You’ve probably seen this map floating around on the Internet, and this is the book it comes from. There are lots of other cool maps, too — the transfer of curry under the British Raj, the “bread debates” of the twentieth century — but despite appearances Cuisine and Empire isn’t really a history of ingredients or even cooking methods, just as a history of architecture isn’t really about innovations in forestry or framing techniques. Rather, it’s a history of the entire cultural bundle we call a “cuisine,” which obviously includes raw materials and ways of turning them into food, but also has a lot to do with ideas. What is food? What is cooking? What role do they play in human society and the natural world? How about the supernatural world? And what’s the relationship between cooking and the state?
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Tastes that we associate mainly with dessert — warm spices like cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg, plus a hefty dose of sugar — show up everywhere in medieval food, including in heavy meat dishes. Perhaps the closest things in modern circulation are agrodolce sauce, a sweet-sour balsamic-vinegar-and-fruit condiment that goes nicely on pork, or vinegary Filipino adobo. In fact, elements of Catholic cuisine survived best in regions of the former Spanish colonial empire, because the Spanish resisted the rise of French cuisine. The legacy lasted long enough that mole poblano — a dish derived from the spicy stews brought to Andalusia by the Muslim conquest, adopted by Catholic Spaniards, and imported to the New World by the colonial elite — was reinterpreted by Mexican nationalists in the early twentieth century as a symbol of the seamless mixing of peoples into a diverse nation.
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In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Paracelsus and his followers promulgated a physiological theory that contrasted sharply with the Galenic medical establishment that had prevailed since the classical era. Inspired by experiments in distillation, they denied the existence of the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) and instead argued that there were only three: salt, like the solid residue that gave food its body and taste; oil, like the oily fluid that made things unctuous; and vapor, the pure essence of whatever was distilled, that gave foods lightness and aroma. They also argued that fermentation, not cooking, was the fundamental process involved in digestion, so anything that rotted quickly must be especially easy to digest — particularly fresh fruits, herbs, and vegetables, overturning centuries of traditional avoidance of raw plants.
[...] the new theory arose at just the right time was eagerly adopted by cooks and the general public. Vapor in particular was considered nourishment for the brain, so sparkling water became popular, as did cakes raised with beaten eggs, whipped creams, and mousses. Simmering meat and fish to extract their essence was also a valuable vaporous technique. And most importantly, cooks began to experiment with sauces based on these theories, in which butter or lard (oily) bound flour (salty) with wine or stock (vaporous).
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[B]y the time Russia, Hawaii, and Mexico tried to adopt haute cuisine, the physiological theory that had underlain it all had long since shriveled up and died, replaced in the eighteenth century first by the idea that health depended on the balance of acid levels and then by a new understanding of the chemistry of nutrition. But it didn’t matter: culinary philosophies may grow out of other ideas about the world, but then they take on a life of their own.
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There are a dozen other equally fascinating stories in this book — I haven’t even touched on the USA’s nineteenth century transition from a cuisine of pork, molasses, and cornmeal to one of beef, sugar, and wheat flour — but they all boil down to the complicated interplay of material conditions and human ideas about the world. Yeah, sure, new ingredients — or new methods of transporting, storing, and processing old ones — do a lot to change how people cook and eat…but new ways of thinking and talking about food do as much or more. And we can’t really understand why we are the way we are unless we know how we got there.
From the blog post:
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