At the First Table: Food and Social Identity in Early Modern Spain by Jodi Campbell (review)

FOOD HISTORY AND THE HISTORY OF SPAIN have both been growing fields in anglophone historiography for the past two decades. Beyond the occasional article or special issue of a journal, however, there has been little in English that combines the two for the early modern period. Jodi Campbell's At the First Table begins the work of addressing this gap. Focusing primarily on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Campbell gathers material from a wide variety of sources, including municipal regulations, account books, confraternity registers, dietary and medical treatises, cookbooks, and period literary works, interweaving them with the conclusions of a growing body of food literature on the late medieval and early modern Spanish kingdoms. Her book helps bring early modern Spain into the anglophone conversation about food history, placing it in the context of both Mediterranean and Western European foodways while simultaneously hinting at the ways in which early modern Spain's food culture was distinct unto itself, as much the product of particular developments like Atlantic expansion and the Inquisition as it was of the broader food cultures in which it was enmeshed.

Chapter 1 sets the table, so to speak, by outlining the general food practices of early modern Spain. Here one finds the bread and wine that form the basis of the premodern European diet and the Galenic and Aristotelian frameworks that gave that diet meaning. But this chapter is also where the reader first encounters what will be the book's major leitmotif: the degree to which Spanish foodways were particularly "Spanish" versus the degree to which they participated in broader Mediterranean and European food cultures. Campbell also takes care to address the fact that Castile's food culture was one of many in the peninsula, and that, by the time it became dominant, it had long been drawing on the food cultures of Catalonia, Italy, and the peninsula's recently expelled Jews and Muslims. In chapter 2, "Social Groups and Collective Identity," Campbell presents evidence in favor of a strong link between food practices and formation or reinforcement of various group identities, including not only status, gender, occupation, and religion but also voluntary associations such as universities and confraternities. The arguments for much of this chapter place Spain in the context of broader arguments about food and identity that food historians have advanced for other times and places, but the author mixes in a specifically Iberian issue when she discusses how the relationship between food and identity functioned in a society that was both religiously plural and moving towards a brutal homogeneity. In the early modern era, Catholic Spain focused ever more intensely on the Church's food prohibitions as Protestants moved away from those same strictures, but the main issues surrounded Jewish and Islamic food cultures that were already well interwoven into Spanish foodways. In an age of religious anxiety, the diets of converts from Judaism and Islam came under special scrutiny, as certain foods and preparations came to be associated with an unwanted difference and as both what and how people ate marked individuals out as either belonging to the (Catholic Christian) collective or not.

Chapter 3, "Status and Change," forms the core of Campbell's book. In her introduction, she notes that, though food's role as an identity marker is a historical constant, how it marked identity has been subject to a great deal of historical change. The field of food history is one that tends to come unmoored in time, and so an exploration of specific ways in which food cultures are historically contingent is a welcome addition to the historiographic discussion. Campbell examines how particular historical triggers could transform food cultures (for example, the widespread availability of sugar from the Americas producing change in foodways), or how food cultures could be deployed to resist change (e.g., the blurring of lines between nobles and a self-fashioning early modern elite). Historical change also makes an...