Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns (review)

Robert Appelbaum's Aguecheeck's Beef, Belch's Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections is an accessible and engaging exploration of the significance of food in early modern literature and social practice. Appelbaum deftly synthesizes myriad critical perspectives in his interpretation of the "semiotics of food and feeding" (216) in an impressive range of textual material — including drama, prose fiction, epic, travel writing, medical documents, and cookbooks — from a number of European nations and ranging from the classical period to the eighteenth century. More, Rabelais, Boccaccio, Nashe, Shakespeare, Milton, Léry, and Defoe are just some of the authors covered in this highly informative study. While conceptualizing food as "a phenomenon that exists at the border of the symbolic and the material" (9) is not in itself new, the strength of Appelbaum's approach is in the way he highlights the intersections of the culinary and the discursive and, most importantly, in his attention to nuance in early modern attitudes towards the preparation, consumption, and commodification of food, nuance indicative of larger cultural ambivalences.

In the introductory chapter, "Aguecheek's Beef, Hamlet's Baked Meat," Appelbaum reads brief allusions to food in several of Shakespeare's plays as examples of how such references draw our attention to the complexity of the systems of thought and behavior lying behind them. In "The Sensory Science" and "The Cookbook as Literature," he considers the effect of print publication on the experience of eating and drinking, focusing in the former on medical regimens and the doctrines of the humors, of intake and discharge, and of sensory effect, which influenced early modern understandings of the body's relationship to food and health. In the latter, he examines early cookbooks in the context of questions of authorship, intentionality, and readership, outlining how early recipe books codified the culinary experience and participated in social stratification and gender dynamics.

"The Food of Wishes, from Cockaigne to Utopia" and "Food of Regret" are also paired. Appelbaum traces the transition from the myth of Cockaigne, a place of copious foods where peasant needs were satisfied and social injustices righted, to imagined utopias in which, although also lands without hunger, food was contrastingly deemphasized, although not depoliticized: utopian dining is symbolically central to expressions of communist politics and reflects an increasing secularization and policing of food practices in literature during the period. In "Food of Regret," Appelbaum explores intersections of the myth of the Golden Age and the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, connecting them to early modern interest in ethical vegetarianism and spare diets. Turning to Paradise Lost, he points to the paradoxical representations of sublime digestion (Raphael's version) and its corruptive counterpart (hell), and he concludes by drawing attention to an intriguing doubleness in the forbidden fruit itself, illustrating how, as an apple and a peach, the fruit epitomizes the multiple moralities attached to food in the period.

Contradictory conceptions of appetite are central to Appelbaum's discussion of pickled herring and self-regulation in "Belch's Hiccup," human flesh and hunger in "Cannibals and Missionaries." He emphasizes the need to insert the importance of the household, women, and laborers into Elias's theorization of the "civilizing process" and argues that the discourse of gluttony informs European representations of New World cannibalism and products: "[a]ll the elements of the culture of colonial experiment — commodification, alienation, rediscovery, hybridization, and wonder — come together in colonial cookery" (277).

Scholars familiar with studies of food in early modern literature and culture will notice some predictability in a number of the texts chosen by Appelbaum, including Thomas Nashe, Richard Ligon, Jean de Léry, and cookbook writers like Robert May, for example, who have been the focus of other food-related studies. There are also places where synthesis predominates over analysis. Nonetheless, the new material Appelbaum...