Cornucopia
During the final days of its run, an exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art drew so many museum-goers that the crowd spilled onto Wilshire Boulevard and had to wait there for more than two hours before filing by an installation of objects, some exalted, many more mundane, that had been excavated from the classical Roman town of Pompeii, which was buried by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79. Among the items on display was a variety of kitchen implements: a cooking pot, a ladle and strainer, a terra cotta baking dish, a bronze frying pan with a spout on its rim, glass pitchers and bottles and cups, all these the Calphalon and Tupperware and Pyrex of their day. The form and use of these objects were so unchanged that it felt as if 2,000 years were a mere wink of time; how could it be otherwise when in their daily life the Pompeians--even if they were partial to dining on the odd dormouse--were so much like us?
A somewhat similar feeling of the curious continuity, or circularity, of time seizes the reader who stumbles away from “Food,” the dense, illuminating, sometimes delightful, occasionally maddening collection of essays and papers introduced and edited by Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari and revised for the English edition by Albert Sonnenfeld. The book aspires to be nothing short of a complete history of man’s experience of and conduct at the table--or, more accurately, because the fixed table did not come into being until the 18th century, his general relationship to food, with attention to the informing economic and demographic factors and (as the editors put it) “differences between urban and rural areas, culinary arts, dietetics, meals and table manners, and symbolic aspects of eating” from the beginning of mankind onward.
Exhaustive? Absolutely. Exhausting? A little. But even at its most heavy-going (some papers are scarcely more than compilations of facts, although others, like Jean Soler’s essay on the dietary rules of the ancient Hebrews, are careful and probing), “Food” is a cornucopia of captivating, subtle, myth-debunking information, research and insight. No reader of this anthology will ever again pick up a fork or sip from a wineglass or tear a piece of bread from a loaf without thinking that, behind each of these actions, there lies a long and complex tale.
Early humans began to eat in company some 500,000 years ago, when, after the hunt, families gathered to cook the meat around a common fire. In the Neolithic period, a revolution took place that caused the basic European diet to come into being: Cereal crops were cultivated, livestock were raised and wheat was turned into bread. Soon earthenware pots were created, and man began to cook food in boiling water. With all of this, according to Catherine Perles, who contributes a paper on food and prehistory, “Eating, which was at first a response to individual needs, thus gradually became a key element of group structure, a mark of identity, and a symbolic means of expressing thought.”
Communality, identity, symbolism, thought: Food was on its way to taking its place among the great cultural themes. And once it did, certain factors began to inform its choice, preparation and consumption, factors that still affect the way we eat today. From the beginning of recorded history, it appears, food has been closely linked to social hierarchies and distinctions; it has been influenced, quite eccentrically, by dietetics, and it has followed changing fashions, as people have traded, explored, traveled and been conquered. In food, as in other aspects of the culture, very little is static or unchanging in the face of the new.
How has food served as a marker of social identity? In the ancient world, it was very simple: If you ate like the Greeks, you were civilized and (better still) urban; if not, you were barbaric. Civilized people dined together at banquets, not on the run like nomadic barbarians. They ate and drank reclining, propped up on one hand, with the fingers of the other used in place of cutlery. They dined frugally, with the triad of wine, oil and bread at the center of their menu (meat was usually eaten only following a sacrifice). They drank only after eating and separately from it, at a symposium, where they mixed their wine with water, imbibed sparingly and counted on the libation to help welcome into their bodies such divinities as Eros, Dionysius and the Muses.
From the Greeks on, all societies have modified the measure of what it means to be civilized at the table. For the ancient Jews, strict dietary rules helped keep them a strictly individual people. The ancient Romans were a good deal looser than the Greeks: They tossed out the symposium, drank wine with their food, found other routes to their gods. But they still had their hierarchy: garden vegetables were superior to grains, grains were superior to meat, Roman habits were superior to those of the barbarians and (worse!) cannibals. The lavish Roman banquet of lore--one of the many myths revised in “Food”--comes late in the empire and turns out to be something of an exaggeration (though flamingos’ tongues and a stew of cockscombs and goose feet did appear on at least one Roman table).
During the early Middle Ages, with the ascent of Germanic culture, aristocrats and town dwellers, who throughout history have set the civilized standard, reversed the ancient hierarchy and valued beef and pork over vegetables and legumes; they preferred white to dark bread and ale over wine. Dietetics underwent a shift too. In the ancient world, as Montanari writes, the aim of the diet was to “bring the body back to that perfect equilibrium, without which health and physical efficiency were impossible.” This meant attending to the needs of the four humors (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic) and balancing hot foods and flavors against cold ones and dry ones against moist. In Renaissance Italy, a host might still worry about excessively overheating his guest’s body (which could lead to the sins of gluttony or, graver still, lust), but by the 18th century, dietetics relaxed as a harmonizing of flavors became more important.
As Flandrin points out, friandise, or the love of good food and the art of recognizing it, became “a refinement of the civilized individual.” There was a liberation of gourmet instincts as cooking freed itself from dietetics, to which it returned in the modern era, first in the 19th century (the time of such evangelical, and slightly quack-like, American food reformers as William Sylvester Graham, John Harvey Kellogg and Horace Fletcher) and then again in the late 20th, which saw an increased understanding of the role of vitamins, calories, fats and cholesterol in human health and well-being.
Nothing has shaken up man’s relationship to food more than his movements, although change has often taken years, even centuries, to become firmly integrated into cuisine. The discovery of America introduced to Europe the tomato (which, however, is not mentioned in any cookbook as being used in a pasta sauce until the early 19th century), the red pepper, the turkey (it quickly appeared at aristocratic tables, joining peacocks, cormorants, swans and stork) and of course coffee and chocolate, with tea coming from the Far East. A different kind of American influence still appeared in the modern period, with the spread in popularity of ready-to-eat, processed and fast food.
Some of the more pleasing passages of “Food” address related subjects, such as table manners, the rise of the restaurant and the hotel, the origins of the cookbook and the many curious changes in gastronomic fashion and ideas. In the early Middle Ages, for example, when public hostelries became respectable places for a traveler to lodge and nourish his body, among the host’s duties was an obligation to avenge the death of his guest (a possible recompense: If a guest died under your roof, you were considered his legal heir). In the first texts on table manners, which were written in the 12th century, diners were instructed not to blow their noses, spit in their plates or return chewed food to the table--all this at a time when these injunctions were essential and themselves civilizing, as people did not have their own cutlery or tableware (food was placed on a board or a large piece of bread and shared by two diners). A famous 13th century book advised against coughing, slouching and putting your elbows on the table and suggested that a diner refrain from complaining if the meal was too salty or badly cooked and urged him to hide any “fly or dirt” found in the food. All this still seems reasonable after 700 years.
Although “Food” is avowedly Eurocentric in its point of view, there is one area in which the Eurocentrism becomes Euro-snobbism: the section on the contemporary period. In its concluding chapters, the authors draw a portrait of culinary America that is grudging, haughty and one-sided. To be sure: Compared to France and Italy, America may be an uneven country, gastronomically speaking. We are, some of us, guilty as charged: We are “vitamaniacs” or “sucrophobes,” we can be painfully obese, “maniacal” exercisers or fast eaters addicted to fast food, but we are also a country full of thoughtful diners, restaurateurs and cooks, with a rich regional cuisine, ever more popular farmers’ markets and a solid history of gastronomic literature. Sentences like “Visitors to the United States have long observed two peculiar features of the natives’ behavior” (powerful appetites, speedy eaters) or a detailed discussion of Cincinnati chili (a “local specialty as proud of its authenticity as cassoulet or bouillabaisse, even though it can only be described as a transcultural mishmash”) can only draw a guffaw from the reader. It is a shame that “Food,” in other respects so balanced and thoughtful a book, should close on such a low note. Good manners notwithstanding, the reader must lament that in the final course there is nowhere to hide either the fly or the dirt.
*
Alan Davidson’s “Oxford Companion to Food,” a spectacular, idiosyncratic and encyclopedic new reference work, is an essential addition to the shelf of any gastronome, cook, curious eater or reader about food. Nearly 20 years in the making, the volume is a pleasure to read, to thumb through, to revel in, as much for its rigorous scholarship as for the liveliness of its voice.
Liveliness of voice? In a reference book on food? Absolutely. Davidson was assisted by more than 50 specialists in assembling the new “Companion,” but he has written the lion’s share of the entries, and it shows: This is prose with personality, learned and anecdotal and full of charm.
The “Companion” offers myriad delights. There is Davidson’s generosity of spirit: toward M.F.K. Fisher (“a star with her own share of the sky”), for instance, and Elizabeth David (“Her keynote was struck, clear and melodious as a church bell”). There is the way he guides the reader to further source material: Interested in knowing more about the four humors? Consult Galen, Hippocrates, Jane O’Hara May. There are his longer summaries of indispensable places, foodstuffs and themes (France, Italy, garlic, noodles, confectionery). And there is his nose for the recondite: entries on conjuror (a 19th century device for cooking meat with burning paper as fuel), lovi-lovi (a Malaysian tree whose astringent fruit is used in jellies and syrups) and eland (a large African antelope whose flesh, especially the hump, “is savoury and tender”).
Davidson defines “gourmet” as “somebody who takes a discriminating and informed interest in food.” Although these words befit the man who wrote them, they don’t quite capture his wryness or his individual, crisp, colorful slant. Listen to how he assesses Italian cuisine: It has, he writes, “the enormous merits of being cheerful, tasty, varied, inexpensive, and unworrying (no need to worship international star chefs or quail in front of snooty headwaiters or act as though the cost of some pretentious dish is no problem).”
“It will be for people in the imminent 3rd millennium to decide which countries or cultures have made the greatest contribution, in terms of food, to human happiness,” he continues, “but it seems safe to predict that the Italians will be up there at or near the top of the list.” To writing and thinking like this there is only one appropriate response: Bravo.