By Viktoria von Hoffmann, University of Illinois Press, 282 pages
Taste, in both the physical and figurative senses, has had a history replete with philosophical and religious implications. Before it had connotations of good judgment — as in that of the tastemaker — taste as a physical sense was more typically associated with pigs and gluttons.
How taste got from porcine to polished is the fascinating story told in From Gluttony to Enlightenment: The World of Taste in Early Modern Europe, an academic work by scholar Viktoria von Hoffmann. Von Hoffmann focuses her study on France in the early modern era (circa 1500 to the late 1800s), a pivotal time in the history of taste and its perceptions.
As nouvelle cuisine appeared on the scene, a newfound appreciation started to develop for a sense that had “appeared de facto as the lowest of all senses,” Von Hoffman writes. (In the traditional hierarchy of the senses, touch was technically lowest, but its effective status was higher because of its universality among life forms. Sight, affiliated with reason and knowledge, was the most respected of the senses.)
Taste’s initial lowliness had a number of causes and expressions. Associated with indulgence and temporary satisfaction, taste provided “fleeting, earthly pleasures” that the Catholic Church, for one, considered substantially less worthwhile than ascension into heaven. Gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins, “threatened the order of God, the order of the world, and that of men.” Moreover, the mouth — “a border between inside and outside, between self and other” — was thought to be a path for the devil to sneak into a body, as in the story of a nun who failed to make the sign of the cross before eating. The lettuce she consumed was the devil, who thus possessed her.
Fasting would seem the easiest way to prevent devil-entry and ensure virtuous abnegation, yet there were limits to how much the Church welcomed food deprivation. “Holy anorexics,” typically women, were depicted in hagiographic writings as ingesting nothing (other than maybe the sacred host) and being endowed with a supernatural grace. The holy anorexics, who at times faced accusations of witchcraft and heresy, “displayed a dangerous example of singularity, perceived as a dangerous example for the order of the Church.”
Such singularity was another reason for taste’s low status: Taste is idiosyncratic and subjective. The shift in its perception, then, hinged on perceptions of the individual. Discussing personal dislikes, or expressing disgust, was considered uncivil around the 17th century; in 1703, pedagogist Jean-Baptiste de La Salle (canonized in 1900) advised, “‘Just as it is rude to ask for anything at table, it is also required by decorum that you accept whatever is presented, even if you feel some repugnance for it.’ ”
Civility restricted the expression of individual preference, and mind-body dualism in philosophy did not help taste’s case: Descartes, for instance, did not deem the bodily senses to be reliable in the pursuit of human knowledge. It took a shift in approaches to selfhood to give taste its validity. Von Hoffman writes, “It is only in the eighteenth century onward that writers, inheriting from Montaigne’s ‘quest of self,’ would seek moral truth inside the individual, hence confirming the relevance of disclosing personal inner thoughts and sensations.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an advocate of vegetarianism, would go so far as to attribute the aggressiveness of the English to their meat-based diet.
The notion of an individual having “good taste,” or gradually developed. This idea was also influenced by the “taste of God” metaphor used in mystical writings such as those by Teresa of Ávila. Taste developed a spiritual connection and a moral edge — reflecting an individual’s honesty — and soon it took on an aesthetic quality as well. Taste would become “a new elite faculty that entailed judging the value of literary or artistic works”; the
(“honest man,” or gentleman) had a rare, indefinable “taste” that allowed him to distinguish beauty.
Taste had moved far from the table, yet it did find its way back to its culinary roots in the emergence of nouvelle cuisine in the 18th century. “Simplicity and lightness” were at the crux of nouvelle cuisine, which often used bouillons and sauces. Professional writers, rather than cooks, began writing the prefaces to cookbooks, and “philosophical dinners” became a space in which “the finest cuisine accompanied good wines, freed tongues, and favored intellectual exchanges.” Von Hoffman writes, “Taste of the body and taste of the mind intensify each other both in action — knowledge on taste led to a higher attention and enjoyment of flavors — and in words — speaking with esprit, since from now on one’s ideas on taste could and had to be expressed through language.”
Von Hoffman writes with crossdisciplinary dexterity, fusing history, sociology, theology, philosophy, and economics in her scrupulously researched monograph. Her work retains its focus on the early modern era, yet its relevance into the present day of food blogs and Instagram food hashtags is everpresent. It seems that the origins of photographing a particularly good lunch can be dated to developments in France just a few centuries ago.
— Grace Parazzoli