Much of the Old Testament is devoted to explaining what the Hebrew people should and should not eat. It was through this food, this specific diet, that the Hebrews were to define themselves as a distinct people. Food is an integral part of the moral code, the Mosaic law, and history’s strongest expression of the often quoted Brillat-Savarin statement “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.”
In the fifth century B.C., Herodotus, considered the first historian, would no doubt have agreed. Herodotus began his Histories, and with it the discipline of history, with the simple declaration “The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time.” Among those traces were the food habits of bygone cultures. He observed how the Egyptians intertwined life and death, preserving their food in salt and curing their dead in much the same way. He described the food and gave recipes for mummification and explained how, after extravagant banquets, a carved wooden replica of a corpse in a coffin would be carried around the room, shown to each reveler with the words “Drink and make merry, but look on this, for such shalt thou be when thou art dead.”
Perhaps the first true food writer was Archestratus, a poet who lived in the fourth century B.C. in the Grecian colony on what is today Sicily. Little more is known of him than that he wrote a poem called The Life of Luxury, which was characterized by Athenaeus, a later writer:
Archestratus, in his love for pleasures, traveled over every land and sea with precision, in a desire, as it seems to me, to review with care the things of the belly; and imitating the writers of geographical descriptions and voyages, his desire is to set forth everything precisely, wherever the best to eat and the best to drink are to be found.
But among subsequent Greek and Roman writers, food continued to be merely an embellishment to discussions of broader topics. In the second century B.C., Cato wrote extensively about food in the earliest surviving complete book of Latin prose, but the central subject of this work is agriculture. In the first century A.D., Pliny the Elder wrote about food, though his principal subject was natural history. So he discussed the seas, their nature, the sea creatures that we eat, and then, without warning, launched into a tirade against eating seafood: “But why do I mention these trivial matters when shellfish are the prime cause of the decline of morals and the adaptation of an extravagant lifestyle? Indeed of the whole realm of Nature the sea is in many ways the most harmful to the stomach, with its great variety of dishes and tasty fish.”
But what of this extravagant lifestyle that Pliny denounced? The whimsical Martial used food to describe his social life in first-century Rome, both praising and criticizing dinner parties, such as dinner at Cinna’s:
By daily making himself sick
With minuscule drops of arsenic
King Mithradates once built up
Immunity to the poison-cup.
In the same way, your small, vile dinner
Saves you from death by hunger, Cinna.
Plutarch, the brilliant biographer, used food the way later novelists would. Just as Tomasi di Lampedusa brings us a vision of the faded aristocracy in his twentieth-century novel The Leopard, by describing their meals, Plutarch reveals the egocentric character of Lucullus, the aristocratic political leader, by describing the lavish manner in which he dined when alone. We also get to know something of Lucullus in the story of how servants came to him from Pompey’s doctors. Pompey was ill and his doctor had prescribed thrush though the birds were out of season. But Lucullus had pens where he kept thrush for fattening. “So,” said Lucullus smugly. “If Lucullus had not been an epicure, Pompey had not lived.” Whereupon he ordered up a more common dish.
The oldest cookbook of which we still have a copy is by Apicius and was probably produced in Rome in the first century A.D. Unfortunately, there seem to have been a number of people named Apicius living in Rome within that century, and at least three of them were noted gourmets. The leading candidate is M. Gabius Apicius who lived from 80 B.C. to A.D. 40. Gabius Apicius was a renowned gourmet in a society that admired gourmetism. He was known to be wealthy and eat well and many dishes were named after him, including several types of cheesecake, called apicians. If this is the same Apicius, apparently he was unimpressed, because he did not include a recipe for a single apician in his book. It is quite possible that the Apicius cookbook we have was not even written by its namesake, but is a collection of recipes in his honor, possibly compiled several centuries later.
It seems that after Gabius Apicius had spent most of his inheritance on food, he killed himself rather than face financial restraints. The dishes described in this book seem to the taste of someone who would eat his inheritance and then take his life. Its brief and barely explained recipes for sow’s tits, stuffed dormice, and huge architectural centerpieces suggest the kind of extravagant cuisine that Plutarch said Lucullus ate.
It is surprising that the Greeks and Romans, known for producing hedonists, did not produce more pornography—both sexual and gastronomic. Imperial Rome seemed an age ideally suited for gastronomic pornography, with gourmetism appearing as a leitmotif in Roman writing. Some are denounced for their excess, others praised for it. Esoteric food debates run through the literature. Sow’s tits and vulvae are the delicacies of choice for great occasions. But what was the appropriate sow? Many said it was a virgin, but Pliny argued for a pig whose first litter had been aborted.
Yet food writing remained more intellectual than sensual. In the following century, Galen, Marcus Aurelius’s personal physician, wrote about food, diet, and health. “The humours from which animals and humans are composed,” he stated, “are yellow bile, blood, phlegm and black bile.” This unappetizing vision of four humors, whose balance was maintained by a proper diet, became one of the dominant medical beliefs in the Western world for more than a thousand years. The epicurean reader never completely recovers when the discussion of a delectable tidbit suddenly turns on the relative merits of phlegm and black bile.
Galen was that food writer from whom gourmets hoped not to hear. His descriptive powers were used for such subjects as “the stretching sensation” of flatulent wind. He informs that:
The nature of watermelons is generally rather chilling and contains a great deal of moisture, yet they possess a certain purgative quality, which means that they are also diuretic and pass down through the bowels more easily than large gourds and melons. Their cleansing action you can discover for yourself; just rub them on dirty skin. Watermelons will remove the following: freckles, facial moles, or epidemic leprosy, if anyone should have these conditions.
Care for a sweet, cool, juicy watermelon?
The influence of this black bile school of thought was felt for more than a thousand years. Platina, who wrote from Florence at the height of the fifteenth-century southern Renaissance, urged the eating of vinegar because “It represses bile and blood and also cuts phlegm with its intense acidity.” This is a branch of food writing that has been continued by those who extol the virtues of high fiber and low salt.
But, with the thirteenth century, another branch of food writing emerged: the cookbook.
The earliest known medieval cookbook was a German manuscript from the first half of the thirteenth century. At the end of that century a twenty-nine-recipe manuscript was written in Anglo Norman. In 1300, a French manuscript was written. These cookbooks, usually in the form of rolled manuscripts, were the work of chefs recording the cuisine of a royal household, generally at the request of the lord, in order to document the splendor of the court. The recipes, like those of Apicius, were seldom more than a vague outline a few sentences long. They seemed to have been written by professional cooks for professional cooks who already knew the basic concepts and techniques. And they borrowed from one another despite being in different languages.
The most influential of these early cookbooks was Le Viandier by Guillaume Tirel, the head cook for King Charles V of France. Five different versions of this manuscript have been found, four of which ar
e still in existence. The earliest of these is a rolled parchment dated from the second half of the thirteenth century. The latest version was issued in 1604. A consistent curiosity of cookbooks is that subsequent editions are almost always longer than earlier versions. It seems that no one ever shortens a cookbook. The author, Guillaume Tirel, is believed to have lived from about 1312 to 1395. So the first of his manuscripts was written before he was born and the last after he died. It appears that the author was the pivotal player in a collection of recipes that was continually enlarged over several centuries.
Tirel, like many medieval cooks, had picked up his lifelong nickname in his apprentice days. Taillevent, the name he was known by, was the word for a lightweight sail used for quick maneuvering, a jib, and may be a reference to his agility. In 1381, Taillevent became chef to Charles V, who, being well known as a promoter of culture, is thought to have urged his chef to compile the recipes.
Taillevent was the most famous chef of his epoch and his book dominated French cooking and French cookbooks for centuries. Among the works it influenced was Le Mésnagier de Paris. This book was written in 1393 by a bourgeois Parisian, sometimes said to be elderly but possibly no older than mid-fifties, as a guide for a teenage orphan he had recently married. It instructs her on morality, taking care of the home, managing the domestic staff, and gardening, and it includes a chapter on cooking.
The recipe chapter of the Mésnagier is to a large degree taken from Taillevent, and only occasionally, in deference to the fact that the intended reader is an amateur housewife, are things more elaborately explained. Taillevent’s instruction for preparing peacocks begins, “They should be blown into and inflated like swans and roasted and glazed in the same way.” Little additional information is offered in the swan section. Le Mésnagier uses this recipe word for word. It is easy to imagine the sad scene of the fifteen-year-old orphan bride, wanting to do well, peacock in one hand, husband’s guide in the other, trying to inflate the heavy bird.
The Mésnagier was the first of a kind of cookbook that was to become commonplace until the twentieth century—the guide to young housewives. These cookbooks contained diverse chapters on such subjects as morality, gardening, running a household, and managing servants. Among the most famous English cookbook/guides to housewives were Eliza Smith’s 1758 The Compleat Housewife, Margaret Dods’s 1829 Cook and Housewife’s Manual, and Isabella Beeton’s 1861 Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Among the leading American ones were Lydia Maria Child’s 1829 The American Frugal Housewife, and Catherine Beecher’s and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1869 American Woman’s Home.
It is significant that these heirs to the Mésnagier were no longer a man’s advice to his young wife but books by women for women. Behind each of these books is a woman’s story. The most successful food book of eighteenth-century England was written by a woman, Hannah Glasse, but no less a figure than Dr. Johnson told Boswell that this was impossible and named a man as the true author. The accusation has been completely disproved. Like the recipient of Le Mésnagier, Isabella Beeton was a teenage bride, but she became a major figure in her husband’s publishing company and published her own guide to young housewives, which, like Le Mésnagier, became a classic. The Beecher sisters had a sense of mission and saw the housewife’s guide as an opportunity to write on their theory of the woman’s role in upholding the morality of a society. Sarah Josepha Hale became one of the most influential women in nineteenth-century America by not only writing about food and household issues but by developing the “women’s magazine.”
From the nameless fifteen-year-old bride given book-length instructions on how to run her husband’s home, to M.F.K. Fisher who dared to write about men the way Brillat-Savarin wrote about women, the history of food writing became the story of the long, slow struggle toward women’s emancipation.
In 1825 a new kind of food book was invented. The author was Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a French lawyer who fled the revolution and spent two years in New York struggling as both a language teacher and a violinist. Although fascinated with the scientific and even medical approach to food, his book La Physiologie du goût, despite its title, The Physiology of Taste, was more of a philosophic and literary musing on food than a scientific investigation. Appropriately, the chapters into which he divided his book were called “meditations.” He meditated on sleep, overeating, undereating, on women, on obesity, on food and sexuality, and on food history. He philosophized, told anecdotes, and made pronouncements, such as “Every thin woman wants to grow plump” and “People predestined to gourmandism are in general of medium height; they have round or square faces, bright eyes, small foreheads, short noses, full lips and rounded chins” (surprisingly, this is not a description of the very tall Brillat-Savarin himself), or “Gourmandism, considered as a part of political economy, is a common tie which binds nations together by the reciprocal exchange of objects which are part of their daily food.”
Yet, somehow, this seemingly meandering book held together, and still does, as a singular literary work.
Three years ahead of Brillat-Savarin, and some say more talented, was Karl Friedrich von Rumohr, a German contemporary who in 1822 had published Geist der Kochkunst, The Essence of Cookery. Baron von Rumohr was an erudite man, a well-traveled art historian, and the author of a four-volume novel and a wide range of other works that were generally praised for their prose craftsmanship. Typical of his ambitious nature, he decided to write a one-volume treatise on cooking, examining the different cooking techniques, the various foods and their uses, extolling the virtues of unpretentious traditional German food. It was written for German housewives to encourage them to maintain their traditions. But far from being a cookbook, it is a nonfiction masterpiece on a cuisine. It was written at a time when German nationhood was considerably behind much of Europe and it reflects, like so much nineteenth-century German literature and music, the search for a German national identity.
Yet the Baron’s achievement has been dwarfed by the fame of Brillat-Savarin’s book. It is sometimes suggested that the reason for this is that most of the world would rather listen to a Frenchman’s gastronomic musings than those of a German.
In any case, the early nineteenth century was a fertile moment in food writing. A contemporary of Brillat-Savarin and the Baron, Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de la Reynière, became the first food journalist. His Almanach des Gourmands, packed with cooking information, food history, and a more than generous sprinkling of opinion and pet peeves, was published eight times between 1803 and 1813.
Due to a birth defect, Grimod wrote with mechanical hands with which he demonstrated his extraordinary dexterity at elaborate feasts. He was celebrated for his somewhat cynical wit, saying of doctors, “It is other people’s indigestion that prevents them from having to diet themselves.” He said of a good soup that “Like the overture of a comic opera, it should announce the subject of the work.” And he left us this warning: “Beware of people who don’t eat; in general they are envious, foolish, or nasty. Abstinence is an anti-social virtue.” He was also the first restaurant critic, having established a jury to rate them, a process that, inevitably, was deemed corrupt.
The literary influence of Brillat-Savarin and von Rumohr continued, and nineteenth-century novels are particularly rich in food description. Alexandre Dumas père who always considered himself a food commentator, left behind 303 volumes of literature. Volume 304 was his posthumously published food dictionary. Dumas seemed certain that this book, and not The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo, would secure his reputation for posterity. The book is outrageously inaccurate. It perpetuated, or perhaps even started, such myths as the ancients driving ducks across the Alps to furnish Roman feasts, a pointless feat that would have taken years. Dumas ignored the numerous edible crabs of the Brittany coast and asserted only two were edible, and that “negroes feed” on the eggs of one of them. He then bizarrely declared that Caribbean people live “almost exclusively�
� on crabs. He describes haddock, a fish that has rarely attained one meter in length, as seven meters long. And some of his recipes, such as “shark pie made from the stomach of young sharks,” seem fanciful. He did write that he had no opinion on the dish since he had never eaten it “and have no wish to do so.” An esteemed man of letters at the end of an illustrious career, on the subject of food, Dumas did, said, and wrote as he pleased, including rejecting all wine and extolling the qualities of water.
By the mid-nineteenth century, all the genre of food books found on contemporary shelves had already been established. There were a few Catos, including Thomas Jefferson, who talked about food in their discussions of agriculture; an occasional Pliny, including Henry David Thoreau, who included food in their observations on natural phenomena; and there are always the Galens, the health writers. But most books were either versions of Taillevent’s cookbook, Le Mésnagier’s guide to young housewives, Brillat-Savarin’s literary musings, von Rumohr’s definition of national cuisine—a particularly popular genre among Basques, French, Italian, and British food writers—or journalism in the tradition of Grimod de la Reynière.
A young woman named Fannie Merritt Farmer, Handicapped from a childhood ailment that may have been polio, was not expected to be a forceful influence on anything when she graduated from the Boston Cooking-School and became an instructor. The decade-old school had been founded in 1879 and offered women a two-year program that would qualify them to earn a living as a cook. Farmer was known for relentlessly testing recipes for exact times and ingredients. In 1896, when she published her Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, she for all time took a great deal of the fun out of cookbooks by insisting that recipes were a scientific and not an artistic expression. No longer would a recipe be a paragraph or two that attempted to express the concept of the dish. Farmer’s book was not the first to specify measurements, but it was the first to list the ingredients at the top of the recipe and was the first to introduce such notions as a level measure. Every recipe was to be a formula, which began with a list of ingredients. While this new style offered little to writers or readers, amateur cooks liked it. With about four million copies sold, it is still in print, still being revised, and has remained the model for recipe writing.
Choice Cuts Page 2
