<i>The Gastronomical Arts in Spain: Food and Etiquette</i>. Ed. by Frederick A. de Armas and James Mandrell

Food as a ‘civilizing’ force is a theme found in the early literature that chronicles the Iberian peninsula’s landfalls in the so-called ‘New World’. Not only did the exchange of commodities fuel an appetite for knowledge but it also enhanced the epicurean palate on both sides of the Atlantic and launched Spain’s culinary hegemony. Food in Spain has been an open passport to universalize the country’s customs and assert its regional and ethnic character. De Armas and Mandrell make the case for convening food and text to delineate the trajectory of gastronomy in Spain within academic, institutional and popular domains. Ten essays, divided into three ‘courses’ or sections, span the fifteenth to twentieth centuries: ‘Foodstuffs’, ‘What to Eat and How’ and ‘Modern Appetites and Culinary Fashions’. The first course encompasses the medieval world of honey and beeswax production as symbols of spiritual nourishment in the Cantigas de Santa María [Songs of Holy Mary], followed by the early modern gastronomy of the stew olla podrida as featured in two prominent court cookbooks. Chapter 3, John Slater’s ‘The Politics of the Origins of Maize’, probes the role that this crop played beyond Spain’s territories. At the start of the second section, in Fernando Serrano Larráyoz’s discussion of the diets of the Navarrese ruling elite, we learn that during the first half of the sixteenth century dietetic prescriptions for maladies occasioned by the eating habits of the upper class often required personalized medicine that resisted the homogenization of health practices. In the process of alimentary acculturation in the same period, there emerged the publication of conduct manuals designed to fashion the table manners of the nobility. Julio Vélez-Sainz’s pièce de resistance examines how such manners in medieval and early Renaissance theatre – as it relocated from the palace to the public stage – served as a blueprint to communicate matters of decorum and the ‘democratization of etiquette and manners’ (p. 131), particularly as the ignobile vulgus appropriated courtly ideals of food and dress. The first chapter in the final course is a digest of Felipe V’s political and social discourse as mediated through the influence of Gallic food and fashion. Contributors to the third course also document both Mariano José de Larra’s costumbrista journalism about the traditional cuisine of Spain and the motif of food insecurity in Benito Pérez Galdós’s realist novels as proof of the transition from Romantic impulses to a nascent modern Spain. In the view of José Colmeiro in Chapter 10, gastronomic literature of the post-Franco era is embodied in the ‘palate of memory’, in which consumerism, history, belonging, ideology, science and production occupy accepted cultural spaces.

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