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  • Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns
  • Julia Abramson
Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns. By Robert Appelbaum (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006) 375 pp. $ 32.50

At issue in this book is less what early modern Europeans ate than how they experienced their food and foodways. Foods eaten in a former time and another place were necessarily different, even on the molecular level, from those consumed today. Appelbaum also claims that early moderns felt "their bodies in the experience of eating differently from how we feel them now," due to ideas, language, and semiotic structures unique to their eras and locales (52). The analysis of food and the food system, which entails a "'hermeneutics of everything' effect," helps us to gain a purchase on the specificity of early modernity (9). How did early moderns conceptualize and articulate the range of activities, sensations, desires, and beliefs that connect to food?

This engaging, thoughtful study is broadly organized by themes presented as fundamental to the gustatory Zeitgeist. Chapters or subsections explore the dual associations of appetite with life and with death, digestion understood as the essential process and primary metaphor for life, food fantasies that track the transition from a medieval to a Renaissance or early modern outlook, post-lapsarian foods of regret and nostalgia, and the peculiar culinary triangle (communion/cannibalism/early capitalism) that emerged from the close juxtaposition of the Reformation with foreign missions and New World exploration. The study draws on material from several West European cultures, devoting its most extensive analysis to sources from England and France. Quotations from major works in several genres and disciplines (poetry, plays, novels, medical treatises, travel accounts, and cookbooks) are treated both to a [End Page 105] close reading that interrogates for meaning and to interpretive revision in accord with further historical and cultural data.

In William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, or What You Will, Sir Toby Belch's exclamation, "A plague o' these pickled herring!" (I.v), excuses an eructation, or hiccup, or fart, or "something," depending upon edition and century. His indigestion is habitually understood to indicate drunkenness, and Sir Toby himself to embody the carnivalesque. The bodily eruption signals joyous, lively rebellion against the encroaching strictures of civilité as well as against death. But Sir Toby, notes the author, is otherwise quite courtois even while in his cups, and herring are far more windy than drink. Herring were Lenten fare, poor-man's food saddled with a bad reputation as unhealthful. They were also a key to the early capitalist economy. Toby is drunk, but he is not a mere drunkard. Rather, the character serves a complex semiotic function. An aristocratic (read: voluntary) eater of herring, he prefigures both the cosmopolite libertine and the ever-more oppressive ills of commodity consumption to come.

The triangulation among print documents from a diverse and expansive canon, the turns, as well as the minutiae, of grand events, and the informed speculation about material aspects of existence, yield rich, satisfying results. The breadth and quality of the inquiry should have the additional virtue of stimulating responses to the author's questions and methods. Further studies along the present lines that engage more fully with issues of class, gender, and national (or international) characteristics, as shaped through and expressed by food and foodways, would certainly be welcome.

Julia Abramson
University of Oklahoma
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