Eating Right in the Renaissance

8. Medicine and Cuisine

chapter 8 Medicine and Cuisine There can be no doubt at this point that the Renaissance genre of dietary regimens reflects both medical and culinary concerns about food. But the question remains whether the principles of humoral physiology actually informed eating habits, or whether dietary authors merely accommodated current culinary practices into their medical theories. Ultimately, this is a chicken or egg dilemma. This chapter does not make a systematic attempt to claim priority for one or the other but rather explains the relationship between the two, which was sometimes coincidentally similar and sometimes plainly antagonistic. The points of intersection and the major differences between medicine and cuisine will be made clearer by looking closely at how dieticians suggested food should be prepared. Examining whether preparation techniques match what they perceived to be standard usage and the ways they approved or disapproved of contemporary customs should make the relationship between theory and practice more vivid. Although it might seem reasonable merely to describe recipes found in cookbooks or dishes described by contemporary accounts of banquets in terms of the basic principles of nutrition, this would be a mistake . As we have seen, especially in periods 2 and 3 (latter sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), dietary authors were usually hostile to what they considered the grossly extravagant and unruly habits of courtiers. We should not expect, therefore, any real agreement about cooking among dietary regimens and cookbooks. For period 1 authors, who lacked this 241 242 Medicine and Cuisine 1. Cogan, 118. Cogan is paraphrasing Boorde here: “A good cook is half a physician. For the chief physic (the counsel of a physician excepted) doth come from the kitchen. . . .” Boorde, 49. All he is saying here, though, is that diet is an essential part of health, not that physicians necessarily inform chefs. See also Cogan, 125, where Boorde is directly cited. anticourt aesthetic, the relationship between elite cuisine and dietary concerns was probably much closer, but here too it would be a mistake to assume that “physicke teacheth the cooke,” as Cogan would have us believe.1 An equally plausible argument could be made that basic established cooking procedures and flavor combinations provided ready examples for physicians trying to apply their theoretical principles to concrete culinary examples. For example, if we are told that a dish of cold and moist pork should be corrected by hot and dry mustard and that the mustard’s cutting and abstersive qualities will help us digest the gross and heavy pork, does this mean that the idea originated among physicians ? Or did they merely use this as a familiar example of a nutritionally sound combination? Or were these basic nutritional ideas so imbedded in the European mental framework that anyone when thinking about food would necessarily have had these principles in mind to some extent? There is no reason to believe that this was necessarily so. Before trying to untangle this knotty question, it would first be useful to describe in detail exactly what the dieticians meant by “correcting” a potentially harmful food. Typically, this would involve adding condiments or sauces to balance or counteract the humoral qualities of the main dish. Hot condiments correct cold foods, dry ones correct moist foods, and so forth. Correction could also include the addition of ingredients that were thought to improve the texture and digestibility of a food considered excessively crass, gross, or glutinous. Vinegar or lemon juice on fish follows this logic. The acidic juice “cuts” through the gluey humors of the fish. “Preservative” ingredients such as salt or sugar could also be used to prevent the corruption of certain foods, such as peaches and melons, which are prone to putrefaction in the stomach. Considerable seasonal variation would also have influenced physicians’ recommendations , cooler condiments being used in summer and hotter ones in winter. Lastly, certain cooking techniques were intended to mitigate the drawbacks of most foods in their raw state. Cooking makes foods more digestible and more easily assimilated into the body. It can even counteract the inherent qualities of an ingredient, making dry foods moist or vice versa. Thus, the dieticians were forced to make explicitly Medicine and Cuisine 243 2. Flandrin, “Médecine,” 87 and 93: “Je ne doubte pas qu’en cherchant d’avantage on trouve d’autres coutumes explicable seulement par d’anciennes prescriptions dietetiques.” 3. Flandrin, “Seasoning, Cooking, and Dietetics in the Late Middle Ages,” in Food: A...