Cooking and Eating in Renaissance Italy by Katherine A. McIver, and: Medieval Tastes. Food, Cooking and the Table by Massimo Montanari (review)

What was "the time of lard" in medieval Tuscany (43)? What are "civilizing plants"? (55) When did cow's milk overtake ewe's milk as producing the superior, most desirable cheese? Why was the flesh of winged creatures favored over that of terrestrial animals in medieval monasteries? Among the many intriguing curiosities in Massimo Montanari's erudite, provocative and delightful text on Medieval cooking and food are the responses to such questions. They are more than footnotes to this book, however; they are elements within a thoughtful exploration of the modalities of how and why culinary practices and tastes changed over time. In the same year, Katherine McIver published a quite different type of book on cooking and eating in Renaissance Italy. The former book's audience will primarily be specialists in medieval and renaissance history, while the latter is directed toward a general, non-specialist public.

Montanari's focus is the late medieval, early modern period; nonetheless his study extends in some cases from remote antiquity up to the modern era. As a leading contemporary historian of food and cooking, Montanari's long list of publications includes studies of rural peasant food in the high Middle Ages, hunger and abundance (translated as The Culture of Food), cheese, pears and history, and Italian identity in the kitchen. With this book, the research he has conducted over nearly four decades becomes the basis for new questions and reflections on the character and consequences of the major changes that he has explored. Foods have meanings, Montanari notes, and those meanings condition and are conditioned by some of the most fundamental elements of human life. Grains, for example (Fernand Braudel's "civilizing plants"), from earliest times became a symbol of civilization, when human beings no longer relied on nature, but transformed what they found, such as grains, into diverse forms of breads. Enkidu, a "wild man" in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, becomes civilized when he learns to eat (and as a consequence produce) bread. The link between grains and civilization persisted over time, and not only in Europe: grains were the fulcrum of economic, social, political and cultural life in East Asia (rice), Central and South America (corn), Africa (sorghum), and in Europe (wheat). So closely were Christianity and civilization tied to bread that St. Augustine dedicated one of his sermons to drawing out the metaphor of the making of bread and the making of the Christian.

Where in antiquity physicians considered bread the most nourishing food, by the Middle Ages bread supplanted meat as central to a sound diet. Each of the foods Montanari considers underwent transformations both in how they were prepared, and it what they symbolized. Such was the case for butter, for example, a peasant condiment used as a substitute for olive oil during times of fasting, hence a poor substitute associated with deprivation. Nonetheless it was a popular condiment in northern Europe even if disparaged in fifteenth-century Italy by physicians such as Michele Savonarola, who linked the consumption of butter with diseases such as leprosy. Neither market forces nor cost considerations underlay the struggle between preferences for olive oil or butter; even more important, argues Montanari, is taste. Hildegard de Bingen quite literally turned up her nose at the contemplation of olive oil used for other than medicinal purposes, while others complained that they were nauseated by the sight of food dripping in oil. In Southern Europe, on the other hand, olive oil and lard figured as central during the ecclesiastical calendar of feasts and fasts, even if in the end, butter eventually emerged in the larders of southern Europe as well. The only irritant in this richly informative text is the author's habit of citing his own earlier publications rather than giving the...