In the book’s conclusion, you write, “Eating the Enlightenment calls for a historicist approach to be applied with equal enthusiasm both to satire and to physiology. In short, it calls on historians of science to attend more closely to past uses of language, and on historians of food to attend more closely to past accounts of embodiment.” This is a strong and astute observation that calls for a cross-disciplinary sensitivity. Could you elaborate a little?

L’Art du distillateur liquoriste (1775)
BY Jaques-François Demachy
PHOTO: Biblioteca Casanatense

Yes, the emphasis here is on opening up channels for communication between as well as within disciplines. One area in which this struck me in particular was while I was reading one of the famous Description des arts et métiers series. This was produced by the Académie royale des sciences during the eighteenth century to document the techniques used in the arts and trades. The series is a famous example of the emphasis upon utility in Enlightenment knowledge, and famously boring! Whether studied to reveal artisanal practice in the eighteenth century or as an example of the Enlightenment concern with “improvement,” the books in this series are seen as the ultimate in factuality. So I approached the volume on liqueur manufacturing, L’Art du distillateur liquoriste (1775), without enthusiasm but as a necessary part of my knowledge.

I believe that I read this whole work once entirely through in that way, as a factual source. It was not until much later that I realised it was actually a satire, from start to finish, written by a member of the guild of apothecaries against their guild rivals, the distillers. This got me thinking about how problematic it is for historians to assume that even a source that looks like a “factual” account in the early modern period can be relied upon to possess a single uncontestable meaning. Early modern authors used the whole range of scholarly forms, and were alert to the existence of multiple genres in a way that we are not. One had to know an awful lot both about the practice of distillation and the uses of print in the eighteenth century in order to make that leap to recognizing the book as a satire and not a factual account. But if this satire had gone concealed for so many centuries, then how could historians be sure we were not misreading other early modern sources in precisely the same way — with official and historical sanction? The only solution is for historians of early modern science to become far more familiar with the genres and styles used by scholars of the Republic of Letters. This has been done successfully for a rather earlier period, the fifteenth to early seventeenth centuries, perhaps. But in the eighteenth century historians are still looking for origins: of the French Revolution, of modern science, of the public sphere, of consumer culture. These issues are the cutting edge of eighteenth-century history, and they attract historians’ attention in publication and research, as well as in conferences. As a result, eighteenth-century historians like myself often don’t lay enough stress upon the older scholarly traditions and their continuing power as a means of communication right up to the end of the eighteenth century and beyond.

We no longer consider that we should know our own constitutions before choosing our diet, or that we need to cultivate our tongues before pronouncing on the goodness of foods…

In a similar way, I wanted to encourage historians of food to break away from a close focus on cookbooks or preparation techniques, and recognize that the view that historical actors held of their own bodies played a large role in structuring food choices and preparation. Humoral medicine, for example, was central to the knowledge that elite cooks and clients had about food, taste and appetite. Some historians, such as the late Jean-Louis Flandrin, did attend to this. For others it has seemed epiphenomenal to the history of cuisine, an issue that could be alluded to and then forgotten. Yet when we understand that still today, we add oil and vinegar to cucumber or salad because these substances counteract the cold wetness of cucumber — to cite just one example — it becomes clear how powerfully and in some ways silently humoral medicine structured cookery practices.

Early modern elite eaters did not need to have this explained to them because it was common knowledge. But for us, to parboil an egg or put some dressing on your salad is just tradition, custom, cuisine — it is no longer recognized as belonging to the realms of medicine. We no longer consider that we should know our own constitutions before choosing our diet, or that we need to cultivate our tongues before pronouncing on the goodness of foods, with the exception of wine. It is these lost forms of bodily knowledge that I hope to encourage scholars to place more centrally upon the agenda of the history of cuisine as a result of Eating the Enlightenment. Cookbooks can offer some quite sophisticated repertoires of engagement with the senses, not all of them about taste. For example, from reading a list of ingredients it might not be immediately apparent that the end result was to produce a pure white sauce — but only this makes sense out of the dish’s name: Vestal Sauce.