Renaissance food from rabelais to shakespeare pdf

High speed download, no ads. Millions of people are satisfied with this service, update every day. Starting in , the food world underwent a transformation as the established gatekeepers of American culinary creativity in New York City and the Bay Area were forced to contend with Portland, Oregon. Its new, no-holds-barred, casual fine-dining style became a template for other cities, and a culinary revolution swept across America.

Traditional ramen shops opened in Oklahoma City. Craft cocktail speakeasies appeared in Boise. Poke bowls sprung up in Omaha. Entire neighborhoods, like Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and cities like Austin, were suddenly unrecognizable to long-term residents, their names becoming shorthand for the so-called hipster movement.

At the same time, new media companies such as Eater and Serious Eats launched to chronicle and cater to this developing scene, transforming nascent star chefs into proper celebrities. Emerging culinary television hosts like Anthony Bourdain inspired a generation to use food as the lens for different cultures.

It seemed, for a moment, like a glorious belle epoque of eating and drinking in America. And then it was over. He writes with rare energy, telling a distinctly American story, at once timeless and cutting-edge, about unbridled creativity and ravenous ambition. To "burn the ice" means to melt down whatever remains in a kitchen's ice machine at the end of the night.

Or, at the bar, to melt the ice if someone has broken a glass in the well. It is both an end and a beginning. It is the firsthand story of a revolution in how Americans eat and drink. Providing a unique perspective on a fascinating aspect of early modern culture, this volume focuses on the role of food and diet as represented in the works of a range of European authors, including Shakespeare, from the late medieval period to the mid seventeenth century.

The volume is divided into several sections, the first of which is "Eating in Early Modern Europe"; contributors consider cultural formations and cultural contexts for early modern attitudes to food and diet, moving from the more general consideration of European and English manners to the particular consideration of historical attitudes toward specific foodstuffs.

The second section is "Early Modern Cookbooks and Recipes," which takes readers into the kitchen and considers the development of the cultural artifact we now recognize as the cookbook, how early modern recipes might "work" today, and whether cookery books specifically aimed at women might have shaped domestic creativity. The essays included in this collection are international and interdisciplinary in their approach; they incorporate the perspectives of historians, cultural commentators, and literary critics who are leaders in the field of food and diet in early modern culture.

Even the printed Viandier only contains 44 fish recipes. The vast majority of these species of fish can be located either in the history of fishes by Rondelet or that by Belon. Like Rabelais, Rondelet prefers a personal approach to his taxonomy rather than relying on the texts of Antiquity. Earlier books, he writes, have not treated the subject in sufficient detail. My friends have sent me some of them. I opened them and dissected them. I diligently contemplated all of their interior and exterior parts].

Rondelet has thus travelled the world to view species of fish with his own eyes, yet as a doctor, he also explores the inner world of his collected specimens. In his anatomical discussion of the same fish, Rondelet adds both a dietetic comment and a recipe for it. It can be grilled after placing fennel and rosemary in its belly; it can be roasted or served cold; or can even be baked in a crust.

The must greatly reduces the saltiness, the vinegar gives it a pleasant note, the onion gives it a good smell]. Not only has Rondelet given us a series of potential recipes for this fish but he has also revealed some regional culinary preferences.

As a doctor who studied at the University of Montpellier, he was undoubtedly familiar with taste preferences in the Languedoc. In the Sergent family of cookbooks, many fish dishes are prepared Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare 34 with butter.

This is a striking innovation in regards to medieval practice, where fish is almost never prepared as such. It is referred to, by name, on three separate occasions throughout the list of foods. Frame was unable to trace the name of this dish to any known source, but an analogous recipe can be found in the Livre de cuisine. By including so many references to butter in his meatless-day menu, Rabelais was simply ratifying an association between fish and butter that had already been established by contemporary cookbooks.

Beyond the catalogue of fishes and fowl, Rabelais regales the reader with a multitude of specific dishes whose names are not fantastical creations but actual dishes that can be traced to contemporary cookbooks. Other dishes, however, represent particular contemporary tastes.

As such, Rabelais would have had access to the recipe title either in a printed Viandier in circulation or in one of the Sergent cookbooks. In the Livre de cuisine, this pastry is made by layering sliced beef tongue and chopped fat. Such details about the main ingredient in a recipe are often absent from medieval texts. Instead of beef tongue, beef shoulder is used; in the printed Viandier, tenderloin is specified. Both recipes privilege clove as a spice among others, but the Fleur recipe includes sage at the end, an ingredient absent from the Viandier recipe.

By specifying this recipe on his menu, Rabelais has privileged contemporary cooking practices and writing styles over their medieval counterparts. Admittedly, the name of this dish does not appear in any medieval cookery collections, or even in the printed Viandier. The recipes are identical in each text, but for the purposes of illustration, it suffices to transcribe the recipe from La Fleur: Saulce realle.

Prenez vin vermeil et vinaigre autant de lun comme de lautre, canelle entiere, cloux de giroffle et sucre, et boutez tout bouillir en un beau pot jusques quil soit diminue quasi de la moytie… [Royal sauce.

Take red wine and vinegar, an equal amount of each, whole cinnamon, clove and sugar, and put it all in a nice pot to boil until it is reduced almost by half…] Ultimately, this recipe is a relatively simple one, with a restrained number of ingredients, particularly the spices.

It is noteworthy that the cinnamon is to remain whole, while in most sauce recipes, spices are supposed to be ground up with a mortar and pestle. Instead of being thickened with toasted bread, a veritable sine qua non of medieval sauce recipes, this sauce will be thickened by reducing it. Reducing sauces and producing essences is a common trait in seventeenthcentury cuisine, so its evocation in the Sergent family of cookbooks marks a clear break with medieval sauce practices and anticipates characteristics of classical French haute cuisine.

These recipes are entirely absent from the manuscript versions of the text. Moreover, this desire seems to be French in origin because Platina attributes the name tartre to the French. In addition to the number of tart recipes that Platina offers, a significant number of recipes for boignetes [fritters] appear.

Indeed, all of book nine is devoted to recipes for fritters. Near the end of this profusion of dishes in the meat-day meal, Rabelais also includes a number of items containing sugar. The latter item was a traditional accompaniment to the sugar-sweetened hippocras [mulled wine], a beverage that figures earlier in this particular course number As such, the banquet opens with a white hippocras aperitif and appropriately closes with a digestive red hippocras.

Like the hippocras itself, the abundance of sugar at the end of the meal clearly has a dietetic rationale behind it. According to contemporary dietetic texts, and Platina in particular, sugar held supreme status as an aid to digestion. Sugar also reaches its apex in the recipes of the Sergent family of cookbooks. However, as the sixteenth century progresses, sugar begins to lose its highly praised status.

The menus begin with a number of salted fish that would be appropriate for stimulating both the appetite and the desire to drink. Otherwise, the vast majority of dishes listed in the meatless days refer to fish by name of species alone. Oysters often appear in the form of stews in the Middle Ages, but not served on the half shell. Both recipes involve obtaining very fresh oysters, opening them up, dropping in a bit of butter and pepper, and then placing them on top of hot coals.

The cooking kills the live oyster and produces the finished dish. Rabelais also offers the reader a variety of salads in the first course of the meal.

Salads were thought to sharpen the appetite at the beginning of a meal, but Champier cautions the reader about excess consumption. We should not listen to those who claim that the flavor of foods must be masked by the sweetness of sugar. Thousands of people live comfortably without sugar]. As such, the salt is thought to dissolve to give flavors of all kinds to the palate]. Rabelais lists this particular one among the salads chosen for the meatless-day meal number Champier remarks that the Belgians use hops for making their beer, but they eat the young stems like asparagus, in a salad with oil and vinegar Many recipes exist using this spiced wine as a sauce even for fruit dishes , but none exist incorporating hippocras with lamprey.

This fish does form the basis of many other dishes, and it was considered popular banquet fare. The Fleur includes four recipes for lamprey and one for a particular sauce associated with it.

Champier points out that the condiments used to prepare lamprey are often more expensive than the lamprey itself. He further adds an anecdote about how a particular dish for lamprey, capons with lamprey attached, caused stomach pains in the diners who ate them. As a recognised medical digestive drink, hippocras certainly carries a dietetic charge.

Indeed, Rondelet, in his history of fishes, glosses the highly dietetic French Platina as a vital source of information on the lamprey. However, Rondelet also tells a somewhat fantastical story about lamprey. Fishes, Fowl, and La Fleur de toute cuysine 39 capable of stopping ships at sea by clamping its enormous mouth onto the hull of the boat. Though it is certainly tempting to regard these strangely monnikered dishes as fantastical, cookbook evidence suggests that Rabelais did not in fact have his tongue in cheek.

For the latter, a small hole is pierced in the shell, and the egg is then placed on the coals of the fire to cook. Champier corroborates the use of verjuice in egg dishes, adding that they are also often prepared with vinegar and sorrel juice Given the evidence of medieval and Renaissance cookbooks, dietetic texts, and lexicography, these various egg dishes are certainly not fantastical. As we have seen thus far, the Gaster episode is much more than a satire of the excesses of the table.

Yet, it might be considered a satire in the etymological sense of a mixed dish. However, this unique mixture exists only on the level of discourse; it is ultimately a cuisine of words.

We thought it deserves to be inserted at this point for the diversity of French names found in it. His metamenu was subsequently reprinted in all the other members of the same cookbook family, including La Fleur de toute cuysine. The list may seem excessive, much like the Gaster episode, but the presumption is that a choice will be made from among the many possibilities. As in an actual banquet, one does not eat from every dish. A diner is limited to those dishes within reach at the table.

A wide selection of dishes alone thus does not make gluttony a foregone conclusion. Frank Lestringant has analyzed how Rabelais used a text called the Disciple de Pantagruel as an inspiration for the culinary inflection of the voyages in the Quart livre Lestringant —8.

In several episodes from the Disciple, the travellers encounter a culinary paradise, a true land of Cockaigne. The ovens are constantly lit and capable of producing pastries on demand. Choices are to be made. These choices are inevitably based on how one reads the name of a particular dish. As for our part, we feel that other nations could not name as many dishes in their languages as the French can. This consciousness is a particularly French one.

As Belon puts it, only the French could come up with so many names for dishes, a tendency that distinguishes them from other nations. Culinary literature thus opens a space in which to inscribe a national identity in Renaissance France. The richness and specificity of these chapters resonate powerfully with an ever-widening circulation of a new generation of French culinary literature.

As such, rather than a denunciation of food and banqueting excess, as is suggested by the bulk of Rabelais criticism regarding the Quart livre, the Gaster episode is a celebration of the culinary, linguistic, and cultural inventiveness of Renaissance France.

Clearly by the mid-sixteenth century, culinary literature in France had obtained a critical mass, had reached a crucial threshold. With the advent of the Wars of Religion, Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare 42 the rehabilitated status of food and culinary literature becomes subsumed within the ideological antinomies of Catholics and Protestants. Yet Rabelais provides a sense of calm before the storm. In the chapter immediately following the Gaster episode, Pantagruel has just awakened from a deep sleep occasioned by the reading of a book.

The winds have failed, and so Pantagruel and his bored companions discuss how to pass the time. The ultimate solution is to dine together. At the conclusion of the feast, boredom has been alleviated, questions have been resolved, and the never-ending voyage can continue.

Rabelais thus posits cuisine and banqueting as an inoculation against the social ills to come. Food certainly can be perverted through improper use and, as such, is prone to raising the specter of gluttony. But it can also be a balm and a remedy in the context of conviviality, shared meals, and shared tastes. The literature of food has made this realisation possible. Appendix A Meat-day menu I.

Hippocras blanc 2. Pain blanc 4. Choine 5. Carbonnades de six sortes 6. Coscotons 7. Fressures 8. Fricassees, neuf especes 9. Grasses souppes de prime Souppes Lionnoises Hoschepotz Pain mollet Pain bourgeoys Cabirotades Souppes de Levrier Chous cabutz a la mouelle de boeuf Puys offroient Saulsisses Saumates Fricandeaux Boudins Cervelatz Saulcissons Jambons Hures de Sangliers Hastereaux Olives colymbades III.

Puys luy enfournoient en gueule Chappons roustiz avecques leur degout Hutaudeaux Becars Cabirotz Bischars Dains Lievres Levraux Perdris Perdriaux Faisans Faisadeaux Pans Panneaux Ciguoines Ciguoineaux Becasses Becassins Hortolans Cocqs Ramiers Ramerotz Cochons au moust Merles Rasles Tadournes Aigrettes Cercelles Plongeons Butors Palles Courlis Gelinotes de boys Foulques aux pourreaux Risses Chevreaulx Espaulles de moutton aux cappres Pieces de boeuf royalles Poictrines de veau Poulles boullies Gelinottes Poulletz Lappins Lappereaux Cailles Cailleteaux Pigeons Pigeonneaux Herons Heronneaux Otardes Otardeaux Becquefigues Guynettes Pluviers Oyes Oyzons Bizetz Hallebrans Maulvyz Fishes, Fowl, and La Fleur de toute cuysine Flamans Cignes Pochecuillieres Courtes Grues Tyransons Corbigeaux Francourlis Tourterelles Connilz Porcespicz Girardines IV.

Ranffort de vinaige parmy. Puys De Lirons De Stamboucqs De Chevreuilz De Pigeons De Chamoys De Chappons Pastez de lardons Pieds de porc au sou Corbeaux de Chappons Fromaiges Pesches de Corbeil Artichaulx Guasteaux feueilletez Cardes Beuignetz Guauffres Crespes Patez de Coings Caillebotes Neige de Creme Myrobalans confictz Gelee Hippocras rouge et vermeil Poupelins Macarons 45 Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare 46 Tartres vingt sortes Confictures seiches et liquides soixante et dixhuyt especes Mestier au sucre fin Item rousties Appendix B Meatless-day menu I.

Caviat 2. Boutargues 3. Beurre frays 4. Espinars 6. Arans blanc bouffiz 7. Arans sors 8. Sardaines 9. Anchoys Tonnine Saulmons sallez Anguillettes sallees Huytres en escalles II. Barbeaulx Barbillons Fishes, Fowl, and La Fleur de toute cuysine Meuilles Meuilletz Rayes Casserons Esturgeons Balaines Macquereaulx Pucelles Plyes Huytres frittes Pectoncles Languoustes Espelans Guourneaulx Truites Lavaretz Guodepies Poulpres Limandes Carreletz Maigres Pageaux Gougeons Barbues Cradotz Carpes Brochetz Palamides Roussettes Oursins Vielles Ortigues Crespions Gracieuxseigneurs Empereurs Anges de mer Lampreons Lancerons Brochetons Carpions Carpeaux Saulmons Saulmonneaux Daulphins Porcilles 47 48 Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare Turbotz Pocheteau Soles Poles Moules Homars Chevrettes Dards Ablettes Tanches Umbres Merluz frays Seiches Rippes Tons Guoyons Meusniers Escrevisses Palourdes Liguombeaulx Chatouilles Congres Lubines Aloses Murenes Umbrettes Darceaux Anguilles Anguillettes Tortues Serpens, id est, Anguilles de boys.

Dorades Poullardes Perches Realz Loches Cancres Escargotz Grenoilles III. Puys luy estoient sacrifiez Merluz sallez Stocficz Fishes, Fowl, and La Fleur de toute cuysine 49 Oeufz fritz Pushing against Aristotelian scholasticism, the books of secrets that followed from the Secretum Secretomm assumed that nature could be controlled by art. These texts did not offer their readers philosophy or science. Instead, they provided precisely the kind of instrumental knowledge that was associated with what, for Aristotle, had been two lesser kinds of wisdom: making poesis doing praxis.

Recipes first appear, in print sources, primarily in the books of secrets. For Plat, art was neither separate from nor uy to nature: 'nature', he insisted, 'may be knowne to bee so cunning an uriisL as that she hath not made any thing in vaine, the wittee of man hath also fonnHc out some good use this way' Plat The books of secrets tended to be multi-part volumes made up of a number of different books, each concerned with what seem to us to be quite different kinds of inventions, experiments, and recipes.

V aVs Jewell House, for instance, contains separate books on experiments, dry, chemical distillery, and moulding, while The boke of Secrets begins with sections on the virtues of herbs, stones, and animals. Partridge's Treasurie includes more culinary material, but even here, much of the book is devoted to 'kitchen physic', with recipes for oils, extracts, salves, and other substances that wuliiu be used for medicinal purposes. The different mechanical arts that come together in such volumes -- instructions for distilling, cryptography, medicinal saKcv dyeing, and cooking - were allied with one another to the extent that they were understood to be 'arts of the hand" and, equally important, instances of the knowledge that such arts could produce.

Conking is notably not a distinct category within these volumes. Food meant something quite different to recipe book authors such as Hugh Plat or John Partridge than it did to dietary writers such as Thomas Cogan and William Bullein. In the dietaries, food was theoretically understood to be one of the six non-naturals that gave men a way to control the body and its passions, and some dietaries would thus describe the virtues associated with different foods and make recommendations about the kinds of foods that different kinds of people should eat.

In practice, however, dietaries did not typically include recipes, which were noi inherently consistent with Galenic assumptions about the individuality of both temperament and treatment. In Partridge's Treasurie, for instance, the culinary recipes at the start of the book are simply presented To bake chickens' , but the medicinal recipes include both instructions 'To make Conserve of Roses, or Other for accounts of the books of secrets in the English tradition, sec Spiller xii-xvr Willi.

The dietaries tet d to refer to cooking itself largely in metaphoric terms, as a way to describe how ihe human body worked. From this perspective, concocting, distilling, and cooking all had their counterparts within the human digestive process.

In the recipe books, by contrast, the emphasis is on the control of nature, not that of man. Man contiols; he is not that which is controlled. For someone like Piatt, cooking is a mechar il art that is significant to the extent that it can transform nature and, thus, cr.

Although cooking is initially subordinate to physic within the books of sec the shift away from Galenic models of the body tended to create an intellec 1 space for cooking as a category in its own right. This category shift is apparent in the publication histories of these volumes. Books of secrets were introduced to English readers in the middle of the sixteenth century and were at the hei"M of their popularity in the last quarter of the century.

These volumes went through multiple editions and were usually printed by more than one primer, While additional materials and even sequels were added in the later editions, these volumes were fairly consistent in combining the various mechanical arts in i single philosophical structure and narrative form. In the works from this group, cooking is still associated, at a philosophical level, the mechanical arts and the books of secrets, but that connection appears in a textual format.

Plat's Jewell House is a typical book of secrets; his later Delig for Ladies focuses almost entirely on confectionary recipes. Among the earliest of the volumes in this category were two Recipes for Knowledge 63 idely influential translations of Conrad Gesner's medical works, The Treasure f Euonymus and its continuation The Newe Jewell of Health Ciesner's remedies were largely chemical and alchemical.

Giving a definition r distillation at the start of the first volume, Gesner makes this focus clear; is goal is to show how complex medicinal compounds can be created 'out of simple medicines by the strengths of fire' Gesner Air. Although Gesner himself as not a supporter of Paracelsus, Allen Debus argues that his remedy books promoted chemical medicine in ways that ultimately worked to make Paracelsian iatrochemistry acceptable to English readers Debus , Paracelsian and wilier chemical remedies are prominent in later remedy books such as Leonardo f ioravanti's A Joyful Jewell , which was translated by the apothecary John Hester, Thomas Vicary's The English Mans Treasure ?

The chemical remedy books have strong intellectual affiliations with the books of secrets. Paracelsian medicine was associated closely with the mechanical arts, while alchemy as a whole was tied to the belief that human art provided the basis for the transformation of nature and the creation of knowledge. Despite their different audiences, these volumes thus often use a language that is cJose to that in the books of secrets. The Treasure, for instance, promises to reveal s 'wonderful hid secrets of nature' Gesner, title page.

The recipes in the remedy books differ conceptually from those in the books of secrets. John Banister warns his readers that many of his recipes are 'bitter, hiting. In saying this, Banister is in part repeating a basic tenet of Galenic medicine: food tastes good and medicine tastes. Although Banister begins with this Galenic framework, his recipes nonetheless are structured in ways that follow Paracelsian assumptions.

Partridge, whose recipes in The Treasurie of Commodious Conceits are of a comparatively high standard, provides more and less quantifiable measurements: for red sealing wax, for instance, he recommends 3 ounces of clear turpentine, but specifies 4 ounces in winter.

In Partridge's culinary recipes, quantity itself is a unit of measurement: different recipes specify, in slightly different modulations, 'a quantity of butter', 'a good quantity of butter', and 'a good quantity of sugar and cream with sufficient salt' Partridge, D2r, Fir.

Partridge's attitude toward measurement in part reflects a sense that cooking is an art, variable in practice and hard to convey in words. Equally importantly, however, this sense that both quantities and results will differ also reflects the infinite variability that was understood to characterise the humoral body: in this context, what nourishes and thus what "tastes' good are as different its each individual's humoral complexion.

Chemical remedy books like Banister's bring an attention to the standardisation of remedies and precision of measurement that accord with their understanding of Paracelsian physic. Banister thus calls 64 Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare attention to the need for a uniformity that inheres in the medicine not in the patient: each of his recipes begins with a list of ingredients and measurements, given in Latin and set in an italic font, clearly set off from the instructions themselves, which are English, in a blackletter typeface.

The chemical remedy books are also affiliated with the books of secrets in their relationship to print culture. The authors and printers of these volumes consistently stress the importance of making knowledge accessible in English to those who read.

Noting that people often die when medicines are improperly prepared, Dave explains that he 'caused this precious treasure to be translated into oure usualf. The barber surj: from St.

Bartholomew's Hospital who 'revived, corrected, and published'Thomas Vicary's handbook on anatomy and chemical physic likewise emphasise thai they are making Vicary's work available in English to remedy the need, anmn't apprentices and surgeons, for accessible texts: 'many good and learned men', ihey note, 'in these our daies, do cease to publish abroad in the English tongue works and travelles' Vicary A4r-A4v.

Banister 5 I The translators and authors of English dietaries included humanists. As Eamon notes more generally ; 'when apothecaries, potters, sailors, distillers, and midwives got into print atont : with scholars, humanists, and clerics, the Republic of Letters was permanent! The knowledge that these texts sought to convey and crealt. Print culture provided the technology that made possible the standardisation of medical practice that the Pharmacopoea Londinensis was interested in achieving.

At the same time, though, the I'harmacopoea Londinensis was a strong reaction against the new knowledge, and e new categories for knowledge, that print culture seemed to be stimulating. As a text, the Pharmacopoea Londinensis was intended to prevent the dissemination of knowledge and practice at least as much as it was designed to encourage it. The Pharmacopoea was, for both the College of Physicians and the king himself, a partial solution to a textual problem created by the possibilities of print culture.

Observing that the 'custom of publishing private collections of medicinal recipes had been noted with alarm' in the Elizabethan period, Debus reports that 'there :eable slackening of interest in the private collections of remedies after I61S" Debus , , The publication of the Pharmacopoea Londinensis ly challenged the publication of unauthorised recipe books, deriving from both the books of secrets and chemical physic.

From to , almost no new recipe collections of any kind appeared in print. The Chyrugians Closet 1 This concern about remedy books is itself part of what lAnette Hunter has identified as a much wider reaction in the late sixteenth seventeenth centuries against those who were printing, selling, and hit vim; books connected to the maker's knowledge traditions Hunter, Fnomiously influential and repeatedly reprinted, the Pharmacopoea largely put an end to the printed recipe books that had dominated late sixteenth- and early seven teeulh-centuiy publishing.

The appearance of these volumes has rightly been tied by food historians to the remarkable impact that new developments in French cookbooks, especially Pierre Francois de la Varemie's Le Cvifinifi' Francois ; translated as The French Cook [] , had on English re. Despite the attention given to Varenne's work, though, the English pe books that are published during this period notably do not incorporate linenlal innovations in any significant way and should probably not be erstood primarily as responses to Varenne's work.

The success of Culpeper's translation - which he understood to i radical act against the controls imposed on the publication of recipe books :cms to have convinced publishers to return to the once lucrative recipe book ;t.

Although the Pharmacopoea continued to be published and remained standard work, the existence of an English translation broke one of the key fictions against publications in this genre and so restarted the publication of i books.

Both of these changes were a consequence of the way that the Pharmacopoea moved away from Galenism. Containing compound medicines alongside simples and with the notable inclusion of a section on 'chemical' physic, the volume promoted a move away from Galenic herbalism toward Paracelsian iatrochemistry. Culpeper, B2r Mayeme's comments understate the importance of Paracelsianism in the Pharmacopoea: the shift toward Paracelsian iatrochemistry was not limited In the short section on chemical remedies.

Rather, this influence makes itself mc profoundly felt, first, in a category shift that allowed for the separation of food from physic, of cooking from medicine; and, second, in a methodological shift that emphasised the need for standardised measurement.

In both Galenism and the maker's knowledge traditions, food and physic were integrally connected to one another. From a Galenic perspective, dietary change allowed one to correct humoral imbalances, and, in the dietaries, food was thus often the inverse to physic.

In the books of secrets, culinary and medicinal recipes were both instances of arts tl could transform nature and did so through the body. Recipes for confections and for salves both were pail of the same context and, as we have seen, part of the same texts.

The Pharmacopoea, by contrast, was a medical remedy book that split food from physic. The Pharmacopoea included many traditional Galenic recipes within its pages, but its exclusion of all culinary recipes may be a more powerful indica of the extent to which the dispensatory broke with the traditions that dominalcd sixteenth-century attitudes toward the body and the human art that might sustinn it. By encouraging the treatment of food and medicine as distinct substances, 1 Pharmacopoea Londinensis, itself a recipe book limited to physic, helped prepare the way for the appearance of a significantly new category of recipe books devoted to cookery that becomes dominant by the end of the century.

The other distinctive feature of the Pharmacopoea was its attention to reci] and instructions that follow, as Mayerne noted, 'one and the same rule'. As Pe. Recipes for Knowledge 67 Dear, Alfred Crosby, and others have argued, the 'measure of all things' changed in early modern Europe Dear, ; Crosby ; ; Blank, This attempt to regulate measurement and fix ingredients was part of a larger intellectual shift away from an Aristotelian physics that was founded on qualitative assessments a physics that was concerned with why toward an experimental science that was based on quantitative ones a mathematics of how many.

Mayeme's prefatory letter explains their attention to creating recipes for compounding that follow 'one and the same rule' and specify a 'certain quantity or dose': whereas in most Authors, some things are totally left to the judgment of the Artificer, especially in the quantity of Honey and Sugar, under these two letters, q.

Culpeper, Blv, B2r; 'Candido Lectori', Royal College, Air, AI v der a Galenic understanding of the body, substances such as sugar and honey re understood to be medicinally subtle: like herbs and spices, sugar provided a y to 'temper' foods and medicines to bring them into fuller humoral balance. Adding sugar or honey to taste, in the ways that Mayerne refers to here, was not primarily understood to be a matter of individual preference.

A cultural commitment to 'taste' as a marker of individuality does not become dominant until the eighteenth century. Rather, because of the way that medicine and food either absorb or are absorbed into the body, how something tastes is connected to its medical efficacy. Traditional humoral medicine thus resisted universal cures: under a Galenic - tern, the kinds of fixed recipes Pharmacopoea wanted to set as standards would nol have been accepted as the basis for effective individual therapy.

Hippocrates, Cor instance, asserts that 'no measure, neither number nor weight, by reference to which knowledge can be made exact, can be found except bodily feeling' I lippocrates, Of Ancient Medicine: cited in Appelbaum, Paracelsianism, by itrast, moved away from this systemic model and, as Debus notes, 'went to great pains to determine the correct dosage with their medicines' Debus , This emphasis on standardised measurement and the setting of recipes was associated closely with the Pharmacopoea as a whole and with Theodore de Mayerne in particular.

In Some considerations touching the usefulnesse of experimental natural philosophy London, , Robert Boyle includes a long appendix that dealt with the way in which the new science of chemistry was improving the preparation ol medical remedies. Boyle is committed to chemical physic, but he remains On the medicinal qualities attributed to sugar, see Albala, 66, ; Mintz, Boyle gently mocks those physicians who believe that a single compound could provide a universal cure 'in Persons of all Ages, Sexes, and Complexions, indiscriminately' and cites 'the famous Sir Theodore Mayeme' as his example of this kind of 'Methodist' Boyle, The need for precise and standard forms of measurement certainly becomes increasingly important in the recipe books that were published after Leonard Sowerby's Ladies Dispensatory , for instance, includes a table of measurement equivalences as a supplement to his recipes.

Aletheia Talbot's Natura i exenteruta instructs readers to distinguish differently sized handfuls for different ingredients: herbs should be measured by the mil handful marked M. Culpeper also inserts a supplemental page on weights and measures in the prefatory materials to his translation in which he provides a series of equivalences scruples to drams to ounces and translations for Roman and Greek forms of measure libra to ounce, for instance Culpeper, B3v.

Beyond this, however, he also complains that besides these, the College have gotten another foolish and incerlain way of measuration not here set down, viz.

Apugil is properly so much as you can take up with your thumb and two fingers, and is very uncertain, not only in respect of the length of the finger, but also in respect of the matter you can take up. The handful and pngil - along other measurements of the body like the yard, the foot, the ell, and the span - were less a measurement system than a form of proportional ratio in which man wv i the measure of all things.

Paracelsianism shifted away from both the variable ; i humoral body, with its radically individual complexions and its assumptior! This shift ; i was important to the transformation of the kinds of recipes that had prevailed in I ; the books of secrets to those that became central to cookbooks.

As his title suggested, Bedell clearly : sought lo capture readers who might be interested in recent French innovations. Bedell's title page thus makes a second appeal to potential readers by promising that these recipes were 'copied from a choice Manuscript of Sir Theodore Mayeme knight, Physician to the late K.

Charles' Mayerne, title page. This appeal is more in keeping with the character of the other, aristocratic recipe books he was publishing during this period, and one that suggestively points to the influence that the Pharmacopoea Londinensis had on the publication of recipe books, both chemical and culinary, in seventeenth-century England. Bedell promises his readers that these recipes are Mayeme's.