The Taste of Conquest (38 page)

In light of the need to continually correct a recipe according to all these factors, it’s hardly surprising that medieval and Renaissance cookery guides were so imprecise when it came to quantities. Just how much ginger went into the ubiquitous carmeline sauce often depended on the intended consumer. That is not to say that cooks didn’t also spice food for reasons of taste or that people didn’t eat what they liked in defiance of every dietitian’s advice, just as they do today. Platina, for one, is continually adding comments to Martino’s recipes that make you wonder at first how anyone could eat them. Typical are the notes that follow instructions on how to make
torta ex riso,
a kind of rice pudding. First, the Vatican scholar recommends the dish for being nourishing. Then, in the same sentence, he adds, “It delays for a long time in the stomach, dulls the eyes, creates stones, and induces blockages.” Perhaps the diners experienced that same guilty titillation we get from forbidden foods like Häagen-Dazs and triple-crème cheeses. How else to explain the medieval popularity of melons despite their being roundly decried by every professional?

In general, fine-tuning your diet was sufficient to get you on the straight and narrow, but in the case of illness or other physiological dysfunction, the healing professions turned to what might be loosely described as drugs. While common people depended on the kinds of herbs sold today by Jacob Hooy, the wealthy preferred more exotic remedies. Typically, these included all sorts of precious ingredients, spices being only the most digestible. An early Italian nostrum for “soothing the heart” includes gold, silver, pearls, emeralds, sapphires, and other precious stones, along with cinnamon, cloves, aloeswood, saffron, cubebs, cardamom, amber, coriander, camphor, and musk. The ingredients were to be finely ground, mixed with sugar, and taken in wine.
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Once again, the demand for these cure-alls escalated after the printing revolution. One of these “books of secrets,” titled the
Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontes,
was first published in Venice in 1555. Shortly thereafter it appeared in Latin, French, English, Dutch, and German translations. By 1575, fifty editions had been printed, promising to deliver the recipe for a fountain of youth. An English edition opens with a prescription “to conserve a manne’s youthe, and to hold backe old age.” The secret lies in a “miraculous” distilled cocktail of Asian spices, saffron, sugar, citrus, minerals, and alcohol, which was to be stirred into veal, chicken, or pigeon broth or diluted with white wine.

Both physicians and cooks frequently turned to spices to fix humoral imbalances because they were considered a particularly concentrated corrective. Accordingly, a relatively small amount of hot and dry pepper could make dangerously cold and moist fish safe to eat. Given the quantity of fish eaten in pre-Reformation Europe, it is not surprising that a sufficient supply of pepper was needed to maintain public health—at least, by those who could afford it. For more careful adjustments, spices could be combined to reach just the right balance. Thus black pepper, not surprisingly, was considered hotter than cinnamon. By combining the two, a more nuanced effect could be achieved.

There were, of course, more cheaply available correctives, such as garlic and even salt, but it was generally accepted that people of a “finer” composition needed more refined seasoning. This was explained by the self-evident fact that the humoral makeup of a peasant was necessarily different from that of a merchant or scholar. Numerous writers warned of the pains and illnesses that came about from eating foods inappropriate to a person’s social position. The ruling classes could suffer just as much from eating thick peasant soups as common folk from ingesting more refined foods. Suffice it to say that oat bran never would have made it into upper-class medieval diet books.

Not that spiced food was deemed appropriate for everyone, even if class and cost were not at issue. Women, for example, were often warned off spices because of their supposedly delicate nature. With obvious disapproval, the sixteenth-century surgeon William Bulleyn describes how some women used pepper to “dry up” their complexion to make it seem more fashionably pale: “Although pepper be good to them that use it well, yet unto artificiall women that have more beastliness then beauty and cannot be content with their natural complexions, but would fayne be fayre: they eate peper, dried corne [grain] and drinke vinegar…to dry up their bloude.” Another seemingly contradictory explanation about why women should avoid hot spices was for just the opposite reason: that they stimulated blood flow that might lead to sexual arousal. If the number of recipes purporting to cure performance problems is any indication, men, on the other hand, seemed to need all the help they could get in this regard. According to contemporary theory, spices, with their concentrated heating ability, were just the potions to get the job done. Cloves “augment miraculously the force of venus,” as one writer puts it. The way the mechanism was supposed to work is that heating foods would agitate and engorge the penis, while an increase in the circulation of blood would aid in the production and eventual delivery of the sperm. Applying the same reasoning, cold foods should have the same effect as a cold shower, so accordingly, bachelors and priests were supposed to eat plenty of lettuce. Even in the Middle Ages, real men did not eat salad. Interestingly, today spices are still widely used in men’s colognes, aftershaves, and so on, whereas the preference for women’s scents tends toward the floral.

Dry and heating foods were not seen merely as a performance enhancer in the bedroom, they were also supposed to increase mental acuity. It was common knowledge that sanguine and phlegmatic people were slow-witted and forgetful; thus, a dry constitution would seem to guarantee intelligence. Here again, it was upper-class men, who were presumably the only ones making the big decisions and thinking deep thoughts, who were more likely to benefit.

Does this mean that rich people ate spices only because they thought they were good for them? This theory has been popular of late among food historians as a way of explaining the late medieval penchant for imported spices. And while there is probably something to it, the spice-balancing explanation has probably been overplayed. Certainly, if the reaction of today’s public to nutritional pronouncements is any indication, adherence to humoral principles was at best mixed. What’s more, a plethora of sixteenth-century literary parodies from Shakespeare to Rabelais seems to indicate that physicians, dietitians, and the diets themselves were often a subject of ridicule.

It’s worth noting that humoral medicine wasn’t the only game in town. Much like we turn to herbal medicine and yoga when more conventional medicine fails, people in medieval Europe turned to prayer, miracles, and magic when the humoral system couldn’t deliver the goods. Not surprisingly, this happened a lot. In any case, the line between healer and magician was often fuzzy. In 1403, five “sorcerers” were allowed to attempt to cure Charles VI of France. Unluckily for them, the king’s idea of a malpractice award was to burn the quacks at the stake. Other healers were accused of employing sorcery, astrology, and an assortment of other unorthodox medical techniques, though that didn’t stop them from having a successful practice.

During the Renaissance, spices had their place in everyday medicine, but they also had more esoteric uses. In the sixteenth century, alchemy was all the rage. Alchemists operated on a more metaphysical plane than ordinary doctors and nutritionists, but their arcane insights often trickled down into general dietary theory. These protochemists are often caricatured as obsessed with turning base metals into gold, but many were more preoccupied with discovering a prescription for eternal life, while others had even more transcendent goals. One influential school, led by the Florentine physician and humanist Ficino and his protégé Paracelsus, came up with a notion of hyperawareness that they called the “spiritus,” which could be achieved through a very particular alignment of the humors. Through this “spiritus,” the melancholic individual (refined melancholia was naturally the prerequisite for genius) would be able to perceive the world without having to resort to more ordinary senses. In other words, transcendent genius could be achieved if you carefully calibrated the intake of your micronutrients. Of course, the highly concentrated humors in spices made them perfect for the job. Paracelsus, for one, was fond of a kind of metaphysical aromatherapy in which his spice-scented concoctions were meant to be inhaled rather than consumed. In one recipe intended to kick-start this “spiritus,” a potion of potable gold was perfumed with cardamom, cinnamon, mace, and cloves, along with flower and animal gland extracts.

While the obscure concerns of Paracelsus were hardly of interest to the man in the street, many of the ideas filtered down to the popular press. Who wouldn’t want to find out the secret formula of a long and healthy life, especially in an era in which pestilence and disease were all too commonplace and a fifty-year-old person was considered a doddering relic?

Yet even as the details of the venerable humoral system became available to the widest public ever, Galen’s theories increasingly came under attack from rival camps.

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PICES
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OSE
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AVOR

In one of Rembrandt’s more famous paintings, a group of lace-collared men huddles around a limp body entirely naked except for a skimpy loincloth. They are all bathed in a ghostly light that seems to emanate from the white cadaver at their center. One of the men, the only one with a plain collar and a hat, pries apart the dead man’s left arm with a pair of forceps, exposing the meat, muscle, and sinew beneath the skin. The picture, painted in 1632, is known as
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp
and depicts a scene that took place in the old spice-weighing tower in Nieuwemarkt. By this point, the building not only served to regulate the traffic in nutraceuticals like cinnamon and nutmeg but was also used by the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons for their annual public dissection. Dissection had been made legal only a few years earlier, and there was still a level of prurient titillation to the rare occasions when the public was invited. The rule was that only the cadavers of convicted criminals could be pried open for inspection. This one had just been hanged for armed robbery. As the tangled innards of the thief ’s arm dangle from the end of the doctor’s instrument, the famed surgeon Nicolaes Tulp looks out, presumably to the assembled audience in the operating theater. Apparently, he was as skilled at wooing an audience as wielding a scalpel. He later held the position of city treasurer eight times and of burgomaster (mayor) four times.

Surgeons did not used to be this highly esteemed. In medieval Europe, the messy business of surgery was often a sideline practiced by barbers and dentists, lowly professions compared to the learned ranks of physicians, who kept their clothes clean and handed out carefully penned prescriptions. People turned to surgeons only as a last resort. The Catholic Church had long had an issue with dissecting corpses, with the result that most surgeons had to learn on still-living patients—obviously with variable success. Yet once Holland had declared itself for the Protestant side, the taboo against cutting open cadavers was slowly relaxed, and doctors could finally study the subcutaneous world.

In the Middle Ages, the inside of the human body had been as much a terra incognita as the far-off Indies, and the first explorers of hearts and spleens made discoveries that were often just as surprising as those made by da Gama and Columbus. What they found often contradicted what they’d read in the erudite textbooks of Galen’s apostles. But perhaps more important, it was the empirical approach of Tulp and his colleagues that made the Galenic model—that exquisitely constructed house of cards built of deductive reason—wobble at its foundations. Over and over in seventeenth-century texts, you read the revolutionary refrain that since the ancients had lived in another time and place, they could hardly be regarded as the source of all knowledge. The humoral system was not yet thrown out the window, but it was precariously balanced on the ledge, with competing systems making its hold on medical orthodoxy ever more tentative. What happened then is just what happens today when medical opinion begins to shift: the public got confused. As far as spices went, who knew where they were now supposed to fit in the people’s diet?

Whereas spices’ overseas origin had once been a selling point, now it became controversial—at least, in some quarters. The Portuguese and Castilian voyages in search of Christians and spices had come home with reports of hundreds, if not thousands, of plants nobody in Europe had ever heard of and plenty of specimens, too. Dietitians and naturalists had the prodigious task of sorting them all out so they could be plugged into the humoral system. Many of the new plants were viewed with suspicion. (Famously, tomatoes and potatoes were long considered toxic.) Arguments simmered about whether imported plants and medicines were well suited to Europeans. According to the xenophobic camp, when God created the world, he had provided all that was necessary for each group of people in their own backyard—thus, local medicines like chamomile and henbane were better for curing local ills than exotic cloves and nutmeg. Conveniently, this happened to align with the opinions of those Calvinist preachers who regarded the likes of cinnamon and cloves not as missives from paradise but as the harvest of a pagan and hedonistic soil. As such, they were sure to beguile men away from a decent, God-fearing life, a life that could come only from a diet of homegrown turnips and spice-free cheese.

While the religious climate in the Netherlands may have become more tolerant toward slicing into cadavers, Protestants and Papists alike became ever more puritanical when it came to the pleasures of living flesh. Eating well (however that was defined) was increasingly seen as the problem rather than the solution, as it had been earlier. The diet books make this change in medical opinion abundantly clear. Ken Albala, an American food historian who has studied the early nutrition guides, points to a shift from fifteenth-century books—which are generally tolerant and, at times, even promote the pleasures of the table (Platina’s bestselling
De honesta voluptate et valetudine
means “On Honest Pleasure and Good Health,” after all)—to a more preachy and uptight approach that has no use for fine cooking. In 1530, Luis Lobera de Ávila, a Spanish dietitian, could still advise his readers to “eat all that is most delectable and delicious for it is also the most nourishing.” By the seventeenth century, you are more likely to read opinions such as those of Leonard Lessius, the author of a popular lifestyle guide, who ranted against “lickorish cooking” and “curious dressing of meats.”