Julia Child, once an extremely influential and now legendary personage of the culinary world, repeated that love was the most important and indispensable spice to use when cooking. Slightly pompous though it may sound, this insight is not unrelated to common sense. Emotional engagement is known to enhance one’s commitment to what one is doing and to help one learn and overcome possible difficulties. John Dewey, who was equally emphatic about the importance of feelings,1 understood emotion as a binding agent of experience that makes it integrated through the mechanisms of the selection and distribution of emphasis. He literally dubbed emotion “the moving and cementing force,”2 explaining that it “selects what is congruous and dyes what is selected with its color, thereby giving qualitative unity to materials externally disparate and dissimilar. It thus provides unity in and through the varied parts of an experience.”3
Food and feelings are interrelated at the very basic level of gustatory sensations. As a result, food is a vehicle of fundamental emotions, those intimately interwoven with bodiliness and capable of permeating all spheres of individual and social life. Dewey matter-of-factly observes that “[t]he dictionary will inform anyone who consults it that the early use of words like sweet and bitter was not to denote qualities of sense as such but to discriminate things as favorable or hostile. How could it be otherwise? Direct experience comes from nature and man interacting with each other.”4 Indeed, expressions such as a “bitter end/defeat” and “the sweet taste of victory” refer to remote, non-corporeal aspects of social life. The activities involved in the making and sharing of food bear a strong emotional charge. These correlations go very far back in time, and contemporary anthropologists insist that social bonds directly derive from culinary practices.5
a frenchman [sic] should not stay unexpectedly to a meal particularly if he asked the servant beforehand what there was for dinner. […] So when Miss Stein said to her, Monsieur Matisse is staying for dinner this evening, she would say, in that case I will not make an omelette but fry the eggs. It takes the same number of eggs and the same amount of butter but it shows less respect, and he will understand.8
1 Foods and Cooking Techniques
According to Madeleine Ferrières, modernity has instituted three fundamental rules for hierarchizing food.10 The first rule concerns setting apart meat dishes from Lenten fare, and has been dictated by religion and the church. As Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat spells out in A History of Food, “throughout the Middle Ages and up to the end of the seventeenth century a holy, meticulous and implacable evangelical influence pervaded European kitchens. The dinner bell was set by the church bell […] Meat-eating was forbidden on almost 180 days a year.”11 How the strict ecclesiastical injunctions were interpreted was quite another matter, as evinced by perhaps the boldest maneuver of classifying a beaver as a fish on account of it living in water and having a scale-covered tail. Catholic hedonism, which was particularly rampant in southern Europe, carried away both clergy and laymen. Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose sentiments largely aligned with Protestantism, condemned those who serve both God and their own stomachs by fasting,12 and offered advice to help believers take control of the power of appetite, which made them eat and drink even if not hungry.13 From the Renaissance through to the 19th century,
To degrade […] means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy and birth. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one. To degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place.18
No wonder that the tension between the fixed, permanent rules of the organization of social life in the Middle Ages and the boundless, cheerful play embodied in carnival was a rewarding and recurrent theme in art: “Lent always
The second principle behind food hierarchies is vertical and aligned with the “ladder of being,” which rises to God, its bottom end resting on the earth. The metaphor of a ladder (or a chain) institutes a simple principle of evaluation according to which whatever abides far from the ground is superior to the plants and animals that directly touch it. Hence the humble position of root vegetables and pigs, which burrow in soft dirt. The abomination of impure ground also tainted occupations dealing with the cultivation of plants whose edible parts directly touched life-giving soil and the breeding of animals which trod the ground. At the same time, fowl and fruit were nomen omen highly valued.
Evaluative classifications were developed for fish as well. Heavy fish were believed to drop to the bottom, while light ones lived close to the surface; hence the sole and the turbot surpassed the tuna and the porpoise. The hierarchy of foodstuffs also corresponded to other divisions of rank that mirrored class inequalities: “This age-old principle of ordering the world persisted through the ages because it legitimized the tastes and preferences of the elite: the verdicts of Providence have placed the quail and the chicken, the turbot and the sole atop classic gastronomy, which dismisses common and mundane products such as garlic and potatoes.”20 The desire of the rich to keep away from the poor was also expressed in other ways which made gustatory pleasure part of the “social ideology of ostentatious extravagance.”21 Distinctions were marked, for example, by mealtimes. When the privileged classes had their breakfast, slaves in America and workers in Europe would already have toiled for hours.22 In France, “dinner time shifted by eight hours from the late 16th century to the early 19th century,” because the Parisian elite tended to wake up ever later.23 The urban rich could afford increasingly better and more expensive meats carefully selected by butchers, while the poor “struggled to obtain the worst parts of carcasses, scrambled together by offal sellers.”24 Only when trade
Truffles seem to have been the only food to have eluded the relentless evaluation mechanisms. These black mushrooms that grow underground have avoided the fate of roots and maintained their elevated position till the present day, even though hardly any rankings have stood the test of time. The mutability of culinary tastes is perhaps best illustrated by the history of the lobster. Now basking in the splendor of a luxury victual, the lobster suffered the ignominy of being nicknamed the cockroach of the sea in the 19th century. Bearing such a label, it could not but be deemed good solely for the tables of the poor, orphans, servants, and prisoners or, alternately, for being ground up and used as a fertilizer.26 Nature was generous to the Americans at the time: “New York Harbor alone held half the world’s oysters and yielded so much sturgeon that caviar was sat out as a bar snack. […] A popular American recipe book of 1853, Home Cookery, casually mentions adding a hundred oysters to a pot of gumbo to ‘enhance’ it.”27
The third criterion for instituting hierarchies of food stemmed from dietary beliefs anchored in ancient philosophy. Eating choices were informed by the theory of the four humors developed by Galen, a Roman physician of the 2nd century ad, and largely endorsed until the 17th century (and beyond).28 Drawing on the theories of Hippocrates and writings by Aristotle, Galen claimed that all life was based on the combination of four principles: dry, wet, hot, and cold, which corresponded to the four elements of air, water, fire, and earth, and to four vital fluids, that is, blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. The same logic explained the existence of the four seasons of the year, the four ages of man, the four winds, the four directions, and so on.
Obviously the four humors or temperaments could not be considered as equally desirable. The sanguine temperament, associated with air, spring, morning and youth, was, and in some measure still is, regarded as the most auspicious one. Favored with a well-knit body and a ruddy complexion, the sanguine seemed to surpass all the other types in natural cheerfulness, sociability, generosity and talents of all description; even his faults, a certain weakness for wine, good food and love, were of the amiable and pardonable kind.30
as Erwin Panofsky explained in his famous essay about Albrecht Dürer’s celebrated engraving Melencolia. A glaring surfeit of one of the humors presaged illness. What people feared most was the excessive activity of black bile, which could lead to insanity.
The proportions of the vital fluids in people’s bodies were amenable to regulation through proper diets.31 For example, an overabundance of humidity in the body was cured by administering substances deemed to be dry; and the other way round, the surplus of the dry element was supposed to be remedied by juicy fruit. A good cook was in a sense a physician. In Galen’s framework, “[c]uisine is to be understood as the art of manipulation and skillful combination, given that perfectly balanced foods do not exist in nature.”32
Healthy people were recommended balanced dishes. Some propitious combinations have stood the test of time and still enjoy popularity. The classic combos of ham and melon, or mozzarella and tomatoes reverberated with the wisdom behind the art of balancing the elements. The Italian historian of food Massimo Montanari stresses that such a concept of diet, informed by aspirations to equilibrium rather than any restrictive theory, did not separate pleasure from health. Well-composed menus served both ends.33
Since antiquity, roasting has been associated with barbarism, while the boiling of meat was lauded as the best method of cooking. In his The Learned Banqueters, Athenaeus censures Homer for his culinary habits: “Homer […] never made broth when he sacrificed oxen, nor did he boil the flesh or the brains, but he roasted even the entrails. So very old-fashioned was he.”35 Montanari illuminates this rivalry of techniques through a classic reference to Claude Lévi-Strauss. Specifically, the clash of boiling and roasting ensues from a long-standing conflict between nature and culture, originating in the tension between the wild and the domestic and playing “an antithetical role on a symbolic level.”36 Given this, the selection of cooking techniques is not only a matter of taste, but also an ideologically dictated decision. If the point is to dissociate oneself from nature, cooking is a better technique because it intervenes in products more incisively than quick fire-roasting.37 In Food Is Culture, Montanari explains that “boiling ‘mediates’ through water the relationship of fire and food and necessitates the use of a container-utensil – namely a manufactured object that typically represents ‘culture’ – thus tending to take on symbolic meanings more directly linked to the notion of ‘domestication.’”38 The dialectics of the boiled and the roasted breeds two further division, according to Montanari. One of them is the distinction between the cuisine of the poor and the cuisine of the rich, and the other, the gap between women’s cooking and men’s cooking. Boiling in a pot is more economical, which can be understood in two ways. Firstly, the technique is friendly to meats of humble quality (and virtually irreplaceable for salted meat), and secondly, it
Today, fresh and less processed foods tend to be extolled. Light salads, crispy barbecued vegetables, fish, and raw steaks represent a healthy diet in vogue with the middle class.41 Roland Barthes’s famed essay “Steak and Chips” eulogizes rare beef: “Steak is part of the same sanguine mythology as wine. It is the heart of meat, it is meat in its pure state; and whoever partakes of it assimilates a bull-like strength. The prestige of steak evidently derives from its quasi-rawness. In it, blood is visible, natural, dense, at once compact and sectile.”42 This now classic dish of French cuisine made its appearance in Paris in the wake of the battle of Waterloo, ousting boiled beef, which was relegated to the position of rural food.43 In this way, to apply Montanari’s insights and terminology, the electrolyte levels evened out in French cuisine, as urban civilization was offset by fresh blood, and the rhythms of nature dominating in the country found a counterpoint in long-lasting boiling in which meat became soft and its fibers fell apart. Barthes discerns a corresponding process: “And just as wine becomes for a good number of intellectuals a mediumistic substance which leads them towards the original strength of nature, steak is for them a redeeming food, thanks to which they bring their intellectualism to the level of prose and exorcize, through blood and soft pulp, the sterile dryness of which they are constantly accused.”44
The city-country opposition echoes in the division between popular cuisine and erudite cuisine.
2
The President of France François Mitterrand had at his disposal a host of chefs working at the official kitchen of the Élysée Palace, but he hired a personal cook in 1988. The position was obtained by Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch, who had grown up in Périgord, a region famous for its truffles and foie gras, but who was an ordinary villager with no formal training, as Mitterrand expressly requested.45 She was the first and the only woman to cook at the president’s official residence. She was explicitly tasked with making traditional French dishes in the style that the seventy-seven-year-old Mitterrand remembered from his family home. For several months, Mazet-Delpeuch took care of the private meals eaten by Mitterrand and his friends, who were sometimes joined by heads of states.
She resigned, unable to cope with the tensions and unfriendliness which marred her work. This episode may be explored as a clash of two paradigms: amateur female cooking linked to private cuisine and professional male cooking bound up with official cuisine. Jean-François Revel’s insights come in handy at this point to illumine the core of the conflict. His study Culture and Cuisine: A Journey through the History of Food revolves around a rift between two approaches to cooking; he refers to one of them as popular cuisine and to the other as erudite cuisine.46 That the two were pitted against each other may have resulted from historical necessity, since, as Revel argues, “[t]he history of gastronomy is nothing more nor less than a succession of exchanges, conflicts, quarrels, and reconciliations between everyday cuisine and the high art of cuisine.”47
[popular cuisine] has the advantage of being linked to the soil, of being able to exploit the products of various regions and different seasons, in close accord with nature, of being based on age-old skills, transmitted unconsciously by way of imitation and habit, of applying methods of cooking patiently tested and associated with certain cooking utensils and recipients prescribed by a long tradition.48
Popular cuisine likes peaceful regularity. It embodies the spirit of the region, serves as a link that unites local communities, and its recipes and techniques form a cultural code which is intuitively deciphered by locals and opaque to outsiders.49 Some dishes are so intimately fused with places that they either cannot be cooked or taste different, if not downright worse, elsewhere. This simple truth is amply borne out by Calabrian cuisine, which defies any geographical transfer, because its vegetable dishes and pasta sauces use an endemic species of onion. Oval-shaped, loosely structured, and mild-tasting, the onion, which Italians call cipolla di Tropea (Tropea onion), thrives in the fields of Vibo Valentia, which stretch along the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea. This red onion variety is very fragile and travels badly, so to enjoy the unique flavors of Calabrian cuisine, one must venture far into the south of Italy.
Popular cuisine to a considerable degree hinges on what Luce Giard terms the action of the gesture, arranged in an
orderly series of basic actions, coordinated in sequences of variable duration according to the intensity of the effort required, organized on a model learned from others through imitation (someone showed me how to do it), reconstituted from memory (I saw it done this way), or
established though trial and error based on similar actions (I ended up figuring out how to do it).50
The effects of efforts involved in everyday cooking depend on how adeptly one matches gestures with tasks and one’s proficiency in them. The fine-tuning of techniques is not a value in and of itself, since, unlike in erudite cuisine, innovation and originality matter far less than the preservation of the best flavors and the continuity of the tradition. The heritage is coupled with inventiveness, and history reinforces education in order to make the gesture effective and construct a sprawling network of culinary practices: “Doing-cooking thus rests atop a complex montage of circumstances and objective data, where necessities and liberties overlap, a confused and constantly changing mixture through which tactics are invented, trajectories carved out, and ways of operating individualized.”51
Popular cuisine must have been on Roch Sulima’s mind when he claimed in Antropologia codzienności [An Anthropology of Everydayness] that “boldness in the kitchen is far rarer than in the bedroom or in the wardrobe.”52 Popular cuisine is a stable basis for its refined sister – erudite cuisine. Trained in schools, erudite cuisine is aloof and looks toward the future, undaunted. Fearlessness is one of its signature features. However, the sense of power that erudite cuisine cherishes would be less pronounced if it were not for the backing it receives from popular cuisine. Revel warns chefs against excessive self-confidence: “I shall add that a chef who loses all contact with popular cuisine rarely succeeds in putting something really exquisite together,”53 and reminds readers that “it is a striking fact that truly great erudite cuisine has arisen principally in places where a tasty and varied traditional cuisine already existed, serving it as a sort of basis.”54
Erudite cuisine eagerly abdicates its responsibilities toward the community and is not adamantly committed to guarding tradition, which provides a rendezvous point whence chefs make forays into the unknown. Tradition takes a step back to make room for “invention, renewal, experimentation.”55 This type
To sum up, (1) the logic of female cooking is founded on the local, the intuitive, and the emotional; it enjoys relative liberty, though it avails itself of handwritten recipe notebooks and familiar techniques; it revels in sizeable bites and hearty casseroles; and it aims to make one feel full, secure, and safely belonging. It is cultivated by poor people and in rural and urban kitchens, where mothers or humble family cooks work. (2) The logic of male cooking puts trust in the intellect and accuracy; it is inseparable from panache and a surplus of luxury; it is supported by modern technologies, pursues universality, and repudiates freedom and chance, which are only admissible at the onset of the experimental phase, whereas the final dish must be impeccable; it aspires to captivate and surprise.58 The outcomes of this approach were once consumed at royal courts and the households of the mighty; today, they are to be savored at fashionable restaurants.59
Inadvertently rather than purposefully, the division proposed by Revel produces an image of a hierarchical system. Indeed, while Culture and Cuisine neither offers any direct appraisals nor puts either of these cuisines before the other, trying instead to appreciate them both, the very terminology it applies
In this framework, Mazet-Delpeuch would be ranked as “what breeders call a half-bred horse: it trots but it does not gallop,”60 because she was indeed a family cook, albeit at a bourgeoisie home. Throughout the 19th century, the aspirations of the French middle class were steadily increasing, as a result of which the solidity of peasant cuisine merged with the refinement of aristocratic cuisine, bringing forth bourgeois cuisine. Mitterrand told Mazet-Delpeuch to cook simple but exquisite dishes. How his instructions translated into actual meals is evocatively illustrated by the menu of the private dinner the President and Madame Mitterrand held for the Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa. Truffes en croûte (the truffle season happened to be in progress) were served as the highlight of the menu, in the company of beef fillet with Madeira sauce, vegetables, and a souffle. No French dinner could possibly go without a selection of cheeses and a sweet finale, which on that occasion was provided by a “cocoa-grain-shaped sorbet with three different kinds of chocolate.”61
3 The Senses
The senses are essential to the relationship between the self and the world. The way in which the sensual body interacts with its surroundings underlies the division into the distance senses, which are also called intellectual senses, and the contact senses, which tend to be referred to as the lower senses.62 While sight and hearing promise objectivity due to their detachment from the object being contemplated, touch, smell, and taste are the subjective senses because they are not separated from the object they perceive. According to Carolyn
Vindications of touch were also propounded by later philosophers. Even though Descartes considered sight to be the noblest of the senses, he concluded that touch was “more certain and less vulnerable to error than vision”;65 George Berkeley found touch an indispensable prop for sight, as the latter failed to provide the sensation of “solidity, resistance, and protrusion”;66 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel similarly appreciated touch, because it “senses the weight, resistance, and three-dimensional shape (Gestalt) of material bodies, and thus makes us aware that things extend from us in all directions.”67 Yet, we would indeed be hard pressed to find any advocate of the objectivity of the affiliated senses of smell and taste among venerated philosophical authorities. In both cases, experience takes place within the depths of the body and prompts an instantaneous response of satisfaction or disgust. All such responses are private and based “on bodily instinct without reference to shared ideals,”68 The subjective quality of taste is also manifest in that we do not acquire an extensive knowledge of the world by tasting, or that is at least what most researches claim.69 Worse still, as Korsmeyer elaborates: “Inward directedness further
Henry Home, one of the host of 18th-century philosophers to investigate the senses, advised that art should not be mixed up with the inferior senses: “Of all feelings raised in us by external objects, those only of the eye or the ear are honoured with the name of passion or emotion: the most pleasing feelings of taste, or touch, or smell, aspire not to that honour.”72 In Home’s view, the difference between the inferior and superior senses lay in the way they perceived external objects. Aesthetic pleasure, which is anchored in sight and hearing, originates in the sensible mind whereas the lowly senses of taste, smell, and touch condense experience in the parts of the body where tasting, smelling, and touching take place.73 Home also denounced gustatory impressions as fleeting and thus incompatible with everlasting art: “Organic pleasures have naturally a short duration; when prolonged they lose their relish; when indulged to excess, they beget satiety and disgust; and, to restore a proper tone of mind, nothing can be more happily contrived than the exhilarating pleasures of the eye and ear.”74
Probably the most familiar and intimate of the senses, taste has traditionally been considered by philosophers to be the lowest of them all. At the same time, Christianity exorcised the pleasures of taste as menaced by the worst of vices – gluttony. In the Middle Ages, gluttony was deplored as the original and thus gravest sin seeing that the eating of an apple marked the beginning of the fall of man.75 Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that “[p]hysicality has often symbolized the limits imposed on human life by the fact that
The sense of taste fell victim to the dualist vision of culture in which body and mind, as well as in parallel matter and soul, were pitted against each other as mutual enemies. In this configuration, the mind was elevated over the body. This notion was disseminated by the greatest thinker of antiquity, Plato, who proposed that divine knowledge which we forgot at the moment of birth could only be retrieved by the labor of the rational soul, which he tasked with “conquering” the mortal body and managing the senses and affects. Knowledge and virtue were predicated on the taming of the flesh.78 Less stringent in his judgments, Aristotle believed that, as form needed matter, the soul needed the body. “[T]he soul seems to be stretched out and stuck on to all the sensitive members of the body,”79 he pictorially rendered the relationship of the two in the Exhortation to Philosophy. Still, in assessing the role of the senses and privileging the mind, Aristotle did not differ from Plato: “of the senses, the sight is by necessity the most valuable and honorable, and intelligence is more valuable than it and all the others, and more valuable than living, intelligence is more authoritative than truth; hence the main pursuit of all humans is to be intelligent.”80
The notions traceable back to antiquity continue to enjoy considerable authority today. “For many persons an aura of mingled awe and unreality encompasses the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘ideal’ while ‘matter’ has become by contrast a term of depreciation, something to be explained away or apologized for,”81 Dewey pointed out, and his observation is still relevant. This is evinced by the fact that parallel concepts surface, for example, in the vigorously
4 The Senses and Gender
In her exploration of sensory hierarchies, Korsmeyer aims to reveal their latent dynamic, which helps sustain the belief that culturally entrenched divisions are neutral. In an attempt to explain why neither food nor the act of tasting and ingesting has attracted interest from philosophers, Korsmeyer inscribes her considerations in gender discourse and brings the “gender” coloring of dualistic divisions into spotlight. This approach enables her not only to produce an account of the evaluative processes which have contributed to the hierarchical order, but also to clarify the mechanisms behind these processes. She agrees with the performance theorist Peggy Phelan that “gender has been, and continues to be a fundamental category for the organization of culture.”83 The category in fact underpins the binary oppositions which have organized and continue to organize philosophical thinking and social hierarchies. As Korsmeyer stresses, the endorsed system of divisions “has spawned a preference for reason over emotion, mind over body, abstraction over particularity, and so on, systematically linking the ‘superior’ term (mind, reason, abstraction) over its supposedly subordinate counterpart (body, emotional sensibility, particularity),”84 and, consequently, contrasting the attributes of the male realm with those ascribed to the female domain.85
As a result of the dismissive attitude to the bodily senses, the study of them has tended to be cursory and superficial, often yielding misconceptions. Korsmeyer sets forth to redress some of the errors with which the appraisals of the sense of taste are infested. She questions the prevalent notion that taste is subjective, which drives the exclusion of taste from the realm of knowledge, morality, and also art. Korsmeyer professes that food may fulfil a range
For a lot of chefs, menus are multi-layered communications which eaters receive through the sense of taste, but also take in intellectually, engaging their knowledge and sense of humor. Meals at Central, the best restaurant in South America, and Osteria Francescana, the best European restaurant, are supposed to ensure exquisite gustatory sensations and, besides, teach geography and history.86 The skills and competencies of chefs and the restaurants they manage are evaluated by their guests and reviewed by specialized food critics, whose opinions affect the popularity of the venues. The flourishing of the culinary criticism sector belies the belief that taste is a purely private matter.
The representational function of food is particularly conspicuous in rituals and ceremonies, when “what we eat and drink is put to use in our commerce with the world around us.”87 The severance of taste from the instinctual sphere is most emphatically demonstrated in the Eucharist. By putting the holy substance inside their bodies, believers underline their complete unity with Christ: “This bodily aspect imparts to taste a peculiar and profound intimacy that can lend to eating a depth of participatory meaning wherein one attains insight through the very act of tasting and eating.”88 Spiritual and symbolic dimensions are also pronounced in meals served during religious festivals. For instance, the Christmas Eve supper and the Easter breakfast hold a very special position in the Polish tradition, as the sensual pleasure of feasting is replete with religious, social and personal meanings. Some of the dishes are directly associated with religious symbolism; for example, the fish, which are the central course of the Christmas Eve supper, symbolize Christ, and the number of
Korsmeyer does not negate the subjective dimension of taste, but she highlights its cultural and social anchoring, which results in sharing the experience of tasting and making it “as communicable as more standard aesthetic judgments,” and open to debate and assessment.89
5 Towards Integration
In the previous chapter, I discussed the fraught relation between aesthetic and gastronomic taste, a sometimes dramatic tension which cast a long shadow on the constitution of aesthetics in the 18th century. Is it at all possible to bridge the yawning gap between appetite and aesthetics? Can the distance between the two be reduced, or, perhaps more pertinently, should it be reduced?
Importantly, when Immanuel Kant made an absolute distinction between pleasure originating in the body and pleasure stemming from contact with beauty, the relationship between cuisine, aesthetics, and knowledge was not as strained in France. The connection between taste and scientific knowledge on the one hand and aesthetics on the other was not entirely disrupted in early French modernity.90 Gastronomes enjoyed a position comparable with researchers in other disciplines: “The gourmet’s tongue and palate were precision instruments, capable of generating the connaissances, or experiential knowledge, upon which sçavoir, or true knowledge, was founded. Then as now, the word ‘taste’ denoted both a physiological faculty and the power of discrimination.”91 The gourmet knew how to tell good wine from bad wine. Cultivated
Physiological taste, moral taste, and taste involved in judgments about art were highly appreciated in Paris in the 18th century. However, while the latter two were extensively studied, the taste responsible for culinary sensations remained underexamined.93 Despite this disproportion, as Emma C. Spary argues, ideas about the proper ways of perfecting physiological taste were forged in the mid-18th century, in parallel to those pertaining to aesthetic taste. What the gustatory and the aesthetic had in common was the recommendation of “moderation.” In Théorie des sentiments agréables, Louis-Jean Lévesque de Pouilly champions moderation as a desirable state both in morality and in physical existence. A rational hedonist was expected to possess a considerable knowledge of nutrition, promoting conscious choices and pleasures unalloyed with the risk of “overdosing.” To attain the status of a competent culinary judge was anything but easy, just as it was not easy to keep the desirous body and the pronouncements of reason finely poised: “This corporeal balance or harmony was characteristic of the construction of the connoisseur as a person of taste in both the sensible and the aesthetic domains, as an individual in whom the exercise of reason over the passions, mind over body, was perfected to yield a lifestyle of calm philosophical pleasure.”94 This harmony was not conceived as a mere metaphor. For example, Spary cites theories of Étienne Laureault de Foncemagne, who claimed that flavors could be harmonized the way sounds and colors were harmonized. His views were shared by the monk Polycarpe Poncelet, who studied the art of distilling liquors to conclude that “flavors consist of the vibrations of varying strengths of salts which act on the sense of taste”; consequently, “there can be a Music for the tongue and the palate, just as there is one for the ears.”95 The overall aim was to concoct harmonious flavors and a balanced body, that is, to “produce agreeable sensation in the soul.”96
Since corporeal and spiritual taste both depend on the conformation of the organs [which are] destined to operate their diverse sensations, the acuity of these two sorts of taste reliably proves the acuity of their respective organs. Could one not rise from the corporeal taste to a very delicate principle which it would, in some sense, have in common with purely spiritual taste?97
Foncemagne warned against individuals who never found anything to their liking. He claimed that as the tongues of such people were inflexible and worn out, they needed very strong stimuli to activate their senses. Such people were better avoided, because the symptoms of their bodily enfeeblement could have a graver origin, such as “moral shortcoming and weak reason.”98 Any overstimulation of these senses could have no other culmination than overindulgence and the hazards of inebriety, voraciousness, and lechery.99
The attempts to abolish divisions as outlined above were essentially flawed. Gourmets affiliated with artists and scholars were exclusively male. As Korsmeyer amply demonstrates, if culture is thoroughly organized and value-judged from the masculine perspective, it is inevitably desultory to the feminine sphere. The ramifications of this imbalance, however, stretch beyond that. For example, Juhani Pallasmaa argues that the ocularcentric “male” cultural orientation has engendered alienating tendencies in architecture, which have culminated in modernist design. Modernist design has for the most part “housed the intellect and the eye, but has left the body and the other senses, as well as our memories, imagination and dreams, homeless.”100 Almost a century earlier, John Dewey lamented the sterility of culture caused by the dread of the body: “The elevation of the ideal above and beyond the immediate sense has operated not only to make it pallid and bloodless, but it has acted, like a conspirator with the sensual mind, to impoverish and degrade all things of direct experience.”101 A culture that nurtures contempt for the body is powered by a fear of “what life may bring forth.”102 In a culture that is apprehensive of the
6 Art and Life
Let us examine the division into art and life, the last of the distinctions suggested in this chapter. Can life and art meet? And, more specifically, can a meal be a work of art, and eating an aesthetic experience?
Korsmeyer’s answer to this question is strictly negative. She states that the aesthetic value of food is bound up with the recognition of its representational and expressive roles, but the identification of these dimensions of meals (something she herself does) is a necessary but insufficient condition of equating a cook with an artist.
Korsmeyer offers a vindication of the aesthetic status of victuals, but this is not tantamount to asserting that the preparation and consumption of food should be counted among forms of art. In her view, food is not classifiable in the category of fine art. The reason is that the notion of fine art is inextricable from the idea of the autonomy of art, and as such does not correspond to the act of eating, in which complete unity is accomplished. Food may come in a visually attractive form, but it operates differently than works of art, since “[e]ating is an inescapably cyclic and repetitive process.”103
Even the blatant fact that there are artistic projects which pivot on food and cooking does not make Korsmeyer change her mind. Female artists frequently rely on the language of cooking or dining to articulate their views on an array of social and political issues. When foodstuffs are incorporated into artworks, temporality and inevitable destruction in the process of ingestion are deliberately foregrounded as features of eating. Korsmeyer observes that female artists who evoke the sense of taste in their works aspire to undermine the artistic ideals of autonomy, genius, perfection, and enduring value. Taste is thus a convenient medium for pursuing a variety of goals, which nevertheless do not entail, as Korsmeyer underscores, an urge “to rescue taste from philosophical neglect nor to raise cooking to the standing of art.”104
Nor does this approach provide a strong foothold from which to dispute all the mistakes summed up under the dismissal of taste as too subjective for philosophical attention. The symbolic, representational, expressive, cognitive roles for food do indeed have a parallel with the values manifest in fine art. […] That is, food has aesthetic importance in its own right and need not borrow status from art.106
To sum up, Korsmeyer advocates the incorporation of the sense of taste into aesthetics, but she sees no point in encroaching upon the autonomy of art as a criterion for defining fine arts. Nonetheless, this conclusion does not strip eating and cooking from the prospect of being deemed meaningful and profound experiences within what we call art. For these prospects to materialize, we must abandon the notions minted in the 18th century and adopt a perspective that brings into relief the dynamic and processual quality of art as experience. This mission is embarked on by pragmatist aesthetics, which will serve as my major framework throughout this book.
Peter G. Whitehouse explains that there is no full-fledged theory of emotion in Art as Experience. Dewey relies in it on his prior psychological writings, in which he developed a theory of a unified act. Peter G. Whitehouse, “The Meaning of ‘Emotion’ in Dewey’s Art as Experience,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 3, no. 2 (Winter 1978): 156.
John Dewey, Art as Experience (London: Perigee, 2005), 44.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 44.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 15.
This concept revises the earlier idea that social bonds were originally modeled upon sexual relations. Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2009). I discuss this issue in more detail in “Community around the Table” in this volume.
Alice B. Toklas, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 100.
Toklas, Cookbook, 29–30.
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl van Echten (New York: Vintage, 1990), 7.
Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 8.
See Madeleine Ferrières, “Jedzenie,” in Codzienność dawnej Francji. Życie i rzeczy w czasach ancien régime’u (L’ancienne France au quotidien: la vie et les choses de la vie sous l’Ancien Régime), ed. Michel Figeac, trans. Dorota Sieńko (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Pałacu Króla Jana iii w Wilanowie, 2015), 186–88.
Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food, trans. Anthea Bell (Malden, MA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 101.
Qtd. in Florent Quellier, Łakomstwo: Historia grzechu głównego (Gourmandise: histoire d’un péché capital), trans. Beata Spieralska (Warszawa: Bellona, 2013), 81.
Paul Connerton cites Erasmus’s views from the widely read treatise De civitate morum puerilium (1530): “Some people, says Erasmus, devour food rather than eat it. They behave as if they were thieves wolfing their booty or as if they were about to be carried off to prison. They put their hands into the dishes when they are scarcely seated and push so much into their mouths at once that their cheeks bulge like bellows. They eat and drink without even pausing, not because they are hungry or thirsty but because they can control their movements in no other way.” Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 82. Connerton associates the pressure on civilizing table manners with the development of societies which sought to increase social control and appreciated those who perfected their self-control. See Connerton, How Societies Remember, 82–84.
Philip Shano, “Dining with St Ignatius of Loyola: Rules for Regulating One’s Eating,” The Way 52, no. 4 (October 2013): 9–22.
Quellier, Łakomstwo, 91.
Quellier, Łakomstwo, 105.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 202.
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 21.
Silvia Malaguzzi, Food and Feasting in Art, trans. Brian Phillips (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2008), 109.
Ferrières, “Jedzenie,” 187.
Madeleine Ferrières, “Posiłki,” in Codzienność dawnej Francji, 437.
See Barry W. Higman, How Food Made History (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 156.
Ferrières, “Posiłki,” 436.
Reynald Abad, “Mięso,” in Codzienność dawnej Francji, 293.
Higman, How Food Made History, 156.
See Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life (London: Black Swan, 2016), 127.
Bryson, At Home, 127.
The unabating attractiveness of the theory of humors is evinced by, for example, a passage in “Steak and Chips,” a chapter in Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, which spells out the qualities of steak: “It is supposed to benefit all the temperaments, the sanguine because it is identical, the nervous and lymphatic because it is complementary to them.” Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1991), 62.
Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, trans. Harris Rackham (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press/William Heinemann Ltd., 1981), Book 7, 1239b. The Perseus Project;
Erwin Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943), 158.
Cf. Ferrières, “Jedzenie,” 187.
Massimo Montanari, Food Is Culture, trans. Albert Sonnenfeld (New York: Columbia University Pres, 2006), 52.
Montanari, Food Is Culture, 56.
Ferrières, “Jedzenie,” 187.
Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, trans. Charles Burton Gulick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), Book i, 12c, digitalized by E. Thayer;
Montanari, Food Is Culture, 47.
Of course, this distinction is of rather limited validity. For example, there is no doubt that aesthetically and technically sophisticated dishes of Japanese cuisine are products of a highly developed gastronomic culture, even though they use raw ingredients and do not rely on the transformative interference of fire. See Montanari, Food Is Culture, 31.
Montanari, Food Is Culture, 48.
Montanari, Food Is Culture, 49–50.
Montanari, Food Is Culture, 50.
Jean-François Revel notes that an aversion to blood is a common feature of peasant cooking. Jean-François Revel, Culture and Cuisine: A Journey through the History of Food, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Doubleday, 1982), 27.
Barthes, Mythologies, 62.
Toussaint-Samat, History of Food, 104.
Barthes, Mythologies, 62.
The story of Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch was made famous by Les Saveurs du palais (Haute Cuisine), a movie directed and co-written by Christian Vincent in 2012.
The division into erudite and popular cuisines overlaps with the split into the public and private spheres. It was no coincidence that restaurants came into being as the public sphere started to develop. Food stepped out of domestic recesses and entered the public domain. These transformations were powerfully precipitated by the French Revolution, which democratized access to the culinary art, previously the sole monopoly of the aristocracy. Today, the interpenetration of the two spheres is exemplified, for instance, by popular tv shows in which amateurs cook, documentary series about regional cuisines, and the burgeoning culinary tourism industry. The birth of the restaurant is informatively depicted by Stephen Mennell. Cf. Stephen Mennell, “Eating in the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Eating out in Europe: Picnics, Gourmet Dining and Snacks since the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Marc Jacobs and Peter Scholliers (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003), 249; Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 134–44.
Revel, Culture and Cuisine, 22.
Revel, Culture and Cuisine, 19.
Roch Sulima pithily encapsulates the role of culinary codes: “Like musical codes, culinary codes are among the most permanent determinants of collective, social, and national identity patterns.” Roch Sulima, Antropologia codzienności (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2000), 152.
Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 202.
Certeau, Giard, and Mayol, Practice of Everyday Life 2, 201.
Sulima, Antropologia codzienności, 152.
Revel, Culture and Cuisine, 20.
Revel, Culture and Cuisine, 20.
Revel, Culture and Cuisine, 19.
Revel, Culture and Cuisine, 20.
Revel, Culture and Cuisine, 23.
An insight into the experimentation phase at the Spanish El Bulli, which was rated as the world’s best restaurant for many years, is offered by Gereon Wetzel’s documentary El Bulli: Cooking in Progress (2010). El Bulli was open for six months, while the rest of the year was devoted to developing a new menu of thirty dishes, with the team of chefs led by Ferran Adrià perfecting the details of their flavor, texture, and presentation.
Revel’s division is still relevant despite the new fads in haute cuisine, which now tends to reappraise local produce and reembrace culinary traditions. The food served in Central, the best restaurant of South America, does not even remotely resemble anything that can be seen on the tables of the Andean folk, whom the chef Virgilio Martinez visits before launching a new menu. The processing of the ingredients, the refined cooking techniques, and the flamboyant interpretation of the tradition all make the purported inspiration barely recognizable on the plate.
Revel, Culture and Cuisine, 20.
Łukasz Modelski, Piąty smak. Rozmowy przy jedzeniu (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2014), 254–55.
Importantly, the status of the senses is not universal, and it varies across time and space. My argument is limited to the dominant ideas that contributed to the formation of hierarchies in Western culture.
Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), 12.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, ed. William Ellery Leonard (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1916), Book 2, ll. 398–408: “And note, besides, that liquor of honey or milk/Yields in the mouth agreeable taste to tongue,/Whilst nauseous wormwood, pungent centaury,/With their foul flavour set the lips awry;/Thus simple ‘tis to see that whatsoever/Can touch the senses pleasingly are made/Of smooth and rounded elements, whilst those/Which seem the bitter and the sharp, are held/ Entwined by elements more crook’d, and so/Are wont to tear their ways into our senses/And rend our body as they enter in.” The Perseus Project;
Qtd. in Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2012), 22.
Qtd. in Pallasmaa, Eyes of the Skin, 45.
Pallasmaa, Eyes of the Skin, 46.
Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 3.
Taste sometimes surprisingly becomes an element of tactile experience: “Many years ago when visiting the dl James House in Carmel, California, designed by Charles and Henry Greene, I felt compelled to kneel and touch the delicately shining white marble threshold of the front door with my tongue […]. Deliciously coloured surfaces of stucco lustro, a highly polished colour of wood surfaces also present themselves to the appreciation of the tongue.” Pallasmaa, Eyes of the Skin, 63–64.
Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 93.
See Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics, 92–95.
Henry Home of Kames, Elements of Criticism, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, A. Constable & Company and J. Fairbairn [successor to Mr Creech], 1817), 29.
Home, Elements of Criticism, 3.
Home, Elements of Criticism, 3.
Cf. Malaguzzi, Food and Feasting, 44.
Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics, 88.
Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics, 9.
See Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste, 13.
Aristotle, Protrepticus or Exhortation to Philosophy (Citations, Fragments, Paraphrases, and Other Evidence), ed. and trans. D. S. Hutchinson and Monte Ransome Johnson (2017), 42;
Aristotle, Protrepticus, 37.
Dewey, Art and Experience, 5.
See Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (Utrecht: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 86; Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal,” in Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, 2nd edition (Lanham Boulder, New York, and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), 262–83.
Qtd. in Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics, 5.
Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics, 84.
See Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics, 94–5.
The menu proposed by Virgilio Martinez (Central) reflects the diversity of ecosystems in Peru. Massimo Bottura (Osteria Francescana) develops innovative recipes based on traditional Italian ingredients. His most famous dish was “five ages of Parmigiano Reggiano in five different textures and temperatures,” devoted to the best known cheese of the Emilia-Romagna.
Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics, 96.
Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics, 97.
Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics, 98.
The relationship between and separation of science (science) and sçavoir (knowledge, know-how) are discussed by Amy Wygant, “La Mesnardiére and the Demon,” in Le Savoir au xviie Siecle: Actes du 34e congrès annuel de la North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature, ed. John D. Lyons and Cara Welch (Tübingen: Gunther Narr Verlag, 2003).
Emma C. Spary, Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670–1760 (Chicago, IL, and London, UK: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 196.
Spary, Eating the Enlightenment, 199.
Spary, Eating the Enlightenment, 196.
Spary, Eating the Enlightenment, 223.
Qtd. in Spary, Eating the Enlightenment, 225.
Qtd. in Spary, Eating the Enlightenment, 225.
Qtd. in Spary, Eating the Enlightenment, 225.
Spary, Eating the Enlightenment, 226.
See Gigante, Taste, 3.
Pallasmaa, Eyes of the Skin, 22.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 32.
Dewey, Art as Experience, 23.
Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics, 99.
Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics, 101–102.
This strategy is epitomized by Elizabeth Telfer’s widely read Food for Thought: Philosophy and Food (London: Routledge, 1996).
Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics, 100.