From Gluttony to Enlightenment

The World of Taste in Early Modern Europe

Viktoria von Hoffmann

• Editorial: University of Illinois Press
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780252099083
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Sociologie

Scorned since antiquity as low and animal, the sense of taste is celebrated today as an ally of joy, a source of adventure, and an arena for pursuing sophistication. The French exalted taste as an entrée to ecstasy, and revolutionized their cuisine and language to express this new way of engaging with the world.

Viktoria von Hoffmann explores four kinds of early modern texts--culinary, medical, religious, and philosophical--to follow taste's ascent from the sinful to the beautiful. Combining food studies and sensory history, she takes readers on an odyssey that redefined a fundamental human experience. Scholars and cooks rediscovered a vast array of ways to prepare and present foods. Far-sailing fleets returned to Europe bursting with new vegetables, exotic fruits, and pungent spices. Hosts refined notions of hospitality in the home while philosophers pondered the body and its perceptions. As von Hoffmann shows, these labors produced a sea change in perception and thought, one that moved taste from the base realm of the tongue to the ethereal heights of aesthetics.

1The “Silences of Taste”

It is bad-mannered to criticize the victuals or the sauces during the meal; constantly speaking of grub is an obvious mark of a sensual soul and of a lower education.

—[Courtin], Nouveau traité de la civilité, 176

A “Revolution of Taste”?

The history of taste is deeply intertwined with that of cuisine, to the point that both often tend to be confused. Although taste cannot be reduced solely to the culinary universe, the latter is nevertheless the first and most obvious domain in which one might expect to find discourses on taste. Therefore, it is only natural to start this investigation of taste in the kitchen, with food and cooks, in order to see how taste, food, and the senses interact in the kitchen and in cookery books, and then more broadly in the polite world. How did cooks relate to the sense of taste, which plays such an obvious role in their daily practice? Are there discourses on taste to be found in cookery books? To what extent did the food people actually consume in early modern France influence the ways they thought about and discussed the sense of taste?

The early modern history of food is well known today, thanks to a range of historical research published from the 1980s onward.1 This chapter does not again thoroughly investigate the transformations of food practices from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries; however, it is important to recall a few striking features of the social and cultural contexts impacting the evolution of attitudes toward food. Several scholars have demonstrated the major cultural turn that occurred during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which represented a crucial transition between medieval cooking and modern forms of cuisine, so different from one another that many specialists consider this transition to have been a true “revolution.”2 The entire cookery process was transformed—the products, techniques, and seasonings, along with the presentation of dishes. If for centuries and up until the Renaissance people had enjoyed spicy and bittersweet dishes, they progressively started distinguishing the sugary from the salty flavors, while also diminishing the amounts of spices and combining them with local herbs like parsley. They also grew fond of vegetables, which had not been praised by medieval elites.3 Furthermore, the whole foundation of cookery changed. The fonds de cuisine, so intimately linked to French haute cuisine, appeared at the time and were used as basic preparations for an array of delicate dishes and sauces.4 Named “jus” (juice) or “coulis” (cullis), butter liaisons (white sauce) and flour liaisons (roux, also called “fried flour”) naturally occupied an important place in early modern cookbooks.5 These cuisine fonds favored the appearance of richer sauces with smoother textures, which replaced the acid or bittersweet dishes from the past.

The new culinary techniques and seasonings actually aimed to enhance the proper flavor of each ingredient, or, in the words of cooks, to valorize le vray goust (the real taste) of food.6 The fracture with regard to ancient culinary habits is, then, obvious. The cultural and symbolic importance of spices had recently started to decline as the market grew significantly in the sixteenth century, making these luxury goods available to a much larger variety of consumers and thus losing their value as a distinctive feature of elite cuisine. Haute cuisine started to be defined less by the sole use of luxury products than by the delicacy of preparation, as it acknowledged the ephemeral and continually changing fashions of the moment. Every sign of earlier habits was perceived as vulgar and an index to membership in an inferior social rank.7

In the end, new products, techniques, and culinary principals provoked—or were stimulated by—a profound transformation of the sensibilities of taste in early modern France. Travel accounts are illuminating in this regard, since they contain several colorful examples of French repulsion toward foreign dishes, often considered too spicy.8 Culinary habits had definitely changed in France. Indeed, the seventeenth century thus seems to have represented a “revolution of taste,” as far as food practices and individual sensations are concerned. But what about discourse? What was written on food, taste, and the pleasures of eating at a time in which modernity transmuted food habits to engage the international triumph of French cuisine? How was this transformation translated from the ways one tasted the flavors of the world into the words of culinary narratives? More generally, what kinds of cultural representations of the sense of taste can be found within the culinary field?

First Discourses on Taste

Cooks are obviously very concerned with matters of taste. In order to prepare a successful dinner, they need to choose wisely the best products and ingredients required for each dish and decide how to prepare them. They use their senses to make these choices, observing, smelling, touching, and tasting the products at each stage of the cooking process, from raw ingredients to the final dish. The senses thus play an important part in cuisine, as cooking is an embodied and very sensory form of practice and knowledge, which required a lot of time and quite intense physical engagement. Taste was only one among many physical and sensory tools used by cooks in their daily work. But what did these practitioners have to say, precisely, on this particular sense?

Unfortunately, traces of earlier cooks’ involvement with food are scarce, since for centuries cooks transmitted their knowledge through speech and practice, leaving very few written records behind, except for rare extracts in a few old recipe books. Culinary manuals were for long mainly designed for cooks and maîtres d’hôtel, or for the master of the household. They typically had a practical purpose, which explains why most of them were so concise. Manuals were habitually written in vulgar languages, not in Latin, which is an indication that they were likely written by cooks for cooks.9 The author, addressing his peers, went straight to the point without annoying his readers with unnecessary details that were self-evident to the practitioner. This is the reason why many of these texts often seem confused and disorganized to contemporary readers, as they display no attention to techniques or proportions. Seldom were references to taste made within this kind of literature, except for some vague judgments on the “better” flavor of a special dish or ingredient. Furthermore, cookery books were originally devoid of prefaces and went directly into the heart of the matter, as, for instance, in Le cuisinier Taillevent: “Here starts the book of the cook Taillevent. Follows the Viandier to match all manners of meat that Taillevent, cook of the king our lord, made to realize boiled as well as roasted, marine as well as freshwater fish; sauces; spices and other things convenient and necessary as will be shown afterwards. And in the first place the first chapter. White wheelbarrow of capons.”10 The recipe of this dish immediately follows the reference to it on the first page. The only preliminary information in the book indicates that Taillevent was a royal cook.

But culinary writings would dramatically change during the early modern era. The invention of the printed book and its incredible development would favor the ever-increasing influence of cookery books.11 It provoked a considerable extension of literacy, opening a new potential market for cookbooks as well. Recipe books were actually among the earliest printed books in Europe, although this did not necessarily lead to new forms of culinary writings. As stressed by Alain Girard, “the first century of printing did no more than increase the circulation of the manuscript texts of the previous age,”12 a fact all the more true in France, where no new recipe book was published between 1550 and 1650. In this particular country, all culinary publications were actually reissues of previous works, such as the Platine en françois, known as De l’Honneste volupté, or Le Viandier de Taillevent, another great library success.13 Food historians explain this absence of publication, which concerns only France, by pointing to troubles connected with the Wars of Religion (1562–1598) and the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).

Evidently, the absence of literary novelty did not stop the evolution of culinary practices, but it is difficult to redraw its progression in a detailed way, for there are no records to testify to it. We can only note the outcome of the process, when the first recipe book came out in 1651 after a century without textual novelty.14 The Cuisinier françois, attributed to François-Pierre de La Varenne, initiated a new generation of cookbooks, revealing the modern culinary principles that were slowly established during the previous century.15 As the first book to disclose the new culinary practices, it saw incredible success and was often edited and translated (when not counterfeited, as soon as 1652).16

With his Cuisinier françois, not only did La Varenne offer a different form of cuisine, he also created an innovative cookery book. Like older manuals, still addressing his peers, he continued to present recipes in which the instructions were reduced to the essential. But the text had a much clearer structure as well as a true unity in style, as evidenced by the numerous references from one recipe to another. The work was also much easier to use, thanks to the presence of a table of contents. This clarification and simplification phenomenon of culinary writings would accelerate during the early modern era and would lead to food dictionaries in the eighteenth century, after several intermediate stages in which the ingredients were considered in alphabetic order. The aim was to extend the readership and reach a wider audience, though it is difficult to evaluate this tendency with any accuracy.17 Librarians/publishers wished to increase their sales beyond the reduced circle of the maîtres d’hôtel from prestigious families, and sought to interest the members of low and medium nobility, as well as the rising bourgeoisie. The cookery books’ many allusions to the moderation of expenses were clearly meant to address this potential new public.18 Indeed, cooks such as La Varenne wished to expose “not only the most refined and delicate ways of dressing meats, pastries and other things served on the table of the Grands [great ones]” but also advice regarding “most common and ordinary things produced in the food of households that only make a regulated and moderate expense.”19 Nicolas de Bonnefons likewise insisted on this in his books. He was the first author in France to dedicate his work to women, which is another sign of the rise of a new audience.20 His Iardinier françois (French Gardener) was furthermore meant not for professional gardeners but for amateurs concerned with improving the quality of their gardens.21 He wished thus to address useful advice to masters and mistresses in a book whose format was precisely reduced so as to ease its consultation and transport.22 The authors who would succeed the most in interesting the bourgeois readers would likewise become bestsellers of cookery literature: La Varenne, Massialot, and Menon.23 The progressive emergence of a “bourgeois cuisine,” when approaching the nineteenth century, also aimed toward culinary simplification, proposing delicious but unpretentious dishes.

However, if most cooks pretended to address more modest readers, the recipes proposed in these manuals were not always accessible to all fortunes. This is the case for L.S.R. in particular,24 who clearly despised the bourgeois and their cuisine, as evidenced in his vigorous critiques of their bad taste, their outrageous expenses, or their ridiculous savings.25 Despite its claims of opening toward a larger public, haute cuisine thus remained in the hands of the elite, as revealed by cooks’ efforts to describe une cuisine à la mode des grands (cooking in the fashion of the great ones).26 Moreover, many cookbooks related less the daily dishes than the exceptionally sumptuous meals, intending to delight the sense of taste and to stimulate the imagination of the reader, as disclosed by Nicolas de Bonnefons: “It [would not be] easy for me to titillate your taste by only treating you with the ordinary, which would only be to provide for your food.”27 It was especially by displaying fancy banquets that cooks could expect to intrigue their readers.

The Exquisite Discernment of the “True Taste” of Food

The multiplication of printed cookbooks is a sign of a slow rise of interest in matters of food and taste among the reading public. So is the content of this new generation of cookery books. The most significant invention of the time was to introduce the recipes with a preface, a creation probably linked to a desire to expand the readership. These preliminary pages are remarkably significant for this research, for they disclose an unprecedented discourse on taste and cuisine. They were written either by the cooks or by their librarians (the editors of the books). After centuries of silence, cooks expressed themselves in these introductions and revealed their personal conceptions of cuisine and taste—a very innovative development.

The first point highlighted in these prefaces was the pioneering nature of modern cuisine, which cooks were very much aware of and had already used for publicity purposes. This pretention appeared as soon as 1651 in the Cuisinier françois, pre...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum?
• 1 The “Silences of Taste”
• 2 Pleasures, Disorders, and Dangers of an Animal Sense
• 3 The Lowest Sense of All
• 4 From a Material to a Spiritual Taste
• 5 Toward an Art and Science of Taste
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index