Food Matters: Alonso Quijano's Diet and the Discourse of Food in Early Modern Spain by Carolyn A. Nadeau

Reviewed by: Food Matters: Alonso Quijano's Diet and the Discourse of Food in Early Modern Spain by Carolyn A. Nadeau John Slater and Víctor Cervantes Nadeau, Carolyn A. Food Matters: Alonso Quijano's Diet and the Discourse of Food in Early Modern Spain. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2016. 306 pp. ISBN: 978-14-4263-730-6. With this book, Nadeau has created a tempting menu of roast meats, stews, cold salads, custards, and chocolate, to demonstrate that food was a powerful organizing force in early modern Spain. The sociological insight underpinning the book is deceptively simple: the better we know what people ate, the better we know who they were (or how they came to be who they were). The methodology Nadeau employs is deliciously complex. She begins with a literary insight related to food, generally from the Quijote, and goes on to ask historical questions about how the foods mentioned in the literary text were procured, how much they cost, how they were prepared, preserved, and seasoned, when they were eaten, and by whom. She then circles back to the literary text and places it in dialog with her abundant historical sources. The result is a wide-ranging and profoundly satisfying consideration of the ways in which food produces meaning and identity in early modern Spain. Food Matters is full of unexpected pleasures. Four of the six chapters are ostensibly dedicated to dishes or foodstuffs: Chapter 2 is about meat and bread; Chapter 3, salads; Chapter 5, lentils; and Chapter 6, poultry. However, there is almost no way to anticipate where Nadeau's curiosity and sedulous research will take the argument. Chapter 6, for example, starts with squabs and the "bodas de Camacho" episode from the second part of the Quijote. It goes on to discuss the diet of Philip IV (and the fact that 60% of the budget for his diet was spent on poultry), menus of royal feasts and the ways that banqueting permitted the performance of social hierarchies, sensuous feasts in the drama of Lope de Rueda and Ruiz de Alarcón (including the "gastro-humor" of La cueva de Salamanca), and the intricate relatedness of food, fantasy, orality, and sexuality. What starts with a humble pigeon ends up a tour de force of literary, historical, and sociological bricolage. One of the most helpful elements of this book is Nadeau's abundant reference to early modern recipes and cookbooks throughout Food Matters. She dedicates the [End Page 181] entirety of Chapter 1 to close readings of medieval and early modern cookbooks; she also provides a substantial appendix of recipes that show us how our sense of flavor combinations has changed. Salads, for example, contain no lettuce, while lettuce, for its part, is softened in beef tallow, stuffed with raisins and pine nuts, seasoned with saffron, boiled, and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar (225–26). Nadeau is careful to point out the ways that cookbooks did not reflect common eating habits; they almost never mention breakfast foods, American foodstuffs such as tomatoes, nor do they make much mention foods strongly identified with the poor, such as lentils. By carefully suggesting the ways in which cookbooks sometimes directed the development of eating habits at elite tables and, at other times, lagged behind the changes in Spanish cuisine, Food Matters provides a helpful understanding of the function of published cooking manuals. Chapter 2's study of meat and bread, read against passages of Don Quijote and the Guzmán de Alfarache, documents the fact that in cities and villages alike there was significant consumption of mutton, which was preferred to beef. This leads to a study of the Mesta (the association of sheep ranchers), conflicts between herders and farmers, and the state's "vested interest in all things ovine" (48). Curiously, Nadeau's examination of bread avoids any discussion of its religious and symbolic meanings, focusing instead on the ways in which degrees of whiteness in bread reflected Spanish social stratification. Nadeau's study of salads and pickled foods in Chapter 3 returns to the idea that food established and maintained social hierarchies, noting that "as one's social rank decreased [. . .] one's salad consumption increased...

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