Eating Right in the Renaissance (review)

When did you last have dinner with friends and family without someone making a comment about the healthiness of the food? As a topic for conversation, the meal's nutritional content—carbohydrates, vitamins, omega-3 fatty acids, cholesterol, fiber, calcium, antioxidants—often overshadows its tastiness. Allergies, special diets, and health warnings cramp the cook's style and fill the eaters with anxiety. Four or five hundred years ago, the words were different—vital heat, concoction, balance of humors, preservatives, temperament, non-naturals, superfluities, putrefaction—but the spirit was much the same. Those who could afford to worry about their diet could find a host of books to advise them. Ken Albala's study of the many nutrition guides published in the first two centuries of printing is packed with revealing anecdotes and smart analysis of the meanings of food and health in Renaissance and early modern culture, along with witty comparisons to the present.

Between the 1470s and 1650, the genre of dietaries flourished throughout Europe—more than a hundred titles in many reprints catered to every kind of reader. Although the Galenic theory of human physiology underlying nutritional advice remained pretty much the same over the whole period, Albala tracks a marked change in tone: from friendly counsel to increasingly prescriptive, moralistic warnings. These admonitions told individuals what to eat, how to eat, and why to eat—and made them feel guilty for eating "delicious stuff" (Thomas Moffett, circa 1595: Albala, p. 180). Just at the time, for example, that sugar—once a pricey medicinal and preservative—became widely available, eaters were told that indulging in pastries and sweetmeats would generate crass humors, "adversitie and sickness" (Grataroli, 1555, 1575: Albala, p. 179).

The general condemnations of the sweet, the spicy, the salty, and the juicy rested on medical theory. In practice, however, social and national prejudices shaped the details of a regimen and methods of cooking. (The audience for the genre was assumed to be male. As a rule, foods deemed good or bad for women were mentioned only in the context of pregnancy or nursing.) Fava beans, mulberries, sausages, and salted foods were peasant fare. Foreigners—to the horror of English authors—really did eat frogs. The English—ignoring classical medical advice—praised beef.

New World foods presented special problems, and Albala's observations on these make very interesting reading. In the food-friendly period of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Europeans had welcomed unfamiliar spices, fruits, and vegetables from the Near and Far East; however, by the time that New World foodstuffs were no longer utter novelties, the dour warnings against so many familiar foods extended to the exotic as well. A new food that could be cooked like an old standby had a chance of acceptance: maize polenta quickly found a place at the Italian, Spanish, and Romanian tables where millet or barley polentas had been eaten since Roman times. But it took considerably more daring to eat a potato or tomato, in the face of their resemblances to deadly nightshade.

While I would have liked more attention to related genres (herbals and books of secrets, for example) and more comparison between theory and practice, I have paid the book the highest compliment I can imagine. My copy will sit, not on the history of medicine shelves, not with Renaissance cultural history, but right next to two recent food history classics—Phyllis Pray Bober's Art, Culture, and Cuisine: Ancient and Medieval Gastronomy and Alan Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food—in the dining room, ready for twenty-first-century table-talk.