MEDICINE AND CUISINE IN THE RENAISSANCE

There can be no doubt at this point that the Renaissance genre of dietary regimens reflects both medical and culinary concerns about food. But the question remains whether the principles of humoral physiology actually informed eating habits, or whether dietary authors merely accommodated current culinary practices into their medical theories. Ultimately, this is a chicken or egg dilemma. This chapter does not make a systematic attempt to claim priority for one or the other but rather explains the relationship between the two, which was sometimes coincidentally similar and sometimes plainly antagonistic. The points of intersection and the major differences between medicine and cuisine will be made clearer by looking closely at how dieticians suggested food should be prepared. Examining whether preparation techniques match what they perceived to be standard usage and the ways they approved or disapproved of contemporary customs should make the relationship between theory and practice more vivid.

Although it might seem reasonable merely to describe recipes found in cookbooks or dishes described by contemporary accounts of banquets in terms of the basic principles of nutrition, this would be a mistake. As we have seen, especially in periods 2 and 3 (latter sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), dietary authors were usually hostile to what they considered the grossly extravagant and unruly habits of courtiers. We should not expect, therefore, any real agreement about cooking among dietary regimens and cookbooks. For period 1 authors, who lacked this anticourt aesthetic, the relationship between elite cuisine and dietary concerns was probably much closer, but here too it would be a mistake to assume that “physicke teacheth the cooke,” as Cogan would have us believe.1 An equally plausible argument could be made that basic established cooking procedures and flavor combinations provided ready examples for physicians trying to apply their theoretical principles to concrete culinary examples. For example, if we are told that a dish of cold and moist pork should be corrected by hot and dry mustard and that the mustard’s cutting and abstersive qualities will help us digest the gross and heavy pork, does this mean that the idea originated among physicians? Or did they merely use this as a familiar example of a nutritionally sound combination? Or were these basic nutritional ideas so imbedded in the European mental framework that anyone when thinking about food would necessarily have had these principles in mind to some extent? There is no reason to believe that this was necessarily so.

Before trying to untangle this knotty question, it would first be useful to describe in detail exactly what the dieticians meant by “correcting” a potentially harmful food. Typically, this would involve adding condiments or sauces to balance or counteract the humoral qualities of the main dish. Hot condiments correct cold foods, dry ones correct moist foods, and so forth. Correction could also include the addition of ingredients that were thought to improve the texture and digestibility of a food considered excessively crass, gross, or glutinous. Vinegar or lemon juice on fish follows this logic. The acidic juice “cuts” through the gluey humors of the fish. “Preservative” ingredients such as salt or sugar could also be used to prevent the corruption of certain foods, such as peaches and melons, which are prone to putrefaction in the stomach. Considerable seasonal variation would also have influenced physicians’ recommendations, cooler condiments being used in summer and hotter ones in winter. Lastly, certain cooking techniques were intended to mitigate the drawbacks of most foods in their raw state. Cooking makes foods more digestible and more easily assimilated into the body. It can even counteract the inherent qualities of an ingredient, making dry foods moist or vice versa. Thus, the dieticians were forced to make explicitly culinary decisions about howtheir readers should prepare food. Whether readers heeded the dieticians’ advice or whether they were already practicing food preparation techniques subsequently used by dieticians to illustrate their points is a more difficult question.

The idea that medical rules actually informed European culinary traditions has been a commonplace among food historians for some time. An invitation to draw explicit connections between medicine and cuisine was made by Jean-Louis Flandrin at the Colloque de Tours in 1979 in his article “Médecine et habitudes alimentaires anciennes.”2 Here, among other examples, he noted that the combination of melon at the start of a meal with salt or prosciutto was originally considered to be a medicinal corrective. The salt was intended as a preservative to prevent the putrefaction of the melon in the stomach, and its “heat” would counteract the “coldness” of the fruit. This was offered as a remnant of a medically based culinary system that has accidentally persisted into modern times. Flandrin has sustained this basic thesis to the present and most recently has argued that heavily spiced, seasoned, and sauced late medieval cuisine is essentially medical in logic. Hot spices not only correct qualitatively cold foods but aid digestion, act as aperitives and stimulate the appetite. Practically all spices were introduced as medicines in the first place, and they merely made their way into the kitchen later as medicinal correctives for food. Cooking procedures too, he argues, were intended to abate the potentially harmful effects of foods with pronounced qualities, fatty meats being roasted to dry them and dry meats being boiled. In sum, “medieval tastes were largely shaped by dietetic beliefs.”3

The most persuasive argument for the idea that dietary principles informed culinary practices has been made by Terence Scully. Although his focus is on the late Middle Ages, he describes not only food combinations based on humoral principles but even the grinding, chopping, and straining so typical of medieval cooking as ultimately medical in origin. 4 That is, potentially dangerous foods with extreme qualities must be counterbalanced by condiments of the opposite quality to make them more suitable for the human constitution, and thorough mechanical combination of flavors aids the tempering process. Elsewhere he has also argued that the “function of the mortar in the mediaeval kitchen was largely to produce powders and mushes whose humours could mix thoroughly and intimately into any preparation.” Scully has also shown how in the mind of at least one late medieval medical authority, Magninus Mediolanensis, typical medieval sauces were specifically used to correct potentially harmful foods following this same corrective logic.5 Thus, among many food historians of the late Middle Ages there is a general consensus that medical principles are not only related but essentially tantamount to culinary procedures.

Using many of the same texts from the late Middle Ages, Bruno Laurioux has also examined the similarities between medical and culinary sources but points out the authors’ ambivalence toward sauces in general, perhaps owing to their fear that they might be applied indiscriminately to any kind of food. Magninus himself complains that sauces were invented for gluttons to please the senses rather than health. His recipes are then a kind of concession to cuisine. It appears to be a realization, on the part of Laurioux, that the sauces were invented first and later accommodated into medicine. He also questions whether the purely medicinal recipes offered by physicians could actually have influenced culinary practice, and if there is more than a vague parallel between them. Like Flandrin, he concludes that it is a general mental schema shared by all medieval people that led to major points of intersection rather that active intervention on the part of physicians.6 Nonetheless, both medicine and cuisine adhered to the same basic principles in food preparation.

As we move into the early modern period, and particularly in the dietary literature itself, this relationship becomes much less clear. Even in the late fifteenth century, our period 1, which is arguably still within the late Middle Ages in terms of medicine and cuisine, there are fundamental differences, even antagonisms, between dietary recommendations and culinary practice. These suggest that either the two systems had begun to drift and that by periods 2 and 3 they became decidedly opposed or that European culinary traditions never had been wholly medical in the first place. Either way, a detailed look at what dietary authors said about cooking will be necessary before investigating the possible impact on cuisine.

PERIOD 1: COURTLY REGIMENS

The most typical way Renaissance dieticians advised their readers to correct foods was through the use of condiments. Although the word condiment etymologically implies foods that have been preserved or pickled, it may ultimately be related to the Latin verb condere, to put things together. Dieticians usually defined it as something added in small quantity to a primary ingredient to season or improve it nutritionally. They also made a sharp distinction between “foods” meant to provide nourishment and “condiments” used only to provide correction. The use of condiments was not intended primarily to improve the flavor or palatability of the main dish, though that might be part of it, but rather to balance its humors or texture by the addition of herbs, spices, or sauces categorized as opposite. This means that most typical condiments should sharply contrast with main dish both in terms of flavor, which is an indication of dominant quality, and in terms of substance or digestibility. Thus, again, we find “hot” herbs and spices added to “cold” dishes and acidic or “cutting” sauces added to tough or viscous foods. By its very logic, this would lead to a cuisine with boldly pronounced, vibrantly contrasting flavors. The idea of subtly accenting flavors, or emphasizing the main ingredient with reduced essences is absent. So too is our modern notion of “balancing” the main ingredient, usually some form of flesh, with garnishes of vegetable and starchy foods. A “balanced” meal meant something very different to the Renaissance theorist.

Among period 1 authors, it is evident that the late medieval penchant for heavily spiced, sugared, and even colored foods still held sway. This was a cosmopolitan and international style of cooking, heavily influenced by Arabic and Persian cuisine, and dietary writers had vast array of options when advising readers exactly how they should correct their foods. Although all New World products were missing from fifteenth-century larders, there were a number of other exotic ingredients that have since passed into obscurity. Among these were verjuice, the juice of unripe grapes or sometimes other fruits such as crab apples or gooseberries; sapa and defrutum, concentrated grape-based syrups; almond milk, prepared by grinding, soaking, and straining almonds; and a number of spices like “grains of paradise” (melegueta pepper), cubebs, long pepper, and galingale, the latter becoming familiar today through Southeast Asian cuisines. One also finds musk, mastic, and sandalwood among the flavorings used by medieval chefs and other spices such as pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, ginger, cardamom, and cumin, not to mention dozens of herbs still relatively familiar and a few less so, such as tansy, rue, hyssop, and southernwood. Although it has become fashionable recently among food historians to stress the similarities between medieval and modern cooking, rather than the former’s eccentricities and perversities, this brief list alone should illustrate the vast differences between the two.7 It should also be stressed that the reason for using these condiments and particularly the context is completely different. Many spices we would consider appropriate primarily for desserts, cinnamon and sugar for example, can be found added to such unlikely foods as fish. We should not assume, however, that the use of such condiments in cooking necessarily proceeded from some medical logic, even though authors praised their medicinal virtues. That is, saffron may have been used to combat melancholy, but in cuisine chefs used it primarily as a colorant rather than corrective.

The source from which we should expect the most explicit explanations of seasoning foods according to medical principles is Platina’s De honesta voluptate, first published about 1470. This is because the work is both about the medical virtues of individual food items and includes recipes taken from an extremely sophisticated earlier cookbook by Martino of Como.8 If the two works held similar advice that would be proof that nutritional and culinary combinations were one and the same, but despite Platina’s best efforts, the two remain noticeably different works. Moreover, Platina makes virtually no attempt to explain the food combinations of the recipes in medical terms. All we are given are brief off-hand comments such as “this is a healthy dish, good for this or that ailment” or, even more surprisingly, “this is a very dangerous dish and should be avoided at all costs.” For example, after a recipe for a fish rolled in pastry, Platina adds, “This is so dangerous I would serve it to my enemies.”9 There can be no doubt that these recipes lie solely within the domain of cuisine, and Platina’s sometimes pathetic effort to explain them is good evidence that a physician did not inform the chef here. Actually, the opposite is the case. Despite the fact that Platina’s description of the ideal chef states resolutely that he should know the nature and virtues of all foods so as to prepare them the best way, just like his friend Martino, he later goes on to describe how dangerous many of Martino’s recipes actually are.10

Even in the sections that Platina himself authored, there are few explicit directions about how seasoning might correct individual items. It is revealing that the sixteenth-century French translator, Desdier Christol, saw fit to insert precisely this information in his version of the work. For example, in the entry on pork, Platina explains how salting preserves the flesh, but it is only Christol who explains that the salt “tempers” the pork’s dangerous viscosity. The medical logic was thus added after the fact. Similarly in the entry for leeks (hot and dry in the third degree) it is only the French version that suggests boiling twice to avoid flatulence and eating them with cold herbs to counteract their heat.11

With regard to cooking procedures as a corrective, Platina appears to have gone even farther off the mark. Introducing the sixth book, in which the recipes begin, he suggests that beef ought to be boiled, which makes sense because it is a cold and dry meat, but also suggests boiling veal, which is tempered, and mutton, which is moist. Either Platina was being careless and inconsistent here, or he had trouble reconciling the standard cooking procedures in the recipes with the humoral principles he had just described. What is even stranger is that he also recommends boiling waterfowl, which is directly opposed to all medical theory.12 All this suggests, rather than the close affinity between medicine and cuisine, the great difficulty of writing a book that is both medically sound and fashionable in terms of cuisine.

Other period 1 authors were more consistent in explaining the corrective logic of their recommendations, but they too had trouble reconciling the advice they offered with what they clearly knew their courtly patrons would be eating. Manfredi felt obligated to explain why even some harmful foods can be eaten by some people: great desire and appetite for a particular item “corrects” its bad qualities, or by some “occult virtue” it may become suitable for a particular individual. Thus, he explains, for some people even onions are perfectly nourishing.13 Presumably, so too are some of the dishes of which physicians disapproved. These ideas have been discussed previously in the context of food guilt or the apparent lack of it among period 1 authors, but it may be that be that bending the strict dietary rules was the only way these authors could write for an audience primarily concerned with cuisine. At any rate, this again highlights the differences between the two. That a food could be “bad” but still nourishing shows that these authors had some serious reservations.

Manfredi also further refines the logic of why some meats are boiled and some roasted but adds that it is not so simple a matter as drying or moistening. Boiled meats do become moister on the outside, but they tend to be drier inside. Conversely, roasted food is drier outside but moister inside. Undercooked meat is more nourishing but difficult to digest, while well-done meat that has lost its “substantial humidity” is easily digested but less nourishing.14We at least get the impression here that the author is well acquainted with what actually goes on in the kitchen. He also offers an opinion on foods cooked over coals, fried, cut into pieces, or baked into pies. For each of these he explains how nourishing it is, how easily it is passed, and whether it dries or heats the body. But none does he condemn outright, something period 2 and 3 authors had no qualms about doing. Fried foods and pastrieswere always condemned in these later works. Here, however, there appears to be a concession to cuisine, a loose interpretation of dietary strictures to accommodate courtly habits, which suggests that there were significant differences between what cooks prepared andwhat physicians believed should be done.

Benedict also enters into the debate over cooking methods and insists that roasted food, because cooked in its own humidity, is moister and more nourishing, although difficult to digest. Boiled food may appear on the plate moist, but it has been suffused with a foreign humidity, usually water. Thus, in terms of nourishing humidity, it is actually drier. More revealingly, he explains that he omits specification of exactly what condiments should be added to each type of meat because “experience shows what they are.”15 This means that either basic nutritional seasoning principles were so well known that he felt it unnecessary to elaborate or that he knew he would be forced to defend some rather unsound practices. In fact, he gives us scarcely a glimpse of rich dazzling late medieval cuisine. The correctives Benedict does offer deal with quite simple fare: correcting hot and moist pigeons with some cold verjuice, beans cooked with mustard, oregano and wine added to prevent flatulence, or hot herbs like arugula or nasturtium combined with cold ones in a salad.16 But if all the complex combinations of pounded spices and elaborate sauces were also medicinal in nature, why not explain them too?

What tantalizing hints about cooking procedures Benedict does reveal deal with cooking everyday foods such as eggs, best poached rather than hard-boiled or fried, and bread, which must be properly risen, cooked through, and not burned. This is all standard advice. Elsewhere he gives advice about pasta, which, because difficult to digest and constricting, should be cooked in a rich meat broth or served with almond oil, pepper, and mint or oregano.17 But for the most part, Benedict, like other period 1 authors, is content to describe the properties of individual food items, not how they should be combined.

The bizarre combinations found in Ficino’s Three Books on Life seem to approximate late medieval cooking more closely, especially his confections of coral, sugar, rosewater, musk, and amber, often gilded and intended to combat melancholy and fortify the mental powers.18 These are, strictly speaking, medicines and not culinary recipes. They aremeant to be “confections” as the word was used in its original sense, and as it still is in Italian, confetti to mean pills. Ficino’s “recipes” are anything but culinary, and we are led astray by looking for medicinally corrective cooking here.

His contemporary Gazius is a much better source for explaining culinary methods. Like other period 1 authors, he still claims that what tastes good is most nourishing; nonetheless, we ought to “temper and correct foods with contraries.” Cold cucumbers are thus combined with onions or leeks, foods that tend to clog are combined with aperitives, lubricant foods combined with styptic ones. If sweet foods harm, then they should be combined with acidic ones.19 The late medieval preference for sweet and sour sauces appears then to be medically informed. Nonetheless, Gazius does lash out against “the meat of animals diversely prepared” followed by fish, milk products, fruits, and confections.20 All these mixed together in the body cause total confusion. In other words, he was the first author to explicitly criticize culinary fashions, especially the courtly custom of eating several different courses together. The cooking methods he commends are standard: fatty meats should be roasted or grilled over coals, and lean meats should be boiled. Thus, roast beef and boiled pork are both nutritionally unsound. Going one step further, though, he continues: foods baked in a pan are harmful and not nourishing; fried foods cause nausea and descend slowly from the stomach. A good proportion of all standard cooking procedures are thus condemned.21 Even the logic of salting meats, intended to correct the humidity, would be best for suckling pig and lamb, but certainly not tough old pork or beef, which should never be used as food.22 In this case we find nutritional logic directly opposed to what was obviously common custom rather than being somehow connected to it. Another good example of this is found in his description of milk, itself particularly dangerous and best combined with honey and salt but especially dangerous when mixed with gross foods such as rice or millet. Yet another favorite of late medieval cuisine, the rice pudding, is also condemned, along with all creamy desserts. 23 This basic antagonism between culinary fashion and sound nutrition continues into periods 2 and 3 and suggests again that either the two were always quite different or that they gradually drifted apart.

This is not to say, of course, that there were no major points of intersection. Gazius also offers recipes for dishes like quinces baked with honey, which he explains as a medicinal corrective. He claims that the logic of combining foods is something even people of little knowledge understand. They use it every day in composing salads, creating dishes with mixed flavors, and adding condiments.24 This suggests that he believed the basic flavor combinations to be common, understood at all levels of society, and in fact rooted in humoral medicine. But culinary fashion had obviously strayed from these simple corrections, especially at court. If his intuition was correct, then we should expect the most nutritionally sound combinations to be those eaten by ordinary people, rather than those found in elite cookbooks. But here too we find dietary authors constantly criticizing common customs. Even if the basic principles can be found among various levels of society and in many different types of recipes, it remains the case that dietary authors still narrowly circumscribed what they considered to be healthy cooking. In the end they found few people who followed the rules with any consistency. In periods 2 and 3 the tendency to more narrowly define these rules only increases.

PERIOD 2: THE GALENIC REVIVAL

As explained earlier in this book, period 2 authors depended more closely on Galenic texts and tended to excise the Arabist influence in medicine and cuisine. In many cases this stricter dependence on Greek sources forced the dietary authors to reassess familiar cooking procedures. One surprising consequence was a new appreciation for pork and less emphasis on kid, which had been the optimal meat according to the Arabist authors. Menapius, for example, following Galen, pronounces pork the most nourishing meat. Because of its moist, pituitous nature, it should be roasted, but can also be served boiled if corrected with pepper, onions, sage, and raisins.25 Apart from suggesting what appears to be a very German dish, not surprising for an author in Düsseldorf, it is remarkable that it was Galen’s authority that supported it. In this case, it is also fairly clear that the author used a familiar recipe as an illustration of his main point that these hot condiments correct the moist flesh. But it seems unlikely that Menapius actually devised this particular combination.

In fact, when Menapius is clear about the specifically medical origin of a dish he recommends, he also adds that many people would be unlikely to eat it. Milk, for example, is much healthier when mixed with salt, but he admits that it makes a much less pleasant food.26 In his discussion of fish, Menapius offers correctives such as wine or vinegar with aromatics such as ginger, cloves, cinnamon, saffron, and pepper, or in place of these onions, leek, and parsley. These latter were clearly the customary condiments for the less than well-off. What is more interesting, though, is that he claims the best corrective was provided by Galen and involves poaching the fish in a bronze vessel with salt, oil, dill, and chopped leeks. But, he adds, “certainly this way of preparing fish today appears to gratify the craving of delicate palates too little.”27 In other words, the ideal medicinal corrective is quite different from the current culinary fashion. This was also the case with matching food and wine. Menapius, contrary to custom as he perceived it, suggests that tough foods and those qualitatively cold, like fish, should be accompanied by subtle and strong wines. Hotter foods, such as meat, should be matched with weaker wines. This certainly runs counter to any gastronomic principle, then or today.28

The relationship of dietary principles to culinary practice in Germany is also evident in the discussion of Hessus and Placotomus on how to prepare brains. As a very pituitous food, brains must be carefully cooked to avoid nausea. The authors approve of the “vulgar” custom of adding ginger to correct both the frigidity and humidity.29 This is another case of a common custom later explained by medicinal logic. Another point of divergence between theory and practice occurs in their discussion of onions. These, they say, are eaten more commonly for pleasure than for nourishment, and then only with boiling twice could they be considered somewhat nourishing and less noxious.30 They would have preferred their readers to abstain altogether, but bowing to custom, they offer a solution that was probably seen as devoid of gastronomic interest. Considering their comments that most ate onions for pleasure, we must assume that few people took their corrective advice.

Also in this period, the French dietician Estienne offers some detailed critical comments about popular tidbits that we would now call appetizers. A number of these “eaten to irritate the appetite and gullet,” such as cured ham, smoked tongue, pig’s feet, patés—particularly those with eggs and onions and especially blood sausages—are condemned outright. Even the few he admitted were less noxious — Venetian lucanica (luganega or linguiça), Milanese cervelat, and some French sausages — should be eaten only sparingly. That is, a major subsection of European culinary traditions lies almost entirely outside of what physicians considered the optimal diet.31 Estienne also makes a distinction between the simple and vulgar condiments like salt, verjuice, sapa, vinegar, herbs, and the more exquisite imported aromatics such as lemon and citron, cinnamon, cloves, and pepper. But he also contends that many sauces, although considered delicate, are quite harmful to the stomach, especially mustard, alliata or garlic sauce, sauces made with pickles and vinegar, and especially anything with onions, leeks, garlic, or dill. Many of the most familiar sauces, presumed by culinary historians to be medicinal in logic, are here condemned by a learned medical writer.32 Even composite salads, claimed by many dietary writers themselves to be based on a corrective logic, Estienne considers harmful and says should not be used as a daily food.33 Of course, the prejudice against rawvegetables stretches back for centuries through the dietary literature, but here it is even after standard correction that they are denounced. Whether this is merely symptomatic of an increasing rigidity that comes with orthodox Galenism or perhaps just with the Reformation, many familiar culinary practices can no longer be fit into dietary theory. This may suggest that many of them were inspired solely by the dictates of taste and fashion in the first place.

The physician’s recommendation for dealing with the most dangerous of foods, mushrooms and truffles, also appears to be quite different from culinary practice. Calanius, after frightening audiences with stories of “whole families destroyed and lost,” tells us that there are some correctives. Pears, for some elusive reason, had always been a typical remedy, and the phrase “Pyra sunt theriaca fungorum” [pears are the antidote for mushrooms] was commonly repeated although rarely explained. Calanius, however, believed oil to be the true antidote for mushrooms. For truffles a more thorough procedure would be required: careful washing, cooking in wine with oregano and rue, then included in a salad with oil, vinegar, and pepper. What this might have tasted like one can only imagine, but it has little to do with what he acknowledges was common, namely roasting in the cinders.34 Again, the nutritionally sound correctives, apparently dreamed up by these dietary authors, seem to have little to do with customary treatments.

For another equally dangerous food, melons, Calanius offers several remedies to prevent putrefaction. “After melons, use plaisantin cheese, or some salted meat, or equally salt or even sugar.”35 The plaisantin from Placentia or Piacenza was the forerunner to parmigiano. At any rate, here finally is a custom, still common in the combination of melons and prosciutto, that appears to originate within dietary medicine. However, this advice runs counter to the almost universal rule that melons should be eaten with no other foods so as to prevent corruption given that anything heavy and difficult to digest would keep the melon in the stomach too long. Some physicians recommend wine as a corrective, which was the current fashion, although by period 2 most authors suggested that the wine would force the melon prematurely into the veins before being concocted.36 The point is that Calanius probably took what was already a familiar custom that could be fit into nutritional theory and then approved it. The fact that this advice was so rare among Renaissance physicians but is still a common practice suggests that its origin was probably not in dietetics.37

In an interesting digression on the changes in flavor that occur during cooking, Bruyerin notes not only that the application of heat corrects food, making it sweeter, but that the choice of heating method is also crucial. Hot and dry foods like onions require a liquid medium to render them hot and moist, and hence sweeter and more nourishing. Cold and moist apples, on the other hand, become sweeter only with dry heat. Thus, roasting an onion would make it drier and bitter. Boiling an apple would leave it insipid.38 This reflects basic theory of how flavors change along with qualitative changes, but does it reflect actual culinary practice? A deft cook can roast onions and poach apples successfully. At any rate, Bruyerin finds this sort of simple correction legitimate. Other corrections, like the “heaping together” of flavors and bizarre culinary combinations, he considers not only poisonous but a species of “adultery.” That is, it involves putting together improper elements and mixing what ought not to be mixed, for the sake of pleasure and the gullet rather than health.39 This is a wholesale attack on cuisine, an explicit denial that culinary combinations have anything to do with health. Such denunciations only become more typical in the sixteenth century and reflect either a growing rift between these two ways of thinking about food or the fact that the two may never have been so similar. The kinds of corrections Bruyerin believed appropriate were much more simple, like macerating cabbage in salt to remove its bitterness and make it softer or combining cold lettuce with hotter herbs like arugula.40 With these examples, it would be impossible to tell whether the idea of correction informed the practice, but it does seem unlikely.

In Spain the distinction between theory and practice is also evident in Nuñez de Oria’s discussion of cooking methods. Apart from typical advice about roasting fatty meats and boiling drier ones and the ban on all fried foods, he adds that most families pay no attention to these rules. There is more circumspection among Turks and Moors, which is why Christians suffer many more fevers and other diseases.41 Most people have no idea which meats are best to cure with salt, and “the greater part of men eat beef in these lands, ignoring their great malice.”42 These comments suggest that in the author’s mind Arab-influenced cuisine or at least custom among Muslims is much more sober and informed, but Spaniards have strayed from dietary principles. Another example is found in his discussion of rules about how and when to eat cheese. The first rule is never to eat it with diuretic and aperitive herbs like parsley, celery, fennel, or pepper, as is done in quesadillas and other dishes.43 These herbs force the cheese undigested into the kidneys, causing obstructions and stones. Cheese must only be eaten after meals, as a seal to the seething stomach. Obviously, this was also a rule most Spaniards ignored. Thus, the cuisine in which we might expect some of the closest affinities between cooking and medicine, at least according to one physician, was quite negligent in this regard.

On the other hand, when Nuñez de Oria does approve of a particular dish, and he even offers recipes, the medicinal logic is difficult to discern. For example, he admits that he is fond of the cuclillo, or cuckoo. Being hot and dry, it would naturally be best boiled according to the logic he spoke of previously, but the recipe suggests it be roasted, well larded or basted with fat, cooked with pepper and cloves, and finally served with a cinnamon sauce, which he claims makes it easy to digest. Adding hot and dry spices to an already hot and dry food defies all medical logic, and the idea that this makes it easily digested seems tacked on to justify a dish whose origin is plainly culinary rather than medicinal.44 On several occasions he is forced to admit the recipe he offers could not be healthy, as he does with a dish of conger eels, salted and dried and then cooked with garbanzo beans, leeks, and dried chestnuts, which he considers a typical dish.45

Among the English period 2 authors there is also a distinction between healthy cooking and common fashion. William Bulleyn, typical of this period, rants against the obscene gluttony he associates with courtly banquets. Especially noxious is mixing of various courses of roasted, fried, and baked foods and mixing of fish, meat, fruit, and salads. There is a pronounced anticourt aesthetic here but not necessarily an animosity toward cooking per se. In a few revealing passages he denotes what he thinks is medically sound cooking, which usually involves simple herbally based condiments. About sorrel he observes that “thy Coke dothe righte well knowe it, and all they that make grene sauce.” As a sour, cold, and dry corrective this would have been the perfect sauce for hot foods. Similarly, in discussing sage, he notes “If it be put in a pigge, it drieth the humours, that would engender fleume” and of purslane, which can be preserved in salt, “then it is very good with rosted meates.”46 In another fascinating passage, Bulleyn suggests that because most herbs and roots are “wyndye” and engender melancholy and gross blood, it is best not to add them indiscriminately to other foods; rather, “the grose binding togither and seething of herbes in brothes and pottage, be more holsomer then the fyne choppynge of them.”47 That is, a bouquet garni, in his mind, is a healthier preparation than the finely incorporated, typically medieval sauces. Whether this reflects a shift of culinary techniques or merely this author’s unique opinion is difficult to say. But this could be one example of a health recommendation adopted in the kitchen.

On the other hand, Bulleyn was far more savvy about cooking than most of his fellow dietary authors. He may have merely known about this practice and commended it, as he did on numerous occasions. There are several recipes for complicated broths, intended to be corrective or medicinal. He also mentions swans in “galantines,” which if well made help to digest their flesh; even eels, tench, and lampreys are acceptable well - baked or roasted and eaten with pepper, ginger, and vinegar. It is clear here that the author repeats the standard dietary line and then procedes to describe and approve of his favorite recipes.48

The confusion over whether standard dishes originated in medicine or cuisine was clearly understood by Fridaevallis, writing near Antwerp a decade later.He wonders whether cooking beans with pepper and honey wine is done for the sake of health, as cooks claim, or for gluttony. Perhaps he was suggesting that any strange combination can be somehow defended using dietary principles, but this one is obviously questionable, as is the combination of peas and almond milk, about which he exclaims “behold how the art of gluttony rejoices.”49 Fridaevallis is finally calling to judgment the many dishes that parade under the banner of health. He does, however, approve of some combinations: wine to correct melons, oregano and acidic flavors to correct squash, and spinach cooked quickly to release its humors, then mixed with butter and verjuice.50 hot and dry, when used to correct mushrooms, cold and moist. Later, however, he does say that all mushrooms are harmful however cooked, retracting his former approval.51 Nonetheless, he does not criticize all cuisine but only that whose primary objective is taste.

It is still not entirely clear, though, what kind of medicinal logic might have led Fridaevallis to approve some of the recipes he offers. He may be just as guilty as others of appropriating dietary rules to defend favorite foods. For example, there are detailed instructions on how to prepare turtles: parboiled, cleaned, and returned to the pot with pepper, saffron, and egg yolks. Also surprising is a recipe for frog’s legs: soaked, floured, fried, and served with celery, fennel flowers, or green sauce. This, he claims, is a way to correct its humidity. Since most dietary authors condemned both of these foods, these recipes appear to be good examples of common customs later rationalized with medicine, as is a recipe for sea urchins prepared in a plate with eggs, pepper, and honey.52 Less strange is an explanation of why olive oil, which is temperately hot and moist, is used on raw herbs to temper their frigidity.5 vinegar and hot and dry salt, this would yield a perfectly balanced dish. But was it medicine that first inspired this combination of flavors?

Italian authors in period 2 also reveal the ambiguous relationship between medicine and cuisine, none more so than the heroic attempt of Domenico Romoli (called Panunto) to describe all the duties of the scalco — a banquet manager, butler, maître d’, and health advisor to a noble household all rolled into one. This work, not unlike Platina’s in its scope, contains an ample collection of recipes, catering and serving information, details regarding what foods are best in which season, and a section on the medical virtues of all known foods. Although Romoli tries to explain that this latter section is really included for the scalco who has to deal with a master in less than optimal health,54 the advice there completely contradicts what was said earlier. Apart from seeming completely schizophrenic, his advice highlights the many discrepancies between what was actually eaten and what physicians thought should be eaten. For example, the first section contains some delightful recipes for pasticci di bue alla francese, which is parboiled beef baked in a pie with spices, and a soffrito di carne di bue trinciata, chopped beef that is fried and then moistened with broth. But later in the book beef is described as cold and dry; it generates gross, turbid blood and melancholy, and is especially harmful for the otiose. Similarly, recipes for lepri con pappardelle and roast hare cannot be made to concur with his later condemnation of hare’s flesh as excessively hot and dry. Why then would the recipes include hot condiments like sage and rosemary?55

One can only assume that Romoli himself felt safe serving anything that tasted good when his master was in health but followed the physician’s advice when necessary. At any rate, the differences between the two are quite pronounced. Romoli was even forced on occasion to directly criticize his own recipes. Cheese should never be mixed with herbs that penetrate the body because this leads to clogs and kidney stones, and “they greatly err who mix cheese in ravioli with parsley roots, spices and raisins. . . .”56 And after the panoply of dazzling banquet menus and complex recipes, he actually claims that “things composed of various ingredients are closer to corruption that those made with few things. Nothing is more pernicious than mixing many things together in the stomach, and remaining at the table a long time eating.”57 This futile attempt to mix culinary and dietetic advice would not be repeated in the next period.

PERIOD 3: THE BREAKDOWN OF ORTHODOXY

In period 3, as has been explained, the divergence of opinion among dietary authors became wider, national prejudices more pronounced, and the tendency to rely on experience over the authoritative sources greater. In some cases this prompted authors to approve of dishes formerly banned by dietary theory; in others it led to rethinking of the principles of corrective cooking altogether. It is clear that on the whole the two domains of cooking and medicine drifted further apart. No one better exemplifies this shift than Girolamo Cardano. Discussing condiments, he makes it clear that they make foods more useful for humans but can easily be abused. In De usu ciborum he assures readers that he is not about to give them a book like Platina’s, which is more for culinary pleasure and gluttony than good health.58 He also condemns all study of how to prepare delicacies and complex mixed dishes because these are all harmful to health. Condiments should only be used as correctives, acidic foods should be sweetened, tough foods softened, and so forth. Combining flavors should only be used to temper the main ingredient, to render it closer to our bodies qualitatively.59 But the finished dish should still be as simple as possible; as everyone knows, the simpler the food, the easier it is to digest and the longer one remains in health.

Despite all this, Cardano does offer several relatively involved recipes, one that ironically could have come directly from Platina—the cibarium album or blancmange, made with rice starch, capon, almond milk, sugar, and citrus juice. He does at least admit that it is really only safe for the sick to eat now and then.60 But there are also recipes for a polenta made of millet, a sort of fava bean pizza made with onions or leeks and eaten in Lent, and baby artichokes eaten raw if tender or cooked in a broth with butter. All these are plainly examples of common Italian dishes that have made their way into a dietary despite the opinion of ancient authorities.61

In De sanitate tuenda Cardano moves even further from standard opinion. Among cooking methods, he describes the different species of roasting: on a grill, above the coals, baked in an oven either alone or in a pie. Surprisingly, he claims that boiling is the worst cooking method; it nourishes the least and makes food the most difficult to digest. He then goes on to approve of frying and especially stewing because these methods best retain the substantial humidity of the ingredients. A recipe for veal pie shows not only how far he was willing to stray from standard advice but his considerably extensive understanding of cooking procedures. The pie includes chopped veal, raisins, parsley, saffron, salt, cinnamon, fennel, egg yolks, and broth baked in a crust, perhaps laden with rosemary. Some people also add sugar and unripe grapes.62 It is not entirely clear why he thought this a particularly nourishing and easily digested dish, and he certainly does not explain any underlying corrective logic, if there is one. Cardano appears here to be yielding to purely gastronomic interests.

The same can be said of his discussion of flavors and how best to mix them. Sweetness, for example, does not go well with bitter or salty foods but does go with acid. Salt goes well with bitter and astringent foods but not with acidic or acrid flavors.63 In practical terms then, sugar goes nicely with oranges but not a salad of herbs. Salt goes with the salad but not oranges. This certainly makes sense gastronomically but seems to depart from strict corrective logic. Combining hot and moist sweetness with cold and dry sourness makes sense, but hot and dry salt with hot and dry bitterness? And why not sweetness with bitter and salty foods, as used in many corrective combinations, the moisture of one offsetting the dryness of the other? All these examples show that nutritional dogma had begun to erode, and authors were increasingly willing to describe recipes that would not clearly fit within the standard rules. This again reveals some of the differences between cuisine and medicine.

Another Italian author of period 3, Alessandro Petronio, directly contradicts standard medical advice on wine. Usually it was described as an aid to digestion, but clearly getting his clues from the kitchen, Petronio observes that in cooking it toughens and firms up food.64 Fish and pork become more tender only if cooked in water. Reasonably then, the same should happen in our stomachs, and water, despite the fact that it is cold and moist, does go with these foods. This advice opposes both culinary and medical dogma and shows that humors, ironically enough, played less a role in the dietary literature than they may have in the dining room. His ideas also relied more heavily on experience outside the kitchen as well. He seems to have appreciated the fact that alcohol dehydrates that body and the fact that this, rather than fumes rising to the head, is what causes headaches, thirst, and bleary eyes. Beyond his willingness to abandon standard theory, Petronio also offers several recipes but is not entirely clear whether these follow a corrective logic. For example, after discussing his preference for seething or poaching fish over roasting (frying was considered the worst method), he explains how to cook tuna on a spit. It should be cut into pieces, salted, skewered, and seasoned with powdered coriander, oil and vinegar, and fennel or rosemary. He also advises to “sbruffa continuamente” [keep it turning].65 After this he describes the best way to eat the fravolino fish (rubellio in Latin), which should be “fresh, fried and cold.” This contradicts his earlier pronouncement against fried fish and ignores the ubiquitous rule that fish should never be eaten after it has cooled. Both these are good examples of customs taking precedence over nutritional theory.

Petronio did not yield to all common customs. One example of his reluctance is a critique of the practice of eating tiny birds bones and all. The bones will not mix with other foods, resist being broken down, can remain in the stomach three or four days, and sometimes can even puncture the stomach lining.66 Like most authors of this period, Petronio strikes out on his own, following neither the classical authorities nor current practice but his own experience. This meant that nutritional theory could coincide with culinary customs but not necessarily because they shared some common humoral logic. Another example of a food commonly claimed to be both medicinal and culinary is marzipan. It was used as a kind of restorative, and a few decades earlier Grataroli claimed that it was an ideal food for travelers because it offered a highly concentrated and easily assimilated form of nourishment.67 Petronio, however, believes that it was just as likely to have the opposite effect; it is actually hard to concoct and distribute, can cause obstructions, and may ultimately weaken us.68 This is just one more example of how dietary theory could depart from both custom and the standard medical authorities.

The dieticians, then as now, tried to promote their own new fads as well. Pisanelli raves about hop sprouts, how they generate clear and pure blood and help to clean out the whole system. He is actually amazed how little they are used outside of Germany, where they were used to make beer.69 His recommendation is to take tender young sprouts and season them with oil and vinegar, yielding a perfectly tempered dish. The significance of this is that neither the classical authorities nor common custom recognized the virtues of hops. Pisanelli is equally enthusiastic about lemons, not because they are nutritious but because they make the best sauce, especially as the Genovese prepare them: cut thin, seasoned with salt and rosewater, and used as an accompaniment to meat.70 Here is one custom, at least, that fulfills all the requirements of a medicinal corrective. But in many other cases Pisanelli approves of a dish despite the warnings of his fellow dietary writers. One example is venison, usually condemned as difficult to digest, generating melancholy and quartan fevers. Pisanelli believes it fine as long as cooked with fatty meats, perhaps like prosciutto, or well larded in a pie.71 It is a corrective logic that the author appeals to, adding moisture to a dry meat, but a common custom has again been rationalized with medical principles.

Another exampleworth mentioning, if only for its sophisticated cooking technique, is eels. They are usually condemned but here cooked over a grill in a leaf of paper with oil, parsley, and coriander. There is a similar recipe for grilled mullet bathed with oil and orange juice.72 Whether these combinations might be explicitly medicinal is perhaps less important than the fact that a dietary writer was quite savvy about culinary matters and was willing to bend the rules a bit to offer some appealing recipes.

Moving into the seventeenth century, the revised version of the medieval work by Ugo Benzi, extensively doctored up by Savoyard Giovanni Lodovico Bertaldi, is also a treasure trove of contemporary cooking methods and how these relate to dietary principles. Bertaldi is clear about what information he adds to the original text, so it would be reasonable to treat his comments as another period 3 work. For example, in the entry for garlic he says “today they are eaten with salads to correct the humidity and frigidity of the herbs, or placed with vinegar, parsley and bread soaked in vinegar to make sauce to eat with meat, which excites the appetite.” And regarding leeks: “In Piedmont they praise leeks cooked with rich goose broth, and women use them with sugar to temper their humidity.” In other words, Bertaldi is among the few to explain customs in explicitly medical terms. Mace, he explains, is used by women in patés of pork to correct the bad quality of this meat and “to give it better taste and better odor.”73 If we trust the author’s comments, he implies that women regularly use corrective principles in common food preparations. In other cases he may have just been using familiar examples to illustrate his points. A good example of the latter, or at least his willingness to ignore received dietary wisdom, appears in his discussion of chestnuts. Galen condemned them, but they can be good and even nobles eat them cooked over the coals in a perforated pan and served with butter, salt, and pepper. This way they taste better, are more nourishing, and have no bad qualities.74 There can be no doubt that common custom outweighs medicine here, because food cooked over smoking coals was always forbidden. Bertaldi does not, however, bow to all culinary trends. He describes ice cream as cold and “windy,” that is, it causes gas.75

The ambiguous relationship between medicine and cuisine can also be seen in the recognized master of salads in this period, Massonio. His favorite combinations of salad ingredients, although ostensibly medicinal, also appear to flaunt corrective rules. Bitter herbs like chicory and endive must be countered by sweet condiments, he explains. Savory ingredients should be intensified with arugula, chervil, or valerian. Insipid lettuce and borage need other herbs and oil, salt, and pepper to make them tasty. He also suggests orange or lemon juice, cooked must, garum, raisins, onions, garlic, and basil as flavorings. What is missing, however, is any acknowledgment that these would be corrective combinations.76 The objective here appears to be flavor. Even the most typical combination of salt, oil, and vinegar in salad dressings comes into question. Massonio admits that oil enters in not as a necessity but through continuous use. It begins as a custom and only fortuitously does it serve to temper the coldness of the vinegar and herbs and add a bit of nutritional value to the whole.77 Massonio also muses that while the ancients called salads acetaria, recognizing the vinegar, and moderns call them insalata, recognizing only the salt, some people think they should be called herba salolacetaria to acknowledge all the ingredients. In any case, here one author admits that custom precedes the corrective logic.

But not all customs are equally adopted. One surprising comment, which follows corrective logic faithfully, insists that garlic is not a healthy condiment for Romans. It is not bad for those in colder climates, but its heat clearly exacerbates the harmful effects of ambient heat in the South. Here cuisine and medicine part ways completely.78 On the other hand, after lengthy discourses on the various ancient opinions on certain ingredients, Massonio often threw in his favorite recipes as well. For example, he explains that he prefers asparagus either chopped with eggs, fried in oil, in a broth, seasoned with cheese and eggs, or boiled with orange or lemon juice.79 None of these appears to have any corrective rationale at all.

Composed in the same year as Massonio’s, Sala’s book on aliments pays the usual lip service to the idea that the culinary art is indispensable to medicine. On their own and uncorrected, many foods would harm us unless properly mixed.80 He will not indulge us, he adds, in tract on pots and pans or recipes as are found in cookbooks, only what is necessary for health. Nonetheless, almost immediately we find sesame biscotti being dipped in wine or some liquor, perhaps vin santo, as well as precise recipes for reginae (a biscuit with anise and coriander) and marzipan. These were, of course, touted as medicinal confections. There are also exquisite recipes for morselli (pounded meat morsels with nuts and sugar), gelatines, placentiae (tarts of fruits, herbs, fish, and the like), which are also considered somehow medicinal, as are sauces such as diasynapis (an Italian mostarda), alliatum, and piperatum.81 What makes the appearance of these so strange here is that they are essentially heavily spiced late-medieval concoctions. Perhaps Padua, where Sala was writing, still fell under the sway of the Venetian spice trade. Or perhaps Sala was just unique among dietary authors for retaining these long after others had abandoned them as illicit. Presumably all of these foods were still relatively familiar and had made the transition from medicine to cuisine; why else would other authors have felt the need to condemn people who use them merely for pleasure?82 Sala does not, in the end, try to explain the medicinal logic of these recipes or how they should be used. And when he does offer specific correctives for individual items, they often defy all logic. For example, with melons, rather than old salted cheese as they serve it in taverns and as even physicians advise, he recommended pickled herring, caviar, or pickles.83 Maybe he was thinking that anything preserved would prevent corruption of the melons.

Whatever the case, Sala was typical of period 3 authors in his willingness to trust experience and his own odd preferences over received wisdom. One example that relates to cooking is the common warning not to cover food after it has been roasted. Presumably the noxious vapors would fall and congeal on the surface of the meat or fish. Sala, however, says that you see everyone do this daily—cooks, tavern-keepers, and families — and no one is harmed.84 In this case, as throughout this work, dietary theory bent to accommodate common practice.

The French authors of period 3 also reveal a great deal about the differences between common custom and dietary theory, particularly because of their aim to correct “popular errors.” Joubert can be credited with starting this trend, and in many cases, against all current practice, he followed corrective logic to its ultimate extreme. For example, wine was commonly denied to boys under eighteen because of their excessive heat. But logically, because they are colder, girls should be allowed wine earlier, contrary to vulgar opinion.85 This idea was also contrary to professional medical opinion, and Joubert was the first to point out this inconsistency in applying humoral principles. Of course, it also reveals a major gulf between theory and practice, both culinary and medical. Joubert also recognized that the so-called drugs sold by apothecaries were actually dainties eaten for pleasure, which led him to denounce all varieties of sugared “biscuteaux, pignolat, tartes de Massepan, confitures et autres friandises” [biscuits, pine nut cookies, marzipan tarts, confections, and other dainties].86 These are precisely the “medicines” that Sala gave recipes for above.

Unfortunately, the majority of Joubert’s work deals with medical errors rather than culinary ones, and his Matinees de l’il’Adam, which he claims deals with food, has been lost. But the list of questions he offers in the second part of Erreurs populaires at least suggests the many ways that common customs may diverge from sound theory, even though he provides no answers. For example, he asks whether “la poire avec fromage, est mariage” [pear with cheese is marriage], whether there is no better sauce than appetite or whether it is alright to use sauces sometimes. He wonders if milk and fish are poisonous together and if nuts after fish serve as an antidote. He also asks why people say not to drink wine after eating salad.87 These maxims reveal that many people thought they understood sound medical principles, but the fact that Joubert called them into question implies that dietary theory informed neither people’s culinary practices nor even their basic understanding of nutrition. In several cases their ideas may stem from folk practices or older, superceded dietary works. This is certainly the case with “Jamais succre ne gasta sauce” (sugar never spoils a sauce), which can be found in Platina. Presumably Joubert was still under the sway of a more orthodox Galenism that could not explain such sayings as “mutton makes us age above all meats, but cheese guards us from it.”88 It is clear from these that custom and theory were not one and the same.

Along similar lines, Duchesne also takes the opportunity to correct some common mistakes, as in his condemnation of “young flesh and old fish” as “repugnant to all reason.” All animals are best at a median age, even if they are not at their best in terms of taste. Duchesne’s priority here is medical rather than gastronomic. He even recognizes that fat animals are always the tastiest and tenderest even though fat itself is dangerous and should be eaten as little as possible.89 In general, Duchesne’s attitude toward cooking is that excessive artifice — mixing of contrary types of food in one meal, and especially all the delicacies and drinks associated with banqueting — are just as dangerous as total lack of correction, as seen among the destitute.90 This attitude is typical of period 3 and again shows that in the authors’ minds few people, especially those at both ends of the social spectrum, followed dietary rules or corrected their food properly. Refuting yet another popular error Duchesne wonders where people got the idea that salt is more harmful than healthy. Of course it can be used to excess, but it is also useful for correcting moist and “excrementous” foods.91 Again, even when people thought they were doing the right thing, dieticians were quick to point out their mistakes.

Bachot was the prime authority of the seventeenth century to pick up this theme of popular errors. On the topic of cuisine, he finds cooks to be the prime culprits in leading people astray. They overentice people with irritating flavors and a wide variety of sauces. And poor diners wonder why they have lost their appetite to such an extent that delicate pheasant and even the most exquisite venison bore them. Their palates have been jaded, their stomachs overburdened: “Chefs lack no artifice to revive lost appetite with an infinity of sauces, saupiquets, and diversely disguised foods...”92 All this serves only to keep people at the table, eating far more than is necessary or healthy. Again, the art of cooking flouts dietary rules.

Regarding the customary order of meals, Bachot’s comments are difficult to make sense of. On the one hand they reveal that a familiar procession of courses has become customary among “les grands” in France. Soups, soft foods, fricassees, and salads start a meal, followed by boiled foods or roasts, and lastly cold foods such as fruits, sweets, and milk-based products. What is perplexing is that Bachot claims this order to be prescribed by medical precepts.93 Nothing could be further from the truth. Although the question of whether soft foods should precede more solid ones was never settled in the dietary literature, no author claimed that all fruits were best at the end of a meal, especially not corruptible ones like melons and peaches. And while milk products at the close of a meal may make sense gastronomically, it contradicts humoral theory because these foods must always be taken alone or at the start of a meal to prevent them from floating to the top of the stomach and putrefying. What appears to have happened here is that common custom worked its way into medical theory, which became simplified and adapted to gastronomic fashion. Another debatable point is whether salads should begin a meal; many authors claimed that they should come last. Perhaps the diversity of opinion among dietary authors themselves on all these points meant that practically anything could be defended using medical theory. It is certain, though, that no physician prescribed the order mentioned above.

The English authors of period 3 showed a similar tendency to accommodate customs in their medical theories. For example, contrary to Galen, who believed that all bread must be well leavened, Cogan writes “Howbeit in England our finest manchet is made without leaven... now adayes common experience proveth in mens stomackes, that bread much leavened is heavie of digestion, and no bread is lighter than manchet.” Cogan even approves of oats, whereas Galen thought they were only good for animals, but “if hee had lived in Englande especially in Lancashire, Cheshire, Cumberlande, Westmoreland or Cornewale, hee would have saide that Oates had been meate for men.”94 This reflects not only a willingness to depart from standard theory but a move toward fitting common practice into approved diet. In fact Cogan himself acknowledges that pigeons stuffed with grapes, which appears to be medicinal in origin, is merely as “cunning cookes have devised.”95 This at least shows that the author believed that cuisine informed medicine in this case.

But Cogan did not simply yield to all customs. Contrary to the manner in England, he claims that peaches should not be eaten as dessert because they swim above other foods and corrupt. He even goes so far as to assert “for such as can rule themselves, and refraine their appetite according to reason, it is best to forgoe both apples, peares and peaches.”96 We can only assume that there is little consistency here, and Cogan is merely recommending whatever happened to suit his fancy. He is completely out in left field when he warns his readers against oranges:Ladie Gula hath not onely commended them to bee eaten with meates, but also devised a banquetting dishe to be made with sliced Orenges and Sugar cast uppon them.”97 Both these, of course, make perfect medicinal sense. Also disregarding all theoretical principles, he makes the following singularly bizarre comment about mutton: “For it is seldom seene that any man hath taken harme by eating raw mutton, so light and wholesome it is in digestion.”98 Faced with such blatantly outlandish comments, it is not surprising that the pronouncements of dieticians eventually lost credibility and people ate whatever they pleased.

Moffett assumes that the basic corrective principles were well understood, but he also admits that there were many who ignore them: “Who seeth not a great difference between meats kill’d in season, and out of season, betwixt raw meat and parboild, betwixt fri’d meats and bak’d meats, spiced and unspiced, salt and fresh; between asparagus once washed and twice washt, betwixt cabbages once and twice sod, etc. is in my judgement deprived of his wits, or else over-wedded to his will.”99 Such invective would, of course, have been unnecessary if the rules were followed. This is not to say that Moffett himself stuck to the rules often. Like Cogan, he was willing to depart from orthodox theory when native custom suited his fancy. For example, he claims that veal is much too moist for the English constitution but is more appropriate for Italians. He also insists that lamb is not as dangerously phlegmatic as Galen and the other authorities contend but is rather “of all other our best nourishment,” which he then proceeds to prove by divine and human reason. 100 That is, it would hardly have been the Old Testament sacrifice or the analogue of Christ’s sacrifice if it were such an unwholesome food. Moffett also, surprisingly, approves of hedgehog, saying it need not be avoided as some fanatics say.101 Even deer’s flesh in season is commended unless ruined by cooks or overeaten by “greedy Gourmands, that cannot moderately use the good creatures of God.”102 Once again, the enticements of cooking are to blame if people abuse good food. On the topic of cooking, he resolutely refuses to describe sauces: “All the which I write, not to tickle the Epicures of our age, who to the further cramming of their filthy corps, make curious sawces for every meat.” And quoting Socrates: “these new found sawces, what are they but whores to edge our appetite, making us feast when we should fast, or at least to feed more than nature willeth.”103 The only proper sauces are exercise and hunger and for those who can get no exercise, only simple herbal correctives, spices, and flavorings like vinegar or lemon.

Some of the examples Moffett provides of what he considers legitimate cooking procedures are nothing out of the ordinary: apples cooked with butter and cinnamon, ginger, or other spices and spinach boiled and served with butter, currants, and sugar. But others are difficult to make sense of humorally, especially this German dish: wild boar parboiled in Rhine wine and juniper berries, sliced and seasoned, then eaten cold with butter. The wine and spices would correct the meat and hasten concoction, but otherwise this just appears to be something Moffett had tasted and liked.104 The same can be said about his advice on olives, usually recommended at the start of a meal as an appetite stimulant. Moffett claims that they are “best in the midst of meat with a French salad; for eaten first they lie heavy in the stomach,” and after a meal their brackish salty vapors hinder sleep and provoke thirst.105 Here custom, even a foreign one, intrudes upon theory. These are rare exceptions to Moffett’s general rule that only the simplest of corrections promote health, while “over-curious cookery, making fine meat of a whetstone, and quelque-choses of unsavory, nay of bad and unwholesome meat” is to be utterly avoided.106

A contemporary of Moffett, Buttes, wrote somewhat more explicitly about how individual foods should be corrected. He counsels the reader to use salty meats and sharp things such as pomegranates or foods preserved in vinegar following grapes to counteract their sweetness. With strawberries, themselves tart, sugar is the best corrective. Apricots are best followed by anise seeds, salty or spiced meats, aged cheese, and wine.107 It is not clear if these were typical combinations, but they do adhere to corrective logic consistently. Gourds should be eaten with pepper, mustard, and vinegar or with hot herbs like onions and parsley.108 In this case the cutting flavors help to digest the gourd, and the hot flavors balance it humorally. Similarly, the correctives suggested for fish are usually sour and spiced: carp is salted for six hours, fried, and sprinkled with vinegar flavored with spices and saffron; trout is poached in vinegar and water and eaten with a sour sauce; tench is baked with garlic and sweet spices or boiled with onions and raisins; oysters are roasted over embers and dressed with pepper, oil, and sour orange juice.109 These are among the clearest examples in the dietary literature of what were considered proper and simple cooking methods. It is not possible to tell with any certainty if these dishes were invented by Buttes. They appear not to be, if only because the medical opinions in the text are mostly derivative. And as he himself reveals in a description of a relatively complex “green sauce” made of sweet herbs like betony, mint, basil, rose vinegar, a clove or two, and a little garlic, “This kinde of sauce, I never tasted my selfe: yet am bold to communicate and commend it to my friends, as I find it described by the Italian Freitago.”110 Buttes may have taken all the correctives from other medical texts, or they may be familiar examples taken from his own experience. In either case, they do show that one author could still describe a humorally sound form of cuisine.

The puritanically minded Vaughan, writing at the start of the seventeenth century, was less generous toward the riotous habits of his countrymen. His advice is to leave for the New World, to “forsake our homebred idleness” and “leave off our loose and lavish living.” Among the abuses he enumerates are smoking and the use of “burning liquors, which are brewed by our vilipendious vulcans, not for any lasting use, but to beguile the lustfull world with desperate receipts, and momentary cures.”111 In other words, his general apprehension is that certain items introduced as medicinal are now being abused for pleasure. Given this attitude, it is not surprising that he has few positive things to say about refined cuisine. He does, however, offer a few interesting recipes for foods he finds honest and wholesome. Among these are explicit directions on how to make mead, about which he remarks that there is “no drinke in the world more wholesome then Meath, if it be well brewed.”112 Although his recipe sounds somewhat medicinal, he does claim that it is a “drink,” presumably for regular use, not one of his “diet drinks” for the sick. The few other culinary preparations he discusses, like how to serve fish, appear to be taken from Buttes. The same recipes for carp and trout are given, as well as a recipe for eels that is almost certainly from Pisanelli. 113 Where all these recipes may ultimately originate is another question, but Vaughan does not offer much that is new regarding cooking, with the exception of an intriguing green sauce made of sorrel, strawberry juice, and violet leaves, to be eaten with pork or young goose.114

On the whole, however, his attitude toward cooking was overwhelmingly negative. In praise of our frugal antediluvian ancestors, Vaughan insists that they were “ignorant of our delicate inventions and multiplied compounds...they knew not our dainty cates, our marchpanes, nor our superfluous slibber sauces.” They had no truck with “swinish epicures, whose thoughts intend on their present provender.”115 This is, as mentioned previously, a decidedly anticourt aesthetic. Its net effect may have been not only to more narrowly define healthy eating but to excise what formerly were perfectly legitimate dishes according to medicine. These authors believed that the abuse of medicines and correctives for the purpose of pleasure is more harmful than the benefit they might have afforded. Thus, complex, spiced recipes, along with tobacco, alcohol, and sugar were increasingly banned, especially by puritanical authors like Vaughan.

Ironically this could also be the case with recusant authors like Hollings, an Englishman who fled to Bavaria to practice his faith. In the introduction of his health manual for students, he complains that dietary rules were indeed followed carefully by the ancients, but today they are practically unknown. Doctors are also to blame for being exclusively concerned with curing patients rather than preserving health.116 This is a common gripe in the dietary literature and reveals that these authors did not recognize among the general populace any clear understanding of proper corrective seasoning. Hollings’s students were also apparently ignorant. Much like today, he complains that they prefer quick snacks to balanced meals, in this case, turnover pies.117 Corrective seasoning for Hollings is a simple matter of counteracting cold with heat and vice versa, but “truly whatever is either fried in a pan, or encased in pastry by bakers and cooked in an oven, or grilled over coals, all of these are rendered unhealthy.” Like many other authors, there is an inherent antipathy toward culinary art here, and in fact he admits that he would say nothing about condiments, sauces, and other gluttonous enticements because they are totally improper for students.118

The attitude toward cooking per se is less stringent in Venner, but there are few explicit directions about how foods should be corrected. In many cases Venner mentions common customs and the popularity of certain preparations but reserves his own judgment. For example, the “feete of a Bullocke or Heifer, which we commonly call Neats feete, tenderly sodden, and layed in sauce, and afterwards eaten cold, are accounted very good meat.” The implication is that people believe this is a healthy dish. Venner does not seem sure. In other cases Venner clearly ignores prevailing medical attitudes, as when he commends cream “no lesse convenient than delightsome: and verily with strawberries and sugar.”119 As a “correctorie” for the cream, the sugar should be used with a heavy hand, presumably to prevent corruption rather than balance the humors of hot and moist cream. This and other “white meats” [dairy products] such as frumentie, rice pottage, and junkets should not be eaten at the end of meals but always on an empty stomach at the start of a meal; at a between-meal “banquet” is even better: “How great therefore is the error of eating custards in the middle, or at the end of meales.”120 It is interesting that Venner could approve of these in principle but not in the typical context as dessert. His advice is really a compromise between theory and practice.

There are other examples of Venner’s willingness to approve or disapprove of common customs but little apparent logic to his decisions. For some reason he finds olives more dangerous than useful: “They are neither good for sauce, nor for meate” and black ones should be rejected as “abhominable.” On the other hand, sampier or samphire, a kind of pickled sea holly, he pronounces a “pleasant and familiar sauce, well agreeing with mans bodie” and convenient for all ages.121 Perhaps olives were somehow seen as foreign and dangerous while samphire is native. All of these approved condiments are nonetheless simple correctives. Like other authors, Venner counsels his readers “to refraine the use of all confused sauces” for “when hunger in gluttonous persons excite not the appetite, then the cooke is put to his shifts by strange mixtures of things to confect a sauce.” These are the product not of a “phylosophicall diet” but of luxurious excess.122 Cuisine again has overstepped the bounds of medical reason.

The last of the English authors in period 3, Brooke, had the same vitriolic attitude toward gluttony and illogical combinations. He too gives no “farrago of recipes,” only simple rules as nature directs rather than art, rules of necessity rather than niceness.123 For Brooke, as for the others, the key is simplicity of diet, something he saw as practiced by few: “In this our English Feastings are exceedingly blamable, in which no Art or Charge is wanting, to furnish us with diseases; There are all the curiosities that can be invented to provoke us to Intemperance, Diversities of Courses and Services.” Brooke is also among the few authors who completely omits discussing condiments. He instructs his readers to see Venner.124

Discussion of a few authors from the Netherlands and of Sebizius in Strasbourg rounds out this discussion of period 3. The Dutch author Lessius’s Hygiasticon was not only among the most popular dietaries translated into a handful of other languages, but he was also frequently mentioned by other authors as prescribing a particularly strict and measured diet.125 Consequently, he also suggests what are probably the most unimaginative descriptions of food in the entire genre. The simplest fare, such as gruel, an egg or two, and cheese and bread will suffice. Costly meat and fish serve only to entice gluttony, and we can live perfectly well without meat altogether and certainly without “lickorish cooking” and “curious dressing of meats.”126 Savory foods are best not even thought about, because our imagination dwelling upon feasts and dainties will entice us to surfeit. We should pretend that these are all filthy, sordid, evil-flavored, and detestable, which indeed with habitual use they prove to be. “We should learn thereby, so much the more to contemne delicacies, and to content ourselves with simple and plain fare.”127 This was a strange psychological tactic and one obviously antithetical to cuisine.

One might expect a book seemingly written to refute the vegetarian stance of Lessius to be more generous with culinary details. Castellanus’s “On Meat-eating,” does mention with approval such refined preparations as foie gras, procedures like aging meat properly, and enters the whole argument over roasting versus boiling meats.128 There is even a discussion of whether the custom of serving meats piping hot from a brazier or chafing dish can be healthy, particularly when food is eaten at such extreme temperatures.129 On the whole, however, Castellanus does not dwell at length on or give specific details about corrective procedures. In fact, his assumption is that it is only comparatively foul meats that require extensive treatment at the hands of chefs. Wild stag, for example, has a gamy or woodsy odor that can be nauseating unless disguised by artifice and condiments.130 This particular correction is entirely gastronomic rather than humoral, and it is revealing that Castellanus does not even suggest what these condiments might be, nor does he explain any inherent medical logic in the few recipes he offers. We are told how twelve larks can skewered, flavored with sage and bacon, and roasted. Although this is a delicacy some physicians condemn altogether while others praise as easy to digest,131 Castellanus makes no attempt to resolve the issue, which is decent evidence that this recipe is culinary rather than medicinal, or at least that physicians themselves are unclear about how this might be a corrective procedure.

Also writing in the Netherlands, though born in Spain, Nonnius provides readers with yet another twist on the question of optimal nutrition by emphasizing the virtues of fish. He also offers many insights into common usage of other foods, only some of which he approves. For example, he mentions that chickpeas are frequently eaten fried, which makes them less prone to cause flatulence but more difficult to digest. Similarly, squash are fried in pan and seasoned with oregano and pepper, or boiled in a broth.132 Nonnius is clear that neither of these preparations were invented by physicians, but he approves of them despite the censure of many ancient authorities. That is, the basic corrective logic can be applied post facto to a wide variety of practices that just happen to make medicinal sense. However, there are other practices of which he cannot approve, such as putting cherries in pastries, “as our depraved age persists in using.”133

Some comments made by Nonnius call into question the entire problem of custom being absorbed into theory or theory informing custom. He notes that everyone uses lemon juice on meats and fish because it has the power to cut and attenuate. But the fact that lemon’s medicinal role is almost tacked on as an afterthought suggests that its use may have been a rationalization of a typical culinary practice. The same is the case when he notes that “many in our age eat figs with salt or pepper.” There is no suggestion that physicians told them to do this, but Nonnius explains that this prevents obstructions of the liver, which can come from eating sweet things.134 We should not rule out the possibility that these were originally dietary practices that had by the seventeenth century become so ingrained as regular habits that the physicians themselves could not be sure of their origin. But the fact thatNonnius claims these are customs rather than recommending them directly as medicinal correctives does cast doubt upon this. At the least, we should not automatically assume that these are medicinal combinations.

In certain instances Nonnius is explicit about favoring a common custom over the pronouncement of the authorities. A case in point is his approval of quail, which he knows the Belgians use frequently without any harm.135 The same is true of fish, which he felt received such terrible press among physicians that many people believed them unwholesome. And, although the Lenten proscription of meat makes it seem a punishment to subsist on fish, Nonnius nonetheless insists that fish are the best food for this season.136

Nonnius would not go into detail about regional preparations or recipes for fish as Apicius and Platina did.137 Strangely, he preferred to expound at length about ancient customs and their praise of fish, which perhaps he felt would polish up the tarnished reputation of this once esteemed food. He does on occasion mention current usage, for example that many European peoples eat turbot or that today everyone concedes that mullet is the best fish.138 What is fascinating about these comments is that he does not suggest that correctives are necessary. The physician himself seems to abandon basic humoral theory. He also describes without censure numerous familiar uses for trout, smoked salmon, sturgeon, herring, and stockfish, many of which were valuable export items for the Belgians.139 Custom had begun to outweigh theory and corrective logic.

Sebizius also openly claimed that condiments are used solely for pleasure and taste. They can make food more suave and hence more easily converted in the body, but there is no suggestion that they are necessary for healthy people.140 There are medicinal foods intended for the sick, 92. but otherwise corrective logic appears to have become superfluous. It may be no coincidence that by the mid-seventeenth century typically medieval flavor combinations have also begun to disappear from cookbooks. It is important to note, though, that Sebizius does not abandon humoralism at all. In fact, he is in some ways an orthodox Galenist. Every food is still classified qualitatively; it is just that the balancing act for condiments seems to have disappeared. This suggests that the food combinations may have been mostly culinary in the first place and that when fashions in cooking began to change, so did nutritional theory.

It is also revealing that when Sebizius does discuss cooking, it is often to some local Alsatian custom that he defers. Among the appetite stimulants we find sauerkraut; among common drinks are both wine, beer, and lora, which appears to be made from a second fermentation of water and grape husks. He also admits that a local “polenta” made from oatmeal is quite pleasant, as are various breads made from millet and even buckwheat.141 Grated horseradish is also a common condiment among Germans, he notes, as is mustard.142 But he does not claim that these serve some corrective function. Sebizius is also willing to approve many typical pork preparations, insisting that they are all healthier if the animal itself is kept clean. No corrective measures are suggested.143 When he describes more complex dishes, he is also quite clear that they have been devised by “our cooks” rather than following some corrective logic. String beans, for example, should have the string removed and then be chopped, boiled, strained, and seasoned with butter, vinegar, broth, salt, savory, and leek. This apparently had become a favorite banquet dish.144 Chestnuts are roasted and soaked in citrus juice, or into geese, pork, or other animals.14

There are also many occasions, however, when Sebizius criticizes local custom, as when strawberries are eaten with cream, “dispensing with health.” They would be better eaten with wine and spices. This is one of the few instances in which he offers a corrective, although he appears to suggest it only as an alternative to the harmful practice.146 He also rejects the custom of eating buttered bread at the end of a meal. This prevents the mouth of the stomach from closing and hinders concoction.147 Characteristic of period 3 authors, Sebizius is willing to attack not only popular errors but received medical wisdom as well. For example, he wonders how Galen could possibly have recommended snails. Just because they are slimy does not mean that they somehow adhere better and are restorative. By this logic cheese, brains, and old beef would be equally nutritious. Ultimately snails are considered much like those other sordid and monstrous things eaten for the sake of insane gluttony, like frogs, cockles, fungus, oysters, and bird offal.148 Here health concerns take precedence over gastronomic ones. Although Sebizius does not indulge his readers with details about how to cook such culinary perversions, there is some indication that he himself was not totally lacking in taste. Directing his readers how to best judge wine, he offers the acronym “COS.” That is, take note of color, odor, and sapor [taste]. Some would go further with “COSTA,” adding tactu [touch] and auditu [hearing]. Rubbing the wine between the fingers and listening to the sound it makes when poured tells you something about its density and viscosity.149 Modern enologists might learn something from this.

Sebizius also on rare occasions admits that cooking is a useful and necessary art. Specifically, he is concerned to contradict an odd claim made by Cardano that raw foods prolong life, not only those sometimes eaten raw, like oysters or eggs, but even meat. Sebizius, interestingly, identifies this as a “macrobiotic” diet. At any rate, he insists that it is not 32. merely a custom but a necessity to cook food.150 Like most period 3 authors, he believes that cuisine has run amuck in certain respects, but he would certainly not recommend living without all art. He even devotes his energies to such seemingly gastronomic questions as “should meat be pounded?” He thought that pounding would make the flesh lighter and that heat could penetrate the interior more fully, riding it of superfluous humidity.151 This is clearly a culinary procedure that he explains theoretically. The point is that although dieticians were hostile to the most extreme excesses of culinary art, they recognized an inherent kinship between the two fields. And because food must be properly cooked to be nutritious, dieticians were forced to assess common cooking procedures, only some of which they could approve.

Thus, medicine and cuisine were still related in the Renaissance in a way they certainly are not today. Humoral theory may have informed culinary practices of the past, but just as often physicians accommodated familiar customs into their theories. And frequently they were openly hostile toward purely gastronomic interests. The relationship between the two fields remains somewhat ambiguous. What can be asserted confidently is that despite the apparent similarity of medical precepts and recipes in the late Middle Ages, the two gradually drifted apart, especially in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It was at that point, of course, that classical cuisine began to abandon humorally based considerations of health,152 as did scientists themselves. This was merely the beginning of the rift between the two fields, which continues to this day.

NOTES

1. Cogan, 118. Cogan is paraphrasing Boorde here: “A good cook is half a physician. For the chief physic (the counsel of a physician excepted) doth come from the kitchen...” Boorde, 49. All he is saying here, though, is that diet is an essential part of health, not that physicians necessarily inform chefs. See also Cogan, 125, where Boorde is directly cited.
2. Flandrin, “Médecine,” 87 and 93: “Je ne doubte pas qu’en cherchant d’avantage on trouve d’autres coutumes explicable seulement par d’anciennes prescriptions dietetiques.”
3. Flandrin, “Seasoning, Cooking, and Dietetics in the Late Middle Ages,” in Food:A Culinary History, ed. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 313–27. This work has been cited previously in its original French edition as Histoire de l’alimentation. Also pertinent here is Bruno Laurioux, “Spices in the Medieval Diet: A New Approach,” in Food and Foodways 1 (1985): 43–76; Melitta Weiss Adamson, “The Role of Medieval Physicians in the Diffusion of Culinary Recipes and Cooking Practices,” in Du manuscrit à la table, ed. Carole Lambert (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1992), 69–80.
4. Terence Scully, The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1995), 99–100; “Mixing It up in the Medieval Kitchen,” in Medieval Food and Drink, ACTA 21, ed. Mary-Jo Arn (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1995), 21. This rationale for grinding and straining is found nowhere in the dietary literature of the Renaissance, though the culinary fashion had died out, one might expect physicians to still be making the same recommendation.
5. Scully, “Deffaire and Destremper in Early French Cuisine,” in Petits Propos Culinaires 38 (1991): 14–19; “The Opusculum de Saporibus of Magninus Mediolanensis,” Medium Aevum 54 (1985): 178–207.
6. Bruno Laurioux, “La cuisine des médecines à la fin du Moyen Age,” in Maladies, médecines et sociétés, vol. 2 (Paris: L’Harmattan et Histoire au Présent, 1993), 136–47
7. Scully, Art of Cookery, 31. Although perhaps the finest overview of medieval cuisine, the examples provided by the author to illustrate basic similarities to modern cooking seem to do exactly the opposite. Grains of paradise, galingale, spikenard, mastic, and cubebs are of course not “the spices at hand in the modern kitchen.” See 30–31 and 85. There is also a minor flourishing industry of medieval cookbooks, such as Constance B. Hieatt, Brenda Hosington, and Sharon Butler, Pleyn Delit, Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks, 2d ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); Maggie Black, The Medieval Cookbook (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992); Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Fabulous Feasts (New York: George Brazillier, 1976); Odile Redon, Françoise Sabban, and Silviano Seventi, The Medieval Kitchen, trans. Edward Schneider (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Also Jean-Louis Flandrin and Carole Lambert, Fêtes gourmandes au moyen âge (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale Éditions, 1998), which is perhaps the most beautiful book on food produced in any language for any period.
8. Mary Ella Milham’s critical edition, On Right Pleasure, and translation explains the relationship between the two authors in great detail.
9. Platina, On Right Pleasure, 381.
10. Platina, On Right Pleasure, 119.
11. Platina, Le grande cuisiner, 45 and 63.
12. Platina, On Right Pleasure, 265. Here Magninus’s advice makes much more sense. He suggested roasting waterfowl, which would counteract their dangerous coldness and moistness. The odd pepper sauce, including toast, liver, and verjuice, discussed by Scully in this context appears to work as a corrective, though certainly nothing like it appears in the Renaissance medical literature. Scully, “Opusculum,” 193.
13. Manfredi, 3– 4.
14. Manfredi, pp. 5v and 7r.
15. Benedictus, p. H2r.
16. Benedictus, pp. H4r, I7r, I3r, L3v.
17. Benedictus, p. O5r.
18. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 141 and 149, 155. The last includes a recipe for a “candy” of almonds, pine nuts, cucumber seeds, as well as spices, pearls, coral, saffron, silk, gold and silver, emerald, sapphire, etc. These things may have found their way into cooking of the day, but their inclusion is hardly supported by humoral theory or nutrition as any other author understood it.
19. Gazius, p. D2v: “Debemus ea corrigere et temperare cum sibi contrariis.”
20. Gazius, p. D4r.
21. Gazius, p. E4r: Flesh “in patellis posita infurno coquatur mala et parum enim nutrit ... nulla autem frixari debet quoniam caro cum pinguedine frixa fastidium facit.” He also suggested that fish is much healthier grilled rather than fried, p. J5r. Especially awful is the practice of putting cooked fish between two plates because it prevents the superfluous vapors from escaping. Worst of all is eating fish followed by dairy products “as many are used to doing,” p. J6r. “Errant igitur valde qui eadem mensa post piscium comestionem lac coagulatum accipiunt ut plerique facere consueverunt.”
22. Gazius, pp. E6r–v: “Clarissime apparet error salientium carnes bovinas antiquas et similes.”
23. Gazius, p. H6v: “Multoque magis predicta faciet nocumenta sicut grossis cibariis permixtum fuerit.” Rice puddings are tough to digest and cause oppilations and kidney stones.
24. Gazius, p. O3r; Scully, Art of Cooking, 40–65; “Opusculum,” 178–207.
25. Menapius, 512.
26. Menapius, 525.
27. Menapius, 538: “Certe si quis ad hunc modo pisces hodie apparet, parum gratificetur palatis delicatorium ac fortassis avertat appetentiam.”
28. Menapius, 569: “Ut vinum subtile valensque sumamus iuxta cibum crassum, durum, ac frigidum natura, et rursus cibis calidioribus digestionique magis paretibus vinum adiungamus debilis.” Much the same advice is offered even earlier by the Spanish Lobera de Avila, 22: “Unde fortius vinum bibendum est cum carnibus bovinis, quam pullinis: et fortius bibendum est cum piscibus quam carnibus regulariter.”
29. Hessus, 45: “Ideo rectè vulgo pulvere zingiberis ... ad corrigendam frigiditatem, et humiditatem, conditur.”
30. Hessus, 59.
31. Estienne, 31–35: “Quae vero gulae atque appetentiae irritandae causa assumitur, veluti sunt perniones moguntini, lumbi ac linguae bubulae infumatae, item pedes, aures rostra porcorum. . . . mali sunt intestina sanguine suillo aromatis ac caepis condito infarcta (sanguiculus aut buldones vocant) crudos succos generat, difficile coquitur, venasque plurimum inflat.” Less noxious are “lucanicae Venetae, cervellatorum Mediolanensibus, Godivellorum Lugdunensibus, caeteris Gallis salsidiarum nomen retinentes...”
32. Estienne, 35–37: “Et si delicatius, tamen ventriculo noxium . . . quae sinapis atque herbae triticeae succum recipiunt.” He appears here to be referring to sauces made from green wheat grass, interestingly enough something today found among the new wonder foods sold in health food stores. In his description of spices he also said that pepper, ginger, and cardamom are so acute and hot that “they ought to be used very sparingly.” Presumably many people were using them liberally. He added, even saffron can be harmful in excess. This is an interesting diversion from opinions found in period 1.
33. Estienne, 59: “Omnino quicquid crudarum herbarum in acetaris assumitur, id corpori plurimum nocet, neque vero quotidiano nutrimento sanguinem probum generant.”
34. Calanius, 46 – 48.
35. Calanius, 60: “Apres les pepons user de fourmage plaisintin, ou de quelque viande salée, ou sel de mesme, ou bien de sucre.”
36. Fridaevallis, 68. He offered wine as an antidote to the melon’s frigidity, rather than a preventative measure against putrefaction.
37. The source cited by Flandrin in “Médecine et habitudes alimentaires anciennes” regarding the melon and salt or prosciutto combination is Thrésor de santé, 436–39 (Lyon: 1607), the French translation of Liebault’s Thesaurus sanitatis. Both appeared after Calanius (or in Italian, Calano), who was writing in the 1520s and 1530s, and it is possible that Liebault’s information was taken from there. Significantly, this advice does not appear in other dietary works, with the exception of Pisanelli writing in 1583. The remedy for melon here is “mangiando secco il cascio vecchio, e cose salate, e bevendoci appresto ottimo vino.” Petronio, 4.
38. Bruyerin Champier, 36 –39. Comparable processes occur as fruits ripen; heated bythe sun they become sweeter. Regarding the changes in flavor through cooking procedures, see Flandrin in Food: A Culinary History, 320–21.
39. Bruyerin Champier, 40. On the topic of condiments: “Verum ipsorum omnino nullo pro alimento utimur ob virium vehementiam, gula ingeniosa, ducem sequuta naturam,misturam omnimodam invenit, ne nonnihil hominum cibis nasceretur. Unde tot culinarum, saporum coacervationes, tot veneficia, tot adulteria.”
40. Bruyerin Champier, 41and 59: “Brassica, tum tenerior tum minus acris amaraque est salsilagine imbuta et macerata.”
41. Nuñez de Oria, 87–90: “Usan se entre Christianos muchas mas guisados que entre Turcos y Moros y por ende los Christianos son tentados de muchos mas fiebres.” Roasting pigeons and “piernas de carnero” leg of lamb, is one example of how Spaniards have gone wrong.
42. Nuñez de Oria, 103: “La mayor parte de los hombres comen sus carnes en estas tierras, por ignorar su gran malicia.”
43. Nuñez de Oria, 167: “La primera regla, que no coma con cosas diureticas abridoras con perexil, apio, hinojo, pimienta, o con otras especias, con las quales y queso, suelen hazer quesadillas, o otras manjares.”
44. Nuñez de Oria, 134: “assanse bien lavando las con manteca, o tozino, cuezensecon pimienta, clavos, y comense con cierta salsa de canela, que llaman hipocras, es carne de facil digestion, y grata al estomago.”
45. Nuñez de Oria, 184.
46. Bulleyn, pp. 56r–58v.
47. Bulleyn, p. 77r.
48. Bulleyn, pp. 75v–76r. After warning against the dangers of beef he describes a broth, “If the said broth be tempered with salte: Mustard, vinegar or garlicke, etc. Be common lye used for the sawces to digest biefe withall, for the said sauces do not onlye help digestion,but also defendeth the body from sundry inconveniences and divers sicknesses, as dropsies, quartens, leproses, and suchelike.” There is also a delightful recipe for a morning drink that bears mentioning here, p. C7r. “If mynts, burrage leaves, rosmarye flowers, honyesuckles, and a little suger bee layed in a Basone, and covered wyth a fayre cloth, and mylke the sayed Bason full through the cloth, and let it stande all nyghte—Thys is pleasant to drynke in the mornynge uppon an empty stomacke. . . .” This sort of tisane may have made the acceptance of tea in the next century much smoother.
49. Fridaevallis, 61. On Phaselis [sic]: “Si pipere et mulso faciat coquus arte salubrem, Dic mihi, naturae servit, an iste gulae?” On peas: “Sed melius sapient, si dulcis amygdala succum Praestiterit, mira sic iubet arte gula.” 50. Fridaevallis, 66 –72. He also commended peaches cut in cubes and immersed in wine, though it is impossible to tell whether or not the custom precedes the medical advice, 109.
51. Fridaevallis, 76: “Fungorum comestorum malignitatem emendant: cùm enim fungi tantae sint et frigitatis et humiditatis participes;” 104, “fungi omnes pessimi sunt, quovis modo coquantur et parentur. Et si gulae satisfaciant, stomacho enim facessunt negotium, siquidem difficulter, ut modò diximus, concoquuntur.”
52. Fridaevallis, 193, 203, 191.
53. Fridaevallis, 212.
54. Domenico Romoli, La singolare dottrina . . . dell’ufficio dello scalco (Venice: Michele Tramezzino, 1560), p. 198r (misprinted as 298r): “Ne giudicate che questa sia materia inconveniente al vostro officio, percioche il vero scalco, oltre che dever saper render ragione di quel che fa, è tenuto anco intender qualque cosa del regimento della sanità, perche trovandosi il suo signore tal hora mal disposto, ò fastidito, sappia giudicare qual pasto gli potrebbe piu convenire per non incorrere in amalatia...”
55. Romoli, pp. 142r and 209r; 151r and 210r. Interestingly, Romoli also claims that hare’s flesh is not really good for hunters who become unnaturally hot in the chase, and hot and dry hare would be dangerous for them. Most authors claimed that only the wellexercised can digest such gross meat. Another example would be a recipe for roasted peacock, p. 146r contrasted with the pronouncement that it “fa cattivo nutrimento, perche è questa carne di cattiva complessione,” p. 219r.
56. Romoli, p. 239r: “Però molto errano quei che fanno col Cascio: ravioli con radici di petrosemolo, e con specie, e uva passa, che son tutte cose che fan penetrare.”
57. Romoli, p. 258v: “Le cose composte di varie cose son di piu presta corrutione che le cose composte di poche. Niuna cosa è piu perniciosa, che mescolar nello stomaco molti cibi insieme, dopo lo star lungo tempo à tavola mangiando.”
58. Cardano, De usu ciborum, 43: “Non quemadmodum fecit Platini, qui libellum de honesta voluptate inscripsit, potiùs ad usum culinarum et voluptatem heluonem qui popinis tantum indulgent, atque gulae...”
59. Cardano, De usu ciborum, 47: “Quae si talia suapte natura non fuerint, ex contrariorum inter se admistione temperamentum quaerere debet, ut calida frigidis contemperentur, non secus ac calidia frigidis, et siccis humida: et in his condimentorum ratio maximè valebit, dummodo non ultra sanitatis limites tendant.”
60. Cardano, De usu ciborum, 55.
61. Cardano, De usu ciborum, 55, 61. As he admitted, Galen claimed that these carecossi or baby artichokes cause melancholy, but Cardano did not seem to care.
62. Cardano, De sanitate tuenda, 91. Some of the information in this work, published after Cardano’s death, overlaps the former title, and I have been unable to tell exactly what this work might correspond to in the Opera Omnia. It may have been pieced together from other works.
63. Cardano, De sanitate tuenda, 101.
64. Petronio, 58: “ogni sorte di vino tarda la concottione, perche indura il cibo nel ventricolo, et rende il chilo più grosso, che non fa l’acqua.”
65. Petronio, 150–53. From the name, it is safe to assume that this was a red fish, but I have not been able to identify the species precisely.
66. Petronio, 178.
67. Grataroli, De regimine iter agentium, 19.
68. Petronio, 189.
69. Pisanelli, 36 –37: “è maraviglia, che essendo di tanta virtù, siano cosi poco usati.”
70. Pisanelli, 52–53: “E certo non si trova salsa miglior di questa.”
71. Pisanelli, 68–69: “Cuocendosi in compagnia d’altre carni d’animali grassi, overo in pasticci molto bene inlardato.” It seems he had prosciutto in mind here as a corrective because on the previous page he suggested “persciuti . . . sono ottimi per cuocer con l’altre carni.”
72. Pisanelli, 106 –7; 96 –97.
73. Benzi, 130 –31, garlic: “all’hora si mangia con l’insalate, per correger l’humidità, e frigidità à della herbe: si mette ancora con l’acetosa, petrosilo, pan infuso nell’aceto per farne salsa, per mangiar con le carni, la quale escita l’appetito”; leeks, 133; nutmeg, 160, “usano le Donne la noce moscata, e macis nelle paste, che si fanno delle carne del porco, per correger la mala qualità d’esse carni, e per dargli miglior gusto, e miglior odore.”
74. Benzi, 185.
75. Benzi, 220: “Ventosa poi è la neve fatta di capo di latte, e bianchi d’ovi, e zuccaro sbattuti insieme, e refrigera molto.” Bertaldi was also willing to criticize what he considered outlandish or ill-advised customs. Worth mentioning is admission that some people eat cats in winter, roasted with aromatic herbs, 298. Even odder is his story of some English and Dutch sailors stranded on Novaya Zemlya in 1617 who were forced to eat polar bear meat, after which some died, 299–300.
76. Massonio, 20–21. Why garo is mentioned in the seventeenth century is uncertain. It may refer to the ubiquitous ancient condiment based on decayed fish. Later in the book he denied that it was caviar, as some authors, such as Petronio, thought. This suggests that people were not familiar with it in the seventeenth century. But why then he would mention it as a condiment is puzzling. Massonio, 99, and 362 where he suggested it to season fagioli beans: “lessi in acqua, e condisconi con olio, sale acete, e peppe; o con olio garo, e peppe; o con succo di narancio, olio e peppe.” It may have been merely for historical interest, as must be his entry for Rhu or sumach, which he acknowledged was used by the Arabs and Spanish, but seems to have disappeared among Italians, because he had to explain what it is. Massonio, 83.
77. Massonio, 88–89.
78. Massonio, 139: “In Roma per esser città calda, è nocevole il mangiarlo spesso: ma ne’ luoghi più freddi, non è insalubre.” Interestingly, Cogan would have agreed with this basic principle. He explained that the French eat garlic to counter the cold of their country, and by this logic the English should eat it even more, Cogan, 61. Despite this critique, Massonio did approve of most common salads. A rare example of one combination he condemned is a mixture of shredded lettuce, olives, lemon, sardines, jujubes, tarantello (pickled belly of tuna) and parsley. This contains too many diverse ingredients, he believed. Massonio, 393.
79. Massonio, 236.
80. Sala, 38: “omnino est ita aliquando esse necessariam in alimentis compositionem ut in medicamentis, potest enim simplex alimentum aut non iuvare ut deberet, aut etiam nocere nisi misceatur, ut non immeritò medicinae ars culinaria inservire perinde dicatur ac pharmacopea.” 
81. Sala, 39– 45. Reginae, the recipe coming from France, “dissolve on the tongue and descend into the stomach without any labor.” They are made with 12 ounces of flour, 16 ounces of sugar, 12 eggs, a little yeast, anise, and coriander. The diasynapis is made of grape must (hence the name mostarda), mustard seed, mace, pepper, cloves, cinnamon, sometimes musk and amber, either quince, pear, or apple, orange or lemon peel, sugar or honey, all cooked together. Sala’s culinary knowledge is also evident in his account of a particular preparation that involves stuffing various animals into others: eggs into chickens, birds into geese, capons into sheep, sheep into oxen, part 2, 17. He also describes birds wrapped in leaves and placed under hot coals to cook, as well as foods boiled in a cloth, bladder, or “double vase” to help retain their moisture, part 2, 21.
82. As merely one example among dozens, just the year before in Antwerp, Nonnius exclaimed that bellaria, placenta, crustula, torta: “ut gulae haec irritamenta passim mensas occupent... nulla sanitatis habita ratione, magna ex pane insalubres sunt.” Nonnius,28.
83. Sala, 47.
84. Sala, 102: “Video tamen quotidie sine ullo periculo sine ulla cautione a coquis praesertim et hospiciis et numerosis familiis calentes carnes suffocari.”
85. Joubert, Erreurs populaires, book 2, 2.
86. Joubert, Erreurs populaires, book 2, 42.
87. Joubert, Erreurs populaires, book 2, 113. All these jingles really only work in French: “vin ne boit apres salade, est en danger d’estre malade.”
88. Joubert, Erreurs populaires, book 2, question 84, presented to Joubert by Bart. Cabrol, “Pourquoy dit-on, que le mouton nous fait envieillir sur toutes viandes: et que le fromage nous en garde?”
89. Duchesne, 411: “jeune chair et vieux poisson, se trouve repugner à la raison.” 90. Duchesne, 211–12. He repeated a story from Galen about seeing some peasants eating a bowl of boiled wheat and concluded that this lack of artifice would be just as dangerous as all the cakes, pastries, and tarts eaten by gluttons. The ideal diet lies between the two, and employs a moderate amount of reason and art, such as results when making bread properly. Strangely enough, though, in the section on medicinal foods Duchesne does offer recipes for cakes, tarts, custards, macaroons, and even a nice apple pie, 503. But these were not intended for healthy people.
91. Duchesne, 481.
92. Bachot, 336 – 40: “les cuisiniers ne manquant d’artifice à resuellir cest appetit perdu par une infinité de sauces; saupiquets, et diverse desguisements de viandes...” A saupiquet is a kind of spicy stew or ragoût. 
93. Bachot, 457: “et mesmes au joud’huy entre les grandes, de servir à table quantité de potage et couvrât de cinq ou six plats à grands bords une assez grande table, et ce tant au disner qu’au soupper; remplir de viandes molles et liquides pour le premier service, comme potages fricaseés, haschez et salades, comme le second est bouilly et rosty meslé, ou tout rosty, comme l’issue de toutes choses froides et de fruicts, laictages et douceurs, estant l’ordre qu’on doit tenir par le precept de medicine.”
94. Cogan, 24 and 28. Moffett agreed, 233. Another departure from the authorities is Cogan’s approval of beef: “all these aucthors (in mine opinion) have erred, in that they make the Biefe of all countries alike,” 114.
95. Cogan, 134. The hot and moist pigeon is corrected with cold and dry, presumably sour, grapes. Cogan’s attitude toward cooks in general is not as negative as many of his contemporaries. For example, in his discussion of stockfish, he went further than Erasmus, who claimed that it nourishes no more than a stock (of wood). Cogan admitted that he once had a good piece, and “a good Cooke can make you good meat of a whetstone... a good cook is a good jewel,” 150. Just as revealing is his claim that students do often need sauces because of theirweak stomachs, but this matter belongs to the cook, not a physician, a clear admission that cooking per se is not within the purview of medicine. Cogan, 161. 
96. Cogan, 91. What is strange here is that he is taking his cue from Salerno. Practically no other author still regarded this as a reliable authority.
97. Cogan, 104.
98. Cogan, 115.
99. Moffett, 48.
100. Moffett, 57 and 61.
101. Moffett, 77. The hind parts of squirrels are also fine fried with parsley and butter.
102. Moffett, 73.
103. Moffett, 255.
104. Moffett, 197, 227, and 72. The combination of spinach with currants and sugar, although strange to modern tastes, was a familiar combination in Elizabethan England. Thomas Dawson has a recipe for fritters with these and other spices, The Good Housewife’s Jewel, ed. Maggie Black (Lewes, East Sussex: Southover Press, 1996), 42. Regarding Moffett’s approval of this combination, it may be another example of a common custom subsequently used in a medical work.
105. Moffett, 209.
106. Moffett, 273. His reference to cooking a whetstone is directly critical of Cogan. See above, n. 95.
107. Buttes, pp. B2v; B4r; C1v.
108. Buttes, p. E6r.
109. Buttes, pp. L7v; M4v; N1r.
110. Buttes, p. P3r.
111. Vaughan, 7 and 29.
112. Vaughan, 40. Mead is made with one part honey and six parts water, boiled, skimmed, reduced by half, and cooled. To this is added barme or “Gods-good” (yeast) and cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and rhubarb tied in a cloth and then allowed to settle for two weeks. It is especially good to use against putrefaction.
113. Vaughan, 67–69, see n. 72 above. Vaughan was well read; he also offered a great deal of agronomic advice taken mostly from Estienne and Liebault’s Maison Rustique.
114. Vaughan, 94.
115. Vaughan, 216 and 271.
116. Hollings, p. A5r.
117. Hollings, 27: “in crustas ac diploides intorquentur, quaeque à pasta nomen et originem ducunt, damnatur omnia.” These “turnovers” are especially bad for students, who have difficulty digesting the dough.
118. Hollings, 37 and 46: “quae verò vel in sartagine friguntur, vel à pistoribus incrustatae furnis coquuntur, vel super carbones torrentur, insalubres reddantur omnes.” It is strangely ironic that these methods are also condemned by modern dieticians, most recently grilling. Charred meats and even toast are apparently carcinogenic.
119. Venner, 73 and 89.
120. Venner, 95.
121. Venner, 100 –2.
122. Venner, 106. This comment is in the context of a discussion on sugared sauces “which of ingurgitating bell-gods are greatly esteemed.” Also 172, where the author asks whether it is good to provoke the appetite with sauces.
123. Brooke, 10.
124. Brooke, 110 and 83.
125. Brooke, for example, claimed that Lessius and Cornaro, bound together, can be found at almost every bookseller translated into English, 12. There was also a French translation in 1646, Spanish in 1782, and a German one as well.
126. Lessius, 62–64; 193.
127. Lessius, 75.
128. Castellanus, 37, 43, 53–57. His comments on aging meats are interesting, noting that some people prefer rare meat, but the process of aging helps to resolve and exhale superfluities, making the flesh drier, softer and lighter, and hence easier to digest. Somewhere between fresh and putrid is optimal. “In carnibus etiam recens ille vigor, tantoperè quibusdam placuit, ut crudas et adhuc palpitantes, atque à vitâ calentes edi voluerint.” “Ergo servanda mediocritas inter recentes nimium et vetustas, ut et putor absit, nec durities adsit.”
129. Castellanus, 46–49: “In hunc finem gulae artifices excogitarunt foculos, quibus in mensam pruna deferretur.” He concluded that such delicacies cannot even be tasted so hot, and tend to overcome our native heat, and dry up our insides.
130. Castellanus, 152–53: “Odor praetereà et sapor quoddam sylvestris virulentiae fastidium afferunt, adeò ut vix placere possit, nisi coquorum artificio et condimentis illa feritatis contumacia frangatur.”
131. Castellanus, 262: “Alaudis... duodenas ligneo trans fixas veruculo culine destinat, et cum salviâ laridoque assatas apponunt et in deliciis habent.”
132. Nonnius, 34: “Plures frictum cicer edebant, quod ita paratum flatus deponeret, sed concoctu difficilius redditur,” also 66.
133. Nonnius, 91: Cherries “inter Bellaria, ut pravus nostri saeculi usus obtinuit.”
134. Nonnius, 120 and 127: “plurimi nostra aetate, ideo ficibus cùm sale aut pipere vescuntur.”
135. Nonnius, 254.
136. Nonnius, 283–310. Ultimately, on the question of Lent, Nonnius took great pains to explain why fish are healthy during spring, but he was forced to bend theoretical principles considerably. Logically cold and moist fish would be much better in summer. He had to insist that fish is really tempered, and so vegetables are appropriate for the summer, meats for the winter. Nonnius, 311.
137. Nonnius, 322. He also said “nor do I seek the laurel from this must cake.” [nec ego laureolam ex hoc mustaceo quaero.] Presumably whoever found the laurel got to be leader for the day, an honor Nonnius did not seek in culinary matters.
138. Nonnius, 349 and 352.
139. Nonnius, 362; 366; 372; 412. Smoked salmon “quotidianis ex Belgio in caeteras Europae regiones avehitur.” “Halecum . . . atque ex Belgia in universam Europam transmittuntur.”
140. Sebizius, 11: “alimentum utile est planéque necessarium, quoniam corpus nutrit. Condimentum voluptatis solùm et suavitatis gratiâ illi additur. Cibis enim potiùs suavitatem conciliat, quàm in alimentur vertatur.” He also mentioned later that with culinary art some people mix contrary flavors. Significantly, he considered such combinations to be culinary rather than medicinal. Sebizius, 96. “Nam quemadmodum ars culinaria interdum alimenta quedam viribus contraria componit: sic etiam Natura permulta, quae sensui quidem simplicia apparent, commiscere solet, facultatibus inter se pugnantia.”
141. Sebizius, 70. His insertion of German terms into the Latin, apart from the comic results, shows that customs are intruding upon theory: “brassica nostra condita, quam Sawrkraut vocamus...” He did later admit that it can cause gas. Reference to local drinks, 81, includes this lora: “Nostri homines loras parant ex aqua vinaceis affusa.” Reference to oats and millet: 144. Buckwheat or “fegopyrum”: 150. Also, like other Germanic authors, Placotomus most notably, he thoroughly approved of beer, 1148.
142. Sebizius, 401 and 465. A simple mustard: “vulgaris illa composito, quae condimenti loco nobis ferè quotidiè offertur, fit ex farina sem. sinapi, vino et aceto.”
143. Sebizius, 589–97. He also noted that there is hardly any part of this animal which is not eaten. Unlike other animals, “pork is like a miser, since it is of no use to anyone until it’s dead” [Avari suibus similes dicuntur: quoniam nemini utiles sunt ante obitum],598.
144. Sebizius, 228–29.
145. Sebizius, 291–92.
146. Sebizius, 338: “Fraga... comeduntur cum sanitatis dispendio ex cremore lactis. Salubriùs assumuntur cum vino, asperso saccaro, et pulvere cinnamomi, aut zinziberis. Sic enim minùs ventriculo nocent.”
147. Sebizius, 767: “Malè faciunt nostrates, quòd butyrum post alios sumant cibos.”
148. Sebizius, 785: “Cochleae... respondetur, pravam consuetudinem non parere errori patrocinium,” and 1055: “Ranis, terrae sordibus, cochleis, sylvarum ulceribus et scabie, fungis, maris muco, ostreis, avium quarundam stercoribus, aliis monstrosis et abhominabilibus dapibus in gratiam insanientis gulae vesci.” The bird’s guts, or perhaps less delicately translated as “bird shit,” probably refers to the custom of eating the offal of roasted snipe or small ducks on toast, referred to on 833 and 933. What “sea mucus” might be is uncertain.
149. Sebizius, 1137: “Ad auditum sonora, sive strepentia, cùm promuntur. Nam quae sine sonitu funduntur, lenta sunt, ac pendula.”
150. Sebizius, 1345– 47.
151. Sebizius, 1429: “Recténe faciant coqui et ancillae nostrae, quòd carnes assandas priùs malleis ligneis percutiant?”
152. Flandrin calls this process “The Liberation of the Gourmet.” While I would agree that dietetics was increasingly separated from gastronomy, I am not as confident that the consequences were all so positive. I am not suggesting that humoralism should have survived, only that considerations of health should not have become so overwhelmingly antithetical toward gastronomic interests. See Food: A Culinary History, ed. Flandrin andMontanari, chap. 32.

By Ken Albala in "Eating Right In The Renaissance", University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, USA, 2002, excerpts pp.241-283. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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