The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe (review)

This engaging book utilizes the culinary literature of early modern Europe, from the 1520s to the 1660s to be precise, to describe the food consumed by the ruling elites, primarily in Italy, but also in France, Spain, and England. Of course, the elites consumed some of this food at banquets, but The Banquet is a misleading title, as is the use of Late Renaissance. Ken Albala begins by apologizing for The Banquet of the title, commenting that "some have their titles thrust upon them," for most of the book deals with what the elites ate, banquet or no banquet. Albala next tries to justify the use of Late Renaissance, "because no other suitable term for this time span exists," but then the "late Renaissance"almost disappears from the text and is replaced by "early modern Europe"or the "sixteenth and seventeenth centuries." I have no problems with this attempt to make the book more marketable, but as a reviewer, I feel obligated to inform readers of the text beneath the title.

Readers who are interested in what European elites ate in the early modern period will not find a more erudite, more interesting, or better-written treatment. Albala is not a "foodie" dabbling in history but a professional historian with an enormous knowledge of food, as indicated by his previous books Eating Right in the Renaissance, Food in Early Modern Europe, and Cooking in Europe, 1250–1650. Most of this book focuses on ingredients, with chapters on wild food, dairy products, spices and garnishes, vegetables and fruit, starches and pasta, and wine and alcohol. The last chapter includes fourteen recipes, one from each of Albala's major sources. At the end comes a six-page glossary that includes Albala's neologisms such as "visceravore" (p. 73, but "viceravore" in the glossary), meaning one who eats offal.

Three topics that receive limited attention will be of interest to readers of this journal, namely, Lenten food, papal dining and banquets, and condemnations of gluttony and drunkenness. Cookbooks devoted much space to recipes suitable for Lent. The prohibition of dairy products during Lent made it especially difficult for milk-producing areas far from the sea, forcing some towns to seek dispensations until the prohibition ended in the mid-seventeenth century. Oddly enough, while dairy products were prohibited, the beaver's tail was not since it was classified as fish because it was always in water. Papal officials wrote some of the culinary texts examined by Albala; while one indicated papal dining and banquets were relatively frugal and sober in the wake of the Council of Trent, others indicated they lost none of their splendor. The condemnations could take the form of moralistic tirade, satire, or medical caution. One of the satires, Satyres Chrestiennes de la Cuisine Papale, was written by the French Calvinist Pierre Viret in 1560. Viret compared Catholic theology to a recipe concocted from incongruous ingredients; kitchen and serving staff to ecclesiastical officials with the Inquisitors awarded the title of great gourmands; and the banquet to Catholic liturgy, ending with the consumption of Christ as if he were a radish.