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hrjWent and taught (and learned, and ate) at the Cooks' Collegium yesterday. I'd intended to do a bit more discussion and analysis as part of the "Cuisine Without Cookbooks" class, but the lecture material filled up most of the time-slot, so I ended up doing more of the talking than I'd really meant to. On to the philosophical musings (which I may also post on the West Cooks list, just to see what people think).
The conjunction of preparing for this class at the same time I was working on a book review for a future volume of Medieval Clothing and Textiles brought up an interesting conjunction of ideas around the concept of fashion. Chances are, any number of scholars have already contemplated this topic and talked it to death, but what the heck. You see, I was reading through some past book reviews in the journal to get a feel for the usual style and came across Jennifer Harris's review of Sarah-Grace Heller's work Fashion in Medieval France. (Note that I have read neither Heller's work nor the source she cites below, so it's possible that I'm misunderstanding the direction and emphasis of her study.)
To quote the relevant part of the review: "Heller provides persuasive literary evidence from ... that a nascent fashion 'system' existed in ... [12th & 13th c.] France long before the broadly accepted date for the birth of Western fashion in the mid-fourteenth century. ... The book begins by proposing a definition of a fashion 'system' (a term borrowed from Roland Barthes' Système de la Mode, 1967), describing a set of criteria for determining the presence of fashionable attitudes within a culture. These include such things as the desire for change and novelty, a striving for distinction and individual expression, and an acceleration of conspicuous consumption."
This was in my mind when I was contemplating the essential underlying questions and assumptions involved in reconstructing a cuisine from tangential evidence, when explicit descriptions of the contents and creative process for dishes do not survive in written form.
One possible assumption is that the present existence or non-existence of recipes for any given culture (and by "recipes" I include descriptions of how to prepare and combine foodstuffs as given in medical literature) is a matter of chance. That is, that we tend to have surviving culinary literature from cultures for which we tend, in general, to have a larger amount of surviving literature of any type; and conversely that the absence of surviving culinary literature is perhaps a consequence of having relatively little surviving literature of any type.
This view can, I think, be easily falsified. It's easy enough to demonstrate that the surviving written material from a given culture may focus on particular themes and genres in a clearly non-random manner. This doesn't only apply to culinary literature, of course. Every medieval person had ancestors, but not every medieval culture created written records of genealogies. Every medieval culture had some sort of legal system, but not every culture wrote down law codes.
Another possible assumption is that the creation of culinary literature is a function of general, regional developments in literary genres. A sort of "they've got cookbooks so we should write cookbooks, too" phenomenon. Something like this can be seen in other genres, for example the explosion of interest in vernacular romances (and in some cases, in borrowings of specific tales) that spread from France throughout most of Europe. The fact that we can trace not simply the spread of the idea of cookbooks, but the transmission of particular culinary tracts, to some extent supports this notion. This line of thinking suggests that a particular culture may not have culinary literature simply because it hadn't yet been "infected" with the concept of creating culinary literature by contact with cultures that already had that concept.
I think there's something to this, but -- looking in particular at my own focal interests in medieval Wales -- it's clear that simply being in contact with cultures that create cookbooks is no guarantee that a culture will come to create its own cookbooks.
But can we assume that the cultural forces that lead to the presence or absence of culinary literature are independent of the nature of the relevant cuisines? That you have cultures X and Y preparing and eating roughly the same sorts of dishes, but culture X happens to have adopted the custom of creating cookbooks, while culture Y is uninterested in the genre? Clearly this is an important thing to take into account when reconstructing undocumented cuisines.
But then I got to thinking about that concept of "system of fashion" and how it relates to the sorts of dishes described in medieval culinary literature. It's a common brush-off that "of course cookbooks don't describe ordinary, everyday food" (usually followed by the commenter's arguments that favorite "traditional" dish X would have been eaten but had simply escaped the interest of the cookbook writers). But aside from its use in "absence of evidence" arguments, there's likely to be a certain validity to the basic assertion. To the extent that the cuisine of the literate parts of a culture differed from that of the non-literate parts, naturally the writers of cookbooks were more likely to focus on their own cuisine than that of other segments of society. And it might be only natural that cookbook writers would focus on more complex, hard-to-remember dishes ... except when one recalls that non-literate societies have no problem at all transmitting extremely complex "texts".
But what about the possibility that cookbooks exist as a symptom of a "system of (culinary) fashion". Consider the following in the context of cuisine: "the desire for change and novelty, a striving for distinction and individual expression, and an acceleration of conspicuous consumption." Is it possible that both the creation of cookbooks and the creation and consumption of particular types of cuisines are both byproducts of a "fashionable" attitude towards food -- the use of food to express this "desire for change and novelty".
In that case, the absence of cookbooks in a culture might well be a signal that it had a cuisine that differed in very fundamental ways from the cuisines of cultures that did create cookbooks. And that could have significant consequences for the optimum ways of reconstructing that cuisine.
Just to toss in a little bit of hard data that resonates with these musings, Giraldus Cambrensis, writing in the late 12th century, and representing the Anglo-French culture that was just on the cusp of giving birth to medieval culinary literature, writes: "You must not expect a variety of dishes from a Welsh kitchen, and there are no highly seasoned titbits to whet your appetite." This certainly sounds like someone familiar with a system of "fashionable cuisine" describing a culture that lacks one.
So, what do you think?
The conjunction of preparing for this class at the same time I was working on a book review for a future volume of Medieval Clothing and Textiles brought up an interesting conjunction of ideas around the concept of fashion. Chances are, any number of scholars have already contemplated this topic and talked it to death, but what the heck. You see, I was reading through some past book reviews in the journal to get a feel for the usual style and came across Jennifer Harris's review of Sarah-Grace Heller's work Fashion in Medieval France. (Note that I have read neither Heller's work nor the source she cites below, so it's possible that I'm misunderstanding the direction and emphasis of her study.)
To quote the relevant part of the review: "Heller provides persuasive literary evidence from ... that a nascent fashion 'system' existed in ... [12th & 13th c.] France long before the broadly accepted date for the birth of Western fashion in the mid-fourteenth century. ... The book begins by proposing a definition of a fashion 'system' (a term borrowed from Roland Barthes' Système de la Mode, 1967), describing a set of criteria for determining the presence of fashionable attitudes within a culture. These include such things as the desire for change and novelty, a striving for distinction and individual expression, and an acceleration of conspicuous consumption."
This was in my mind when I was contemplating the essential underlying questions and assumptions involved in reconstructing a cuisine from tangential evidence, when explicit descriptions of the contents and creative process for dishes do not survive in written form.
One possible assumption is that the present existence or non-existence of recipes for any given culture (and by "recipes" I include descriptions of how to prepare and combine foodstuffs as given in medical literature) is a matter of chance. That is, that we tend to have surviving culinary literature from cultures for which we tend, in general, to have a larger amount of surviving literature of any type; and conversely that the absence of surviving culinary literature is perhaps a consequence of having relatively little surviving literature of any type.
This view can, I think, be easily falsified. It's easy enough to demonstrate that the surviving written material from a given culture may focus on particular themes and genres in a clearly non-random manner. This doesn't only apply to culinary literature, of course. Every medieval person had ancestors, but not every medieval culture created written records of genealogies. Every medieval culture had some sort of legal system, but not every culture wrote down law codes.
Another possible assumption is that the creation of culinary literature is a function of general, regional developments in literary genres. A sort of "they've got cookbooks so we should write cookbooks, too" phenomenon. Something like this can be seen in other genres, for example the explosion of interest in vernacular romances (and in some cases, in borrowings of specific tales) that spread from France throughout most of Europe. The fact that we can trace not simply the spread of the idea of cookbooks, but the transmission of particular culinary tracts, to some extent supports this notion. This line of thinking suggests that a particular culture may not have culinary literature simply because it hadn't yet been "infected" with the concept of creating culinary literature by contact with cultures that already had that concept.
I think there's something to this, but -- looking in particular at my own focal interests in medieval Wales -- it's clear that simply being in contact with cultures that create cookbooks is no guarantee that a culture will come to create its own cookbooks.
But can we assume that the cultural forces that lead to the presence or absence of culinary literature are independent of the nature of the relevant cuisines? That you have cultures X and Y preparing and eating roughly the same sorts of dishes, but culture X happens to have adopted the custom of creating cookbooks, while culture Y is uninterested in the genre? Clearly this is an important thing to take into account when reconstructing undocumented cuisines.
But then I got to thinking about that concept of "system of fashion" and how it relates to the sorts of dishes described in medieval culinary literature. It's a common brush-off that "of course cookbooks don't describe ordinary, everyday food" (usually followed by the commenter's arguments that favorite "traditional" dish X would have been eaten but had simply escaped the interest of the cookbook writers). But aside from its use in "absence of evidence" arguments, there's likely to be a certain validity to the basic assertion. To the extent that the cuisine of the literate parts of a culture differed from that of the non-literate parts, naturally the writers of cookbooks were more likely to focus on their own cuisine than that of other segments of society. And it might be only natural that cookbook writers would focus on more complex, hard-to-remember dishes ... except when one recalls that non-literate societies have no problem at all transmitting extremely complex "texts".
But what about the possibility that cookbooks exist as a symptom of a "system of (culinary) fashion". Consider the following in the context of cuisine: "the desire for change and novelty, a striving for distinction and individual expression, and an acceleration of conspicuous consumption." Is it possible that both the creation of cookbooks and the creation and consumption of particular types of cuisines are both byproducts of a "fashionable" attitude towards food -- the use of food to express this "desire for change and novelty".
In that case, the absence of cookbooks in a culture might well be a signal that it had a cuisine that differed in very fundamental ways from the cuisines of cultures that did create cookbooks. And that could have significant consequences for the optimum ways of reconstructing that cuisine.
Just to toss in a little bit of hard data that resonates with these musings, Giraldus Cambrensis, writing in the late 12th century, and representing the Anglo-French culture that was just on the cusp of giving birth to medieval culinary literature, writes: "You must not expect a variety of dishes from a Welsh kitchen, and there are no highly seasoned titbits to whet your appetite." This certainly sounds like someone familiar with a system of "fashionable cuisine" describing a culture that lacks one.
So, what do you think?
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-22 05:35 am (UTC)I think that the 12th c. saw a lot more cohesiveness in Europe than many researchers give credit for. I think the traveling and exposure to new cultures caused by pilgrimage and crusade changed the internal landscape, because if the guy who didn't burn the food was French (or the knight who had that cook who could find food in a famine was French), people around him would share food. Eat his cooking long enough (and humans being the sort who will elect someone to this duty on campaign or pilgrimage trail out of a group of strangers) and it becomes an acquired taste that is then taken back home.
I think that with the First Crusade, the separate regional cultures and fashions started to meld as people traveled, ate, drank, and saw so many new things that they took home and told stories of. Nascent, we'll give this "system" of exchange, but it had to be there if only in the questioning of every traveler when he came home from far off places.
please note that the above is entirely conjecture, and it's also late enough that I am having issues with phrasing. IMHO, the sociologists would have told us this years ago if we didn't insist on physical proof.
ETA: Right then - that was all to say I think your analysis is correct.
From Juliana
Date: 2008-09-22 01:27 pm (UTC)There's a lot in this post, however, so I'll do what I can to think about it a bit more.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-24 04:41 am (UTC)He also very nearly invented comparative phonology. Missed it by *that* much.
Re: From Juliana
Date: 2008-09-24 04:44 am (UTC)