence, and preoccupation about what one eats, introduced in France with the arrival of Caterina de Medici, were a sign of degeneration against the natural instincts of humanity.

However, not even the Revolution managed to put a halt to these disputes and to the interest in food as an index of culture and taste. The very word gastronomy was made popular in 1801 by Joseph Berchoux (1765-1839), who titled one of his poems La Gastronomie, ou l'homme des champs à table (Gastronomy, or the man from the fields at the table). The term was successful and was soon used to describe the art of good eating, a leisure activity about which the emerging middle class seemed to be passionate.

(Credit: http://www.garwood-voigt.com/H18628BerchouxGastronomie.jpg Links to an external site.)

One of the most important works in gastronomic literature is undoubtedly the Physiologie du Goût (1826) by Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826). You can read the French original here Links to an external site. and an English translation here Links to an external site.. This text, published a few months before the author’s death, adopted a rational, scientific and philosophical approach to the pleasures of the table. A series of 10 famous aphorisms was followed by 148 "gastronomic meditations" that combine physiological and nutritional knowledge of the time to events and reflections of various kinds. The book ended with an idiosyncratic and speculative "Philosophical History of Cuisine", which symbolized the new attitude toward food. With Brillat-Savarin gastronomy becomes a proper literary genre, different from food criticism.

(Credit: http://library.case.edu/images/ksl/ecoll/exhibits/cookery/physiologie.jpg Links to an external site.)

Also in France, Alexandre Dumas authored the Grand dictionnaire de la cuisine (1873). The famous writer, a well-known gourmet and bon vivant, collected comments, recipes, and histories that he arranged alphabetically, in brilliant and often humorous style.

Food remained very visible in nineteenth century novels, which often tried to represent characters and environments in a realistic fashion. In the literary narratives, scenes involving production, cooking, and eating were used with different goals: they might provide some information about the characters, or describe situations, places, or points in time, often as part of the background for the main action. Sometimes discussions at the table allowed characters to interact and push the storyline forward, constituting at times crucial nodes where something important for the development of the plot happens. In the case of the novels of the French author Emile Zola, such Le Ventre de Paris (1873) (in French Links to an external site. and in English Links to an external site.) and L’assommoir (1877) (in French Links to an external site. and in English Links to an external site.), food was also used to describe the moral and material poverty of the lower classes, and the insensitivity and egoism of the upper ones, in France at this time. Food was used to create a literary expose also in Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle Links to an external site. (1906), which denounced the corruption and danger of the American meatpacking industry. His work, although written in the form of a novel, also inaugurates a genre of food writing that denounces the horrors of the contemporary food system.

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