Food Matters: Alonso Quijano's Diet and the Discourse of Food in Early Modern Spain by Carolyn Nadeau (review)

Food shapes a growing cross-disciplinary field especially suited for literary inquiry. Thanks to this critical perspective, we are expanding our understanding of how literary vernacular practices reflect aesthetic preferences, nutritional beliefs, culinary habits, and societal changes and challenges. The contribution is especially welcomed in Golden Age studies, since the field has long considered hunger as a pivotal literary motif and material reality—especially significant in genres like the picaresque novel—but has not devoted the same attention to how "foodways" (cultural, social, and economic patterns of food production and consumption) affect the period's personal and collective dynamics and identities. As Pierre Bourdieu states, subjectivity does not emerge out of "aesthetic choices, but by the most banal ones of eating and drinking" (53), and as Carolyn Nadeau emphasizes, "eating […] plays a key role in one's social identity, and conversely, social identity plays a key role in what and how one eats" (55).

Nadeau's attention to the broad culinary culture that frames these self-defining processes allows her to explore a wealth of textual resources, from the strictly literary texts (canonic and marginal) to the expected cooking manuals and nutritional treatises and other more surprising records, such as travel logs and judicial accounts. The scope of her study is thus clearly intersectional, while the organizing principle remains literary, Cervantine to be precise. If literature conveys for her "the fictional form that reflects human existence" (xv), there is no character like Don Quixote to exemplify just how such fictional existence can be framed or expressed in culinary terms. Indeed, Cervantes chooses to open the story of his knight with a detailed description of his diet, and Nadeau aptly uses this edible genealogy to structure her study. Food Matters thus infuses with an obvious Cervantine sensibility its interdisciplinary exploration of the ways in which literary discourses and culinary practices complement one another.

In chapter 1, culinary manuals are poetically compared to Romanceros, given that both compilations entail collective enterprises that document the changing tastes of their audiences (4). Just as the protagonists of a poetic cycle inform us of the preferences of its public, the main ingredients of these manuals reveal a world of hybrid, Hispano-Muslim choices and flavors. We learn of "exotic" ingredients such as cinnamon, rose water, ginger, or bitter oranges—long gone from Spanish traditional diets—as we witness how an increasingly-defined sense of authorship and cultural identity emerges from these recipes and collections, published between the 10th and the 14th centuries. The rich savory commonalities between this Hispano-Muslim cuisine and a Jewish one would be aggressively displaced only one century later by an imposing Christian gastronomic culture, demonstrating an uncomfortable correlation between the military advances of the Reconquista and the textual expansion of staples like pork (14). This chapter offers an impressive reconstruction of the cookbook genre that closes with a detailed analysis of two competing masterpieces, Diego de Granado's influential Libro del arte de la cocina (1599) and Francisco Martinez Montiño Arte de vizcochería y conservería (1610); but whereas the former adapts the Italian recipes of Dell'arte del cucinare (Scappi, 1570) to Spanish tastes, the latter, as the Head Chef of Philip III, translates the tastes and influences of French and Portuguese cooking for the Spanish court.

The second chapter, "Privileging Meat," traces the emergence of this commodity as "a type of cultural capital which defined social status and played out even in the lives of fictional characters like Alonso Quijano" (46). The high regard for meat was not only due to culinary taste or social demand, but also to the widespread belief in its nutritional properties. However, the pernicious social, ethnically informed frictions caused by this high meat consumption were as palpable; in the post-1492 society that was starting to perfect exclusionary tactics for the members of different classes and ethnic...