Educated Tastes: Food, Drink, and Connoisseur Culture

8. “Los Pajaritos del Aire”: Disappearing Menus and After-Dinner Speaking in Don Quixote

194 “Los Pajaritos del Aire” Disappearing Menus and After-Dinner Speaking in Don Quixote robert goodwin Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote was published in Madrid, in two parts—the first in 1605, the second in 1615. It recounts the midlife crisis of Alonso Quijano, a late sixteenthcentury Spanish gentleman of limited means who reads too many romances of chivalry, which he apparently believes to be true accounts of history. Suffering from a limited diet and a lack of sleep, he takes it into his head to become a knight-errant, adopts the name Don Quixote, and sets out across Spain in search of chivalric services to be performed. He engages with the world on the basis of his chivalric romances, but travels with a down-to-earth and gluttonous squire, Sancho Panza, a peasant farmer who is happy to take a holiday from his wife, but who is sufficiently ignorant to half-believe Quixote’s assurances that it is usual for chivalric servants to be ultimately rewarded with the governorship of some island. As they proceed, these two physiological stereotypes—the fat man and the lean man—learn to negotiate both with each other and with a usually benign world. This intensely ironic work contains philosophical, political, and moral discourse and plenty of commentary on literary theory as it holds up a superficially absurd Chapter Eight “Los Pajaritos del Aire” 195 mirror to early modern Spain. It became an immediate best-seller across Europe and is now considered one of the most influential literary works in the Western cultural canon. The appearance of Educated Tastes falls neatly between the four hundredth anniversaries of the publication of the two parts of Don Quixote, which have recently encouraged a vast scholarly output. Yet despite the current interest in cultural objects among literary critics and the burgeoning importance of food to cultural studies in general, only a handful of scholars have addressed the representation of food in Don Quixote.1 This is all the more surprising, given that Cervantes introduces his titular hero in terms of what he eats: “Not long ago, somewhere in la Mancha, the name of which I do not remember, there lived one of those gentleman with a lance in the rack, an old buckler, and a speedy greyhound. He had more beef than mutton in his pot, he had pickled meat most nights, duelos y quebrantos on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and a squab on Sundays, which used up three-quarters of his income” (1:1).2 B. W. Ife has made a summary analysis of this diet and concludes that Quixote would have suffered nutritional deficiencies: “The consequences of long-term malnourishment of this order would be wasting of the flesh and loss of muscle tone.” Moreover, his diet provides about 10 percent of the recommended intake of vitamin E, which would have caused “weakened red blood cells and neurological dysfunction, causing loss of muscle coordination, and vision problems.” While Ife emphasizes he is not suggesting that “biochemistry can be used for character analysis in literary texts,” all of these symptoms are typical of Quixote, and he argues that Cervantes intended Quijano’s diet to offer a credible background to his reinvention of himself as Don Quixote.3 In that context, it is noteworthy that Cervantes’s father was a barber-surgeon, at the humblest level of the medical profession. Javier Puerto lists a number of medical works Cervantes may have known and notes that Quixote himself indicates knights errant 196 Theorizing and Contextualizing Taste need to be “doctors, and principally herbalists” (2:18).4 Juan de Aviñón’s fourteenth-century Sevillana medicina, published by a Sevillian doctor, in 1545, refers to lentils as “bad and melancholic.” Miguel Sabuco’s Nueva filosofía (1587), based on observation and folk remedies, explains that such melancholic foods cause fear, suspicion , unhappiness, and bad dreams, all characteristics of Quixote .5 Likewise, Aviñón explains that “mutton” (carnero) is “the most noble of meats” and is good for the blood and strengthens the natural heat of the heart, while Quixote’s “pot” had more “cow meat,” which engendered bad humors and also caused melancholia .6 Sabuco also notes that “insufficient food, drink, and sleep, or serious acts of thinking or studying after a meal, all do the same damage . . . and when hunger reaches its limits the desire to eat disappears,” causing “anger” and “irritation.” While most...