Eating Right in the Renaissance

Postscript: The End of a Genre and Its Legacy

postscript The End of a Genre and Its Legacy Why did the genre of dietary regimes come to an end in the midseventeenth century? The theories themselves certainly did not disappear overnight, and there were physicians still defending humoral pathology well into the nineteenth century. But the application of humoral medicine to the study of food and the popularity of this particular genre did indeed trail off. It would be too simple to claim that new iatrochemical and iatrophysical theories suddenly replaced the older Galenism. New theories were just as often blended with older ones, particularly because they themselves offered no comprehensive new way to think about food. Ideas may have been shifting, however. Certainly Santorio’s efforts to quantify the process of nutrition and later van Helmont’s discussion of digestion in purely chemical terms made many of the physiological theories inherited from antiquity obsolete. It is only with hindsight, though, that we can see these ideas as progressive and as part of something we sometimes call the “scientific revolution.” In the seventeenth century these ideas were but a few of the myriad theories leading in every possible direction. Whatever one might say about this revolution, it is true that research became increasingly empirically based. That is, a shift in epistemology persuaded scientists that their own senses, often aided with instruments, yielded something far closer to the truth, especially when accompanied by rigorous methodology. The appeal of experience over received wisdom was evident even after the mid-sixteenth century, or our period 3. 284 Coupled with this new purely empirical focus, what kind of scientist would be content to hash over theories inherited from antiquity? No doubt a few did, and there were some traditional dietaries written in the latter seventeenth century. And, of course, the dietary writers covered in this book were still happily repeating and criticizing Galen, Hippocrates , and the whole lot. But the scientific method demanded starting afresh, reasoning inductively from small certain facts to larger theories. Beginning with the grand schema and deducing the meaning of individual phenomena, as did every author we have encountered, no longer held appeal for the new scientist. The fact that science could not yet produce its own new physiological theories probably accounts for the slow and lingering demise of humoral theory and eventually all research that pays deference to the ancient and revered authorities. Put another way, the audience for dietary regimes did not disappear, the authors did. It may be purely coincidental that the emergence of classical haute cuisine occurred at about the same time. That is, a way of thinking about food in purely gastronomic terms, which increasingly ignored the strictures of dietary medicine, flourished especially in France after the midseventeenth century. One can easily trace in La Varenne, Massialot, and on into the eighteenth century the willingness of cookbook authors to abandon all reference to medicine and cater solely to the demands of taste. The warnings of physicians disappear. Spices and condiments as correctives, medically approved cooking methods, and qualitative properties nearly all give way to new culinary fashions. In fact it would have been practically impossible for a physician to assess this new cooking in anything but negative terms: cream sauces on fish, reduced essences used to accentuate flavors often rounded out with butter, fruits and vegetables used in contexts totally foreign to humoral principles. It may be that even the unscientific dilettante dietary author gave up and joined the new trend toward refinement and elegance in classical cuisine. Whatever the case, the strained relationship between medicine and cuisine was decisively severed. These factors, as well as the general confusion and disagreement within the genre itself, discredited traditional humoral ideas about food, and the entire dietary business gradually became defunct. This is not to say that humoral ideas disappeared from the minds of European peoples . Exactly the opposite seems to be the case. The very fact that traces of humoral logic still lingered in the popular consciousness on both sides of the Atlantic, if not around the world, suggests that old ideas die hard. A few examples should suffice. We still say one should feed a cold and Postscript 285 286 Postscript starve a fever, and we still use humoral terminology to describe flavors being hot like pepper or dry like a martini. The very word “cold” as a pathological state is a leftover from this system. And...