E.C. Spary PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR EMMA (E.C.) SPARY obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge, and worked at the University of Warwick, the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin and University College London before returning to Cambridge, where she holds a lectureship at the faculty of History. She is the author of Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760 (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and numerous shorter pieces. She has also co-edited two collections of essays on the history of natural history and a volume on the history of chemistry. Currently, she is working on The Sciences of French Food, 1760-1815 — a study of the role of scientific expertise in the early production of industrial foods in France.

How did your interests in French food and the Enlightenment come about? How did you manage to intersect them in your intellectual life? Why in particular the French Enlightenment as the period in question? I am an historian of science by training. My first book, Le Jardin de l’utopie (2005) concerned the transformation of the old Jardin des Plantes into a Muséum d’histoire naturelle in 1793. So it was natural for me to continue my interest in French history in the eighteenth century. During the research for that earlier book, I had encountered numerous naturalists and chemists commenting on food and diet. But what most fascinated me was the problem of how scientific knowledge about food rose to importance in eighteenth-century France. My interest therefore centered on how scientific knowledge about food could grow up among these well-established forms of authority so as to rival and even overturn them. The answer to this was not self-evident: at the start of the century the only public food experts were physicians, as they had been since the Renaissance and earlier. By the end of the century the balance had shifted from traditional dietetics towards chemistry. To follow the rise of food experts in French society was therefore to move from one discipline to another. But it was also to ask questions about how and why new forms of expert could appear on the public stage, in print and before rulers. This was particularly true in France, where by the reign of Louis XIV there already existed an authoritative courtly cuisine. In a general sense it was also the case that in all societies, there existed and still exist well-established culinary traditions and eating preferences, coming from parents, peers and fashion, which are entirely distinct from science and medicine. My interest therefore centered on how scientific knowledge about food could grow up among these well-established forms of authority so as to rival and even overturn them. But at the same juncture, as is well known, there was a great takeoff in the consumption of exotic foods, indeed, in dependency on them, throughout much of Europe — as Sidney Mintz shows in his study on sugar. The problem of new forms of knowledge and that of new tastes for food, it soon became clear, were actually the same thing: how did people accept the need for something so novel? Why did they seek the new knowledge that Enlightenment offered, and the new foods that cooks and city merchants offered them? This of course made the choice of Paris obvious, for nowhere else in the eighteenth century brought together new knowledge and innovative culinary practices to such a marked extent.

Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760 BY E.C. Spary (University of Chicago Press, 2012) From the Publisher: “Eating the Enlightenment offers a new perspective on the history of food, looking at writings about cuisine, diet, and food chemistry as a key to larger debates over the state of the nation in Old Regime France. Embracing a wide range of authors and scientific or medical practitioners —from physicians and poets to philosophes and playwrights — E. C. Spary demonstrates how public discussions of eating and drinking were used to articulate concerns about the state of civilization versus that of nature, about the effects of consumption upon the identities of individuals and nations, and about the proper form and practice of scholarship.” Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution BY E.C. Spary (University of Chicago Press, 2000)

What kind of readership do you hope for Eating the Enlightenment? I suppose my imagined readership begins with a small core of historians of science with whom I am in constant debate. I also hope to reach those interested in the history of food, and suggest some new kinds of questions that might be asked about it. Outside that circle, I hope it will be read by others who are interested in the conditions of formation of new knowledge, and in the reasons why the history of knowledge is so often told about so few. For eating is something everybody does almost all the time, so knowing about eating is a reflexive practice — we all have to choose between sources of advice — and I wanted to underline the argument, made by sociologists of science such as Steven Shapin, that all knowledge-making involves routine decisions about the credibility of competing claims. Not all people may have access to specialist institutions or skills, but on a daily basis, all of us have to navigate a complex set of alternatives in order to eat well, and in so doing we are deciding which claims about eating are the ones to trust. It is fascinating to me that one can see this happening even in the eighteenth century. What were some of the challenges you faced during this project? The research for the book took a number of years, and during that time I had a child and changed jobs, so there was a lot of upheaval behind the scenes which made the writing process more difficult than usual. But the materials for the book were available in abundance, since it depended heavily on documents that were rapidly being made available in a searchable form. …the historian’s struggle, I think, is always to keep the balance between individual agency and the need to convey the bigger picture, in one and the same narrative. An example here was the online digitized edition of the Encyclopédie, which had recently become available when I began to prepare the book. Perhaps the most challenging academic problem that I faced was the difficulty of identifying many of the more unusual characters who feature in the book — often, they were not even the sort of people who would traditionally appear in biographical resources. I can’t claim to have had as much success as I would have liked in finding out more about the merchants, authors and café proprietors with whom the book is filled. One develops a passion to identify these individuals with more precision, because their writings survive and the impulse is to create a sort of narratorial identity for them, to salvage them all from forgetfulness and give them relevance. But it is also necessary to recognize that it is not always going to be possible to find out more about some unknown shopkeeper who had a café on the rue Saint-André-des-Arts in 1732: the historian’s struggle, I think, is always to keep the balance between individual agency and the need to convey the bigger picture, in one and the same narrative. My biggest problem of all, though, was laughter — I am embarrassed to think of the times I came across a story in the archive or a library which inadvertently made me laugh out loud. Eventually I came to understand that this ludic function of writing about food was not an accident, but was, for eighteenth-century authors, the essence of food qua knowledge. And for some this was an acceptable feature of knowledge, so that to include food among the possible objects of scholarly attention was a good thing, in keeping with the wish of many philosophes to craft a learning that was both scholarly and worldly, rather than being sequestered in universities or the Church. But for others food could not be the object of knowledge, because that would have the inevitable effect of satirising scholarship as a whole. So to laugh at these food satires and jokes was a form of complicity with the debate.

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.

I enjoyed the chapter, “The Philosophical Palate,” and in particular the section entitled, “The Decline of Taste.” Do you think contemporary “eaters” forget in general that food is a history? What are some ways to reconnect our tastes with those of past eras, or to situate our tastes in a different temporality?

E.C. Spary
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

I don’t think any eater forgets this. Every time they eat, they enact history. Every food choice is both the outcome and the production of history. However, food is not only one history, but many. This is why in the book I argue strongly against commodity history, which attempts to trace a continuous thread of meaning for a given foodstuff across time and place.

Foods are constantly being reinvented, and within individual societies they have a variety of historical meanings. These histories can be short or long term. There might be a history within your immediate family which explains why you do not like meat. Or you may have had contact with the long and distinguished history behind the modern vegetarian movement, which begins with Pythagoras (usually). Or you might appeal to history in the form of the degradation over time of the environment resulting from over-grazing to produce meat. For any of these historical reasons, you might decide to exclude meat from your diet. But even to say that you “never liked meat” is to create a history for your decision not to eat meat. The question is what provokes many people to act in concordance in the same way and thus for there to be a macroscopic change in eating habits in a society. This is the same question for historians and for legislators or analysts attempting to understand future trends or predict the fate of the meat product industry. It is the question that originally interested actor-network theorists in their attempts to explain how societies make collective change out of individual actions. As someone whose historiographical approach has been strongly structured by a concern with agency and power, I do see much public knowledge as being the result of collective action in this way. At the same time, collective outcomes — which are what historians usually take to be most important — cannot be predicted from studying individual action, or only to a very limited extent. This gives historians an advantage of hindsight which analysts and politicians do not possess.

I have doubts about the feasibility of replicating past tastes. There are two conditions which seem to me insurmountable, in the sense that we could never know whether we had been successful in the replication. One is the impossibility of following all the recommendations in cookbooks of the early modern period in order to replicate faithfully. Some cookbooks recommended that the best-flavoured kid came from animals nourished on aromatic herbs in dry landscapes, meaning we would be forced to find not only an organically reared kid of a breed identical to that used in the eighteenth century, but also one which had roamed wild through lavender bushes, say. This could be recreated, but only by those with immense resources. There are even some cookbooks which go to enormous lengths to specify the season, astral aspect, and time of day at which to harvest certain foods. What happens in practice is that the recreators of recipes ignore such information as having no bearing upon flavour, and use recipe recreation as a way of indulging a nostalgic desire for non-factory-reared meat produced in an eco-friendly setting. This choice of which attributes from history to select as the ones which determine flavour fits well with our current political sympathies, which is fine, but it does not give us a reliable guide to past taste experiences.

Every food choice is both the outcome and the production of history. However, food is not only one history, but many…. Foods are constantly being reinvented, and within individual societies they have a variety of historical meanings. These histories can be short or long term.

The second obstacle is that eighteenth-century eaters regarded their senses as the outcome of their whole lifetime’s experiences. Well into the nineteenth century, this view continued to prevail: the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul wrote in very old age that he had never drunk anything but water, in an effort to preserve his sense of taste in its full acuity. To taste like an eighteenth-century person, would you not have to have grown up in the eighteenth century? This might be literally the case: even organic foods and wild foods and our own bodies are now filled with certain industrial chemicals. These are affecting male fertility in every species worldwide; it seems entirely likely that less measurable things such as the sense of taste would have been profoundly altered by a lifetime of exposure to industrial chemistry.

So where historical tastes are concerned I am a radical relativist. I have no objection to trying dishes adapted from old recipes as an entertainment, but I don’t feel we can attain some authentic ‘experience of past tastes’ by so doing. There are just too many unknowable and uncontrollable factors involved. In the same way, I don’t see historians as writing “about the past,” but rather as constructing historical narratives which are more or less convincing to contemporaries, for a whole variety of reasons.

The interesting thing about recipes is that no matter how detailed they are, they can never exhaustively spell out all the conditions of production, like any set of rules or prescriptions. There is always space for manoeuvre between those rules and for reinterpretation from one iteration to the next. To situate our tastes in a different temporality? Eat a new meal. If you like, make it a futuristic meal. Novelty comes through creativity — in the story of Eating the Enlightenment, for sure — so to formulate and put into practice views about what a meal of the future would taste like is, de facto, to shape one possibility for future tastes. To recreate a meal of the past is actually to do the same thing — to innovate.

You also mentioned in the conclusion that your approach throughout the book is “closer to a poststructuralist reading of the ways in which individuals employ foods for self-fashioning, understanding such activities as part of a dialectic between agency and authority.” I am nonetheless tempted to simply ask: why do you think people eat what they eat?

Some of my answer to this question has already been given above by way of illustration. People are immensely complex, and they turn to a great many different sources in order to make an ultimate decision about what, when, where, why and how to eat. Most of their waking lives, they are bombarded with information from family members, friends, advertising, packaging, shops, restaurants, schools, doctors and the government. What I hope is that people feel able to eat for pleasure, because historically much nutritional advice has been about self-denial and risk, for obvious reasons. But there has tended to be a greatly inflated sense of guilt and anxiety about eating in consequence, particularly among women — I am not talking of eating disorders here, however defined, but of ordinary eating guilt. In reality we in the developed world have a better diet now than at any time in the past: we are healthier and we live longer than ever before, with hardly any diseases of scarcity prevalent among us. Of course, this doesn’t make us feel happier about our food! We are still just as anxious, just as bewildered as before, in part because we still experience the act of eating as a principal site at which the tension between our tastes as individuals and our membership of various hierarchical systems (kinship, citizenship, society, fashion etc.) is strongest. I hope that to show that these decisions were no more simple in the pre-industrial period is to suggest that we do have more freedom to choose what we eat than it might sometimes seem, as well as more choice per se. And that we are fortunate to have that freedom, immensely fortunate.

Do you cook? What are some of your favorite recipes? Have you experimented with any from past culinary practices?

When people ask this last question, I like to observe that the types of recipes I have studied in most detail include recipes for extracting gelatine from ox bones or making instant mashed potato —perhaps this is less true for Eating the Enlightenment than for my ongoing research, but I also am not convinced most people would be very tempted by ham buried six feet underground for nine weeks before being eaten. I was once tempted to try a recipe for strawberry marzipan…

To eat a meal, no matter how simple, that consists of the best ingredients and is beautifully prepared is an experience as moving as attending a wonderful performance of a beloved piece of classical music.

I do cook, I can cook. I prefer to write. My cookery has to be dishes that are done all at once in front of one’s eyes, with constant attention, such as omelets, or which can be prepared, then put into the oven for a long period with a timer, such as stews. Fatal recipes for me are those which require you to leave something for a few minutes on the stove. As soon as I put the lid on, a good sentence occurs to me for the end of Chapter 4… Half an hour later, I am wondering what the smell of burning from the stove can possibly be. So, as cookery is not my ruling passion, I don’t have the patience to develop the timing instinct. I do know several excellent, instinctive cooks, and they are the sort of people who will turn round and take the lid off the saucepan moments before the sauce reaches boiling point. It seems like a miracle to me.

However, I am an extremely successful eater. I love good food, it makes me happy. To eat a meal, no matter how simple, that consists of the best ingredients and is beautifully prepared is an experience as moving as attending a wonderful performance of a beloved piece of classical music. One has such gratitude, a sense of kinship with the producer who has — also miraculously — understood what will work and why. In that sense I am a part of the European gastronomic tradition, something for which my father, who took me to many good restaurants when I was a teenager, was responsible. He was a well-travelled man who spoke numerous European languages, and we lived in different parts of Europe, so I became familiar with the cuisines of Italy and Germany in particular — French cuisine was less familiar to me until I was older. It is from that upbringing that I retain a firm conviction that the best pleasure in good food is unmediated, experienced without a requirement to fulfil particular criteria such as fashion or the rules of haute cuisine. Homemade hummus and pitas in a New England country house have for me created as much happiness, if perfectly made, as lunch in a top city restaurant.

Therefore, I would not say that I have favourite recipes, as such. I have successful recipes, which I use regularly to feed myself and my family. What I have is favourite meals, remembered for some particular pleasure they gave me. And I am fortunate enough to have had a great many of those in my life.

French Cooking in Ten Minutes BY Édouard de Pomiane TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY Philip and Mary Hyman (North Point Press, 1994) Les Dons de Comus (1739) BY François Marin

What are some of your favorite culinary writers — both contemporary and historical? One who was a source of entertainment to me was Édouard de Pomiane (1875-1964), whose book I bought for some reason I cannot now remember when I was a student. I will always remember his description of a cherry clafoutis, long before I had ever tasted one, in which he exhorts the reader to turn it out and look with dismay at the blackened pastry made soggy by cherry juice, but then taste this unlikely finished product with delight. French translates very badly into English (I had to read it in English in those days) but de Pomiane’s glee at the emotional inversion involved in the transition from seeing to tasting was my first experience of the playfulness of French culinary writing as a whole, had I but known it. Food was not just about nourishment or even taste, it was about art and design. However, I must admit that as a rule I am not a huge reader of today’s culinary literature, though I do read restaurant reviews. Nor do I particularly subscribe to the cult of “personality” chefs. Of course the past culinary writers fascinate me, but less the well-studied elite gastronomic writers of the nineteenth century than the obscure cookbook writers of the eighteenth — about whom, even after my own (rather perfunctory) research efforts in Eating the Enlightenment, still virtually nothing is known. There are some recent doctoral theses on Parisian cooks being published at present, but even these researchers have found out nothing new on the widely-read culinary authors of the eighteenth century, people like Menon or Marin. To say that I found in the course of research for the book that several contemporaries attributed the authorship of Marin’s famous preface in Les Dons de Comus (Paris, 1739) to Voltaire, is perhaps to explain why I am particularly fond of that preface. Your personal favorite French food or dishes? A large part of Eating the Enlightenment is taken up with the history of the food artists in France — not only the cooks but the makers of prepared foods of different sorts: liqueurs, pastries, confectionery, the foods whose production required, or offered the opportunity for, real skill, talent and imagination. France is not alone in such bounty. Growing up in Italy and Germany, I took it for granted that there would be shops selling all kinds of diverse and ornamental breads, cakes, cheeses, chocolates, ice creams, sausages, even fruits. Food was not just about nourishment or even taste, it was about art and design. To return to Britain aged twelve was a horrible culture shock. In Rome I had eaten white peaches from gold-rimmed bowls of ice water; in London, tinned figs. That was what you could expect even in the best restaurants. Therefore what I love about French food is diversity. Being able to go into a local Monoprix and find over a hundred cheeses from all around Europe, three different varieties of basil and six of grapes, twenty different kinds of pastries, is a great cultural achievement. Elizabeth David writes wonderfully about the reasons for the de-skilling of British food since World War II, and only in very recent times have some higher standards crept back into Britain, so I am not quite so cut off from food pleasures as formerly. But for me gastronomic tourism is also a voyage to my own childhood, which is emotional. And your favorite cafés, bistros, eating addresses or food shops in Paris, or elsewhere in France? Oh, this is hard, because in recent years I have been a single parent. Whenever I have come to Paris lately, therefore, I have had neither the money nor the opportunity to eat out. When my husband and I were still together, we went to a wonderful restaurant, in one of the hilltop villages outside Avignon. So I will just mention that: La Table de Ventabren.