Does the Foodie Have a Soul?

I'm pleased to report that one of my essays is now featured in the latest issue of Gastronomica: A Journal of Food and Culture. 

If you are unable to swing by Berkeley Bowl and pick up a copy, I've attached the article here. (You can also download it off my profile on academia.edu.)

Thanks again to all my readers.  I've been a little slow with the blog updates, but I shall do my best to keep regaling your palates with tales of calves brains and turtle soup as I power through the dissertation home stretch.

Histories of Bad Habits

It's served to us in many different styles - some more palatable than others - but we can’t deny the surge of historical interest in food taking place over the past few years.  Drawing on various forms of expertise, food history seems to be one of the few topics to connect the world of investigative journalism to the ivory towers of academia.  We would expect that historians, perhaps, would gravitate towards broad processes –– such as the spread of industrialization that gave birth to the grocery store and the tin can, or the culinary impact of immigration and the rise of ‘counter-cuisine.’ We might expect journalists, on the other hand, to unmask more immediate concerns, such as the arduous journey from farm-to-table or the politics of GMO labeling, compelling us to think twice about what we select from our grocery store shelves. 

But maybe our interests are more alike than we think.  The last two food history books I have read have grappled with several ancient yet still exigent issues in food history worthy of further exploration.  The first one, historian Dr. Emma Spary’s Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris 1670-1760 (University of Chicago Press, 2012) examines the animated debates about alimentary knowledge during the 18^th century, ranging from the physiology of digestion to the chemistry of alcohol distillation.  The book is written with a specialist audience in mind: rewarding reading provided one reads with a pen in hand.  The second, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Michael Moss’s Salt: Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (Random House, 2013), examines the understudied phenomenon of modern processed food and the political machinations of the industries that design and sell it.  The reading is as addicting as the Cheetos and Twinkies that he describes.  I picked these books up for very different reasons, but both, I think, raise important questions about our understandings of taste preferences, addiction, and the relationship between food and drug. 

1) Matters of Taste

Straddling self-preservation and leisure, philosophers and physicians have long considered taste to be the most enigmatic sense.  The Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius posed the question in the first century B.C.

Lucretius, Roman poet
and Epicurean

“Now, how it is we see some food for some,

Others for others …

I will unfold, or wheretofore what to some

Is foul and bitter, yet the same to others

Can seem delectable to eat?”

Drawing on the works of eminent French physicians and cooks, Spary examines the heated debates ignited by the rich, delectable flavors of fashionable nouvelle cuisine.  As culinary masterminds attempted to dazzle the palate with seasoned ragouts and fricassees, they also marketed gustatory enjoyment of them as a social virtue.  Over the first half of the 18^th century, she argues, physicians anatomically linked a delicate palate attuned to culinary artistry and subtle flavors to a lucid and productive mind. 

Spary’s physicians are essentially the ancestors of the food scientists today working at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, where the manufacture of gustatory delight is now a multi-billion dollar industry.  Moss invites us into this Wonka-like behemoth in Philadelphia, where chemists tinker with smell, taste, texture, and aesthetic appeal to design the cookie or soft-drink guaranteed to bring in the biggest profits.  I was particularly struck by the fact that heavy loads of salt, sugar, and fat do equally great wonders for texture as much as taste, making Wonder-Bread puffy, Cheetos crispy, and Lunchables chewy.  Indeed, seems like the processed food industry has whittled our flavor preferences down to a science. “People like a chip that snaps with about four pounds of pressure per square inch, no more or less,” one food scientist matter-of-factly reports, leaving me wondering whether the subjectivity of human taste preferences celebrates the individual as we like to think. 

2) Nourishing Bad Habits

Likewise, the relationship between taste and habit formation is hardly new.  The famous 17^th century physician Thomas Willis described the pleasure of eating tasty foods as a God-given reward for the monotonous and laborious act of eating necessary to keeping us, and the human race, alive.  (The same logic was also used to explain the pleasure of sex.)  

In his theory of two souls,
Thomas Willis (1621-1675)
speculated why food tastes good

Our understandings of habituation and addiction are quite different today.  As eating was necessary to human survival yet was also subject to the spontaneous grumblings of the stomach, “alimentary pleasure” Spary observes, “occupied a grey zone of permissible indulgence.”  So long as he could sublimate his appetite to his faculty of reason, the 18^th century enlightened eater was permitted to enjoy the delights of haute cuisine.  But not everyone was capable of handling these gustatory pleasures.  The aspirational parvenu and the coarse country brute, unsurprisingly, were most at risk of getting carried away.  The 18^th century science of addiction, Spary explains, therefore had little to do with the chemical composition of tasty foods themselves, but was enmeshed in the ideas of luxury, decadence, and indulgence that eating these foods presupposed. 

The delicate 18^th century ragout thus bore a striking resemblance to the taunting motto emblazoned on every bag of Lay’s potato chips: Betcha Can’t Eat Just One.  Moss, however, is less interested in the social forces informing the production of physiological knowledge, proudly standing by his oh-easy-to-hate culprits: salt, sugar, and fat.  It is the expert manipulation of these substances that induce people to inhale a bag of potato chips in one sitting and to (falsely) believe that their waistlines can get away with it.  I found Moss more compelling when he discusses the disingenuous tactics by which corporations have hooked populations on processed foods.  Virtually all of the food scientists he interviews –– the engineers of everything from Dr. Pepper to Lunchables –– do not dare touch the food that their employers unscrupulously market to our society’s most impoverished and vulnerable demographics.   When it comes to our habituation and addiction to the “wrong” foods, the forces of social distinction always seem to be at work.

Are the processed food industries mocking our lack of willpower?

3) Food and Medicine

Last, Spary and Moss both explore the relationship between food and medicine.  These distinctions are also thousands of years old.  In the 4^th century B.C., Hippocrates exhorted us that every doctor should also be a good cook, as pleasant tasting food was easier to digest than nutritionally identical food that was perhaps less pleasing to the palate.  (Ayurveda and many other forms of alternative medicine are gaining interest in the West because they operate according to a similar logic, discussed in a previous post.  Spary shows us how the medical categories assigned to food –– whether they are “addictive” or “healthy,” “nourishing,” or even counted as food at all –– are highly unstable and are constantly evolving.  While today’s food scientists might balk at classifying coffee and liquor in one alimentary category, 18^th century chemists believed the essential salts in both substances shared certain healthful medical properties –– “spiritual gasoline” –– that affected the brain and nerves in ways more alike than different.  Nutritional beliefs are shaped by far more than science alone, but also incorporate political, social, and cultural factors.

Tang Advertisement, c. 1960

But does this apply to Tang and potato chips?  It might be hard to believe that processed food had ever been touted for its medical properties, but Moss warns us not to forget that the 1950’s “Golden Age” of food processing once signified the triumph of American progress and ingenuity.  Tang, for example, fortified with nutrients, was considered an effective and tasty solution to the high cost and limited accessibility to regular orange juice.  Today, however, the gurus of food processing are singing a different tune, as Moss learns during his trip to Nestlé’s research center in Switzerland.  Here, food scientists keep busy testing potential state-of-the-art alimentary solutions to the obesity problem. 

The nature of their research, unfortunately, suggests that it might be too late.  We hear about new products like “Peptamen” ingested through a tube to feed the alarming numbers of men, women, and children that have undergone gastric bypass surgery to shrink their stomachs yet still can’t rein in their cravings for nutritionally devoid processed food.  Indeed, the new ‘science’ of medical nutrition seems to be suggesting that maintaining health and losing weight the old-fashioned way –– by eating –– might be a relic of a by-gone era.  This might be more serious than a capitulation to the obesity epidemic, bad as that sounds.  These new products suggest that the distinctions between food and medicine, which part ways during the 17^th century, might now, in the 21^st century, be drawing back together. 

I picked up both of these books for very different reasons, and I enjoyed both of them tremendously, albeit in different ways.  Despite the differences in subject matter and approach, both of these books illuminate the messy political, social, and intellectual forces that inform our knowledge of food.  There is nothing inevitable, both books conclude, about the ways whereby our food decisions take shape.  But both of these books open new questions about our relationship to food –– about consumption, about agency, about the politics of alimentary knowledge –– that show us that there is far more research to be done.    

In Defense of Gross-Out Foods

In 1687, Hans Sloane, the Irish born collector, antiquarian, and botanist, traveled to Jamaica as the personal physician of the newly appointed Governor of Jamaica.  

Hans Sloane: 1660-1753

Sadly, the Governor died the following year and Dr. Sloane, bereft of his noble patron and probably eager to dodge suspicions of medical malpractice, traveled around the West Indies for the next 15 months.  In 1707 he finally published a compendium of his observations about these distant English colonies, entitled A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, St. Christopher’s and Jamaica.

Many scholars have shared my fascination with Sloane’s book, and have analyzed everything from his attitudes towards slavery to his meticulous, semi-obsessive collections of insects and plant specimens.[1]  (Sloane was pretty much the quintessential early modern hoarder.  Yet unlike the people portrayed on A&E, his bizarre and compendious collection of curiosities eventually became the British museum.)

A 17th Century Map of Jamaica

My interest in Hans Sloane is slightly different.  I’m interested in what kinds of food Sloane encountered during his time in Jamaica and how these foods informed his impressions of the people he met there.[2]  At first glance, Sloane didn’t seem terribly pleased with what he saw (or tasted).  Take basic English staples: beef and veal.  Not only were these products terribly overpriced (due to the fact that meat rotted in a matter of hours under the oppressive Jamaican sun – meat markets were usually sold out by 7am) but English imports often tasted terrible to begin with.  This, Sloane surmised, had to do with the Calabash Tree Leaves that grew everywhere in Jamaica, which infected cow’s kidneys and milk to the extent that “Everything made of Milk tasts … so strong of it that there is no using with pleasure any thing made therewith.”[3] 

Neither could Sloane stand the cassava bread, so dry that it had to be dipped in sugar-water to be palatable at all.  (Sloane did acknowledge, nevertheless, that it kept men healthy in spite its insipid taste.)  The black slaves, cattle and poultry happily fed on maize (Indian Corn) but Sloane had qualms about its suitability for Europeans. 

Sloane wasn't a big fan of cassava bread
He called it "rank and poisonous"

So alien were these Jamaican foods, so distasteful were they to the European palate, that Sloane began to ponder the very definition of food in the first place.  After all, Sloane surmised, there was no hard and fast rule separating "food" from "non-food."  What was unique about mankind, Sloane reasoned, was his ability to extract nourishment from pretty much anything.  Good to keep in mind during a famine, “should it please God to inflict the like Calamity.”  Thankfully, God had also equipped man with the tools needed to deal with such situations –– teeth, spittle, digestive fluids –– enabling men to extract nourishment from nearly anything.  “[T]hough Stalks and Leaves afford no great Nourishment,” Sloane confessed, “they have sometimes kept many from starving.”  Indeed, Sloane points out, the hungry will even eat inanimate objects such as shoes and belts “soak’d and eaten” when man found himself in dire straits.

Even though the dietary divisions between man and beast collapsed under threat of hunger, Sloane didn’t see anything cruel or unjust about this inevitable state of nature.[4] “All these several differing Bodies; which, when no other are at hand, must be the Food of Mankind in the places where they are produced,” he wrote, “are … digested by the Artifice of Nature into good Sustenance to repair its Losses, and propagate its Kind.”  To the contrary, man’s ability to turn non-food into food was knowledge worth learning and passing on to future generations.[5]

But necessity alone does not determine one’s taste preferences.  [H]owever strange to us,” Sloane continues, strange and un-food-like foods “are very greedily sought after by those us’d to them. Thus Person not us’d to eat Whales, Squirrils, or Elephants, would think them a strange Dish; yet those us’d to them, prefer them to other Victuals.”

Sloane noticed raccoon-meat for sale in Jamaica
Ralph Beilby, A General History of Quadrupeds (1790)

Why, Dr. Sloane wonders, do people willingly eat foods that taste disgusting?  As Sloane wandered the towns, markets, and plantations of Jamaica, he recoiled at the sight of snakes and lizards relished by polite and supposedly “understanding” people “with a very good and nice Palate.”  Rats and raccoons –– bred among the sugarcanes to sweeten their meat –– were sold in local markets as good meat.  His Jamaican observations sent Sloane straight to his gigantic English library, where he found many instances of gross-out foods consumed throughout history. 

–– Ancient Greek grasshoppers “eat like shrimps.” 

–– Peoples of the East Indies dining on bird’s nests

–– Hottentots enjoying the guts of cattle and sheep

While 17th century scientific literature often attributed racial and cultural differences to the distinct climates of foreign lands, taste-preferences could not be explained this way.  The American Indians, displaced African slaves, as well as the ancient Romans apparently considered Cossi (Cotton Tree Worms) “so great a dainty” in spite of their distinct cultures and geographical origins.

But neither were new tastes so quickly learned.  Slaves from the East Indies were less desirable to plantation owners than the Jamaican born Creoles, Sloane pointed out, as the former arrived in Jamaica with a taste for meat and fish as opposed to a cheaper diet of yams, plantains, and potatoes.  

Are we in fact what we eat?  It’s a well-worn adage, but Dr. Sloane didn’t seem to think so.  In fact, precisely because the definition of food was so malleable, Sloane concluded that one’s dietary preferences should not be a pretext to classify, categorize and enslave other peoples.[6]  The Spanish very unjustly enslaved the Aztecs because “the Indians … eat Piojos [lice], and Gusanos [larva], and intoxicated themselves with their kinds of wines … and the smoak of tobacco:” incredibly flimsy justifications for extermination.  Sloane did not know how to explain the acclimation and habituation of taste preferences, but he knew that they did not conform to one's moral or cosmological worth.  Indeed, several scholars have pointed out that early modern conceptions of identity, such as race and gender, were far more fluid and mutable than we now believe them to be.[7]  Where does the sense of taste fit into the discussion?  

---

[1] See, for example, Kay Kriz’s Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies in Hans Sloane’s ‘Natural History of Jamaica’ in The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Jan., 2000), pp. 35-78 and James Delbuorgo, “Sir Hans Sloane’s Milk Chocolate and the Whole History of Cacao” Social Text (2011) 29:1:106 pp. 71-101. Sloane is often credited with the invention of chocolate milk, althought the “Sloane Brand” was actually invented in the 1750s.

[2] I share this curiosity with the high Tory satirist William King, who published a satirical send-up of Sloane’s interest in Jamaican food, entitled “Concerning several sorts of odd dishes used by epicures and nice eaters throughout the world” in Useful Transactions (London, 1700).    

[3] The Calabash plant was even rumored to kill horses by the fruit “sticking so fast to their teeth that they are not able to open their Chaps to feed.” 

[4] My favorite book about early modern famine is unquestionably Piero Camporesi’s Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) orig. 1980.  But while Camporesi focuses on the divisions between the fed and the hungry, emphasizing the latter's wretched, drugged-out, state ––  bran, for example, “soaked in hot water and formed into a bran mash for the pig-men, so reduced to wallowing as to resemble snuffling animals” (38) ––  Sloane focuses on famine as a natural calamity that men should learn to deal with their reason and ingenuity.  

[5] Sloane cites some well known “famine guides,” such as Joachimus Struppius’s Anchora Famis (1578) that advises making bread out of almonds, hazelnuts, and pine-kernels, as well as the work of the Bolognese cleric Giovanni Battista Segni, who documented instances of cannibalism in his work (1602).  talks about veg and animal productions made use of in times of famine – “most attentive and sensitive treatise writers on hunger and its excesses” -

[6] Lest we be too hasty with the praise of Dr. Sloane as an enlightened cosmopolite, I should point out that he married a Jamaican planter heiress and owned slaves.  Just sayin!’
[7] See Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth Century England (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004) and Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 

A Matter of Haut-Gout

Usually I like to cook, but the other day I home late and was too lazy to go to the store.  Luckily my neighborhood offers plenty of take-out options; I ordered out from a Chinese place down the street.  I had never eaten there, but it’s usually pretty busy whenever I walk by.  The Yelp reviews said it specialized in something called “meatless chicken.”  It was the most popular thing on the menu. 

I ordered the so-called meatless chicken, along with lo mein and an order of pot-stickers.  But when the order arrived and I swallowed a forkful, I found the dish a little suspicious.  The meatless chicken tasted unmistakably chicken-y – that part they got right.  It was chopped up into small cubes and the texture felt a little spongy, spongy enough to pass as tofu.  But it felt firm enough to also pass as chicken, chicken so heartlessly raised and artificially processed, I worried, that it barely qualified as chicken at all.  Could the restaurant have made a mistake?

#meatlesschicken #hautgout #deepfriedgoodness

The only way to find out for certain was to order the meatless chicken again, which I decided to do for lunch today.  (Note to self: they have a great lunch special.)  This time I was relieved to experience the same type of meatless meat I had ordered the first time.  I now believed myself to like meatless chicken.  The texture felt more assuredly tofu-like, and the flavor somehow less artificial.

Why was meatless chicken considered such a delicacy at this place? Yelpers called it a “specialty” that “brings me back to my childhood,” and “the best fake meat I ever had.”  The glowing reviews made clear that the appeal of meatless chicken also depended on a combination of appearance, taste, and texture: “tasty fried, slightly chewy goodness!”  A combination of sensory and social qualities made meatless chicken an acquired taste. 

What conditions must be satisfied in order to transport a food from the realm of the disgusting to the delicious?  Our enjoyment of food has little to do with just one taste or one texture, but food’s ability to conform to our expectations of what it ought to taste like.  Confirmation of the chicken’s meatlessness exhorted me to re-evaluate my former sensory observations. 

Has this always been the case?[1]  As some readers might know, I have been working on a history of food connoisseurship during the 18^th century, and I often find myself struck by the passionate responses that new edible delicacies aroused.  Take, for example, the dawn of the 18^th century, when well-to-do tables were invaded by French styles of cooking.[2]  The English found French cuisine distinctive for the culinary artistry that went into making rich cullises, dainty poupetons, the fricassees and ragouts.  The flavors of these new dishes were considered so strong, so peculiar and so indescribable that a new word entered the English lexicon to describe them: they had haut-gout.

Most French cooks working in Britain were male,
but this was the best picture I could find!

What was haut-gout?  Well, it’s hard to say.  While the OED traces it back to 1645, using it in the same phrase as a “pickant sawce,” haut-gout wasn’t exactly a flavor.  You won’t find it in an English cookbok. Even so, haut-gout connoted rich and highly seasoned properties that could not be described in words.[3]  For example, the pungency of soy sauce –- enthusiastically described in 1736 as having “the highest gust in the world” –– opened the taste buds to pleasurable new sensations.  Others, such as Jonathan Swift, were more dubious.  “If a lump of soot falls into the soup … stir it well,” he sarcastically advised in Directions to Servants (1731) “and it will give the soup a high French taste.”[4]  Because haut-gout didn’t represent one particular flavor, what it actually tasted like was anyone’s guess.  Tasting “expensive” could adopt a variety of guises, leading one to confuse it with the all-out revolting. 

 

Smell also wielded power over the likeability of various foods.  In the Comical Don Quixote (1702) the stench of garlic breath might be so bad as to deal a man a “double death” yet it added a “curious hautgoust” to one’s dinner.  Moreover, smell ensured haut-gout’s ability to invade personal deoderized spaces.  “I have some curious green rabbits,” a fictional French character observed in a 1719 play, “with an haut-gout that may be smelt from the forecastle to the great cabbin.”[5]

Finally, haut-gout was closely linked to the new textures of food.  Indeed, English writers dwelled upon the French sauce –– viscous, rich and pungent sauce –– that provided each dish a little something extra.  But what kind of meat swam in the creamy goo?  Who was to say that the meat was what the cook said it was?  How do we know it hadn’t spoiled? Sauce provided a dish a sense of artful mystery, but it also exhorted the diner to trust in the cook’s expertise and benevolence.  (Indeed, it’s no surprise that the saucier is still the highest paid position in a French kitchen.)  Perhaps our cultural ambivalence about sauce is innate.  The famous British anthropologist Mary Douglas noticed that “polluting” substances are often sticky or viscous.  Halfway between a solid and a liquid, sauces defy easy classification. 

But coming back to my original question, did we arbitrate between disgust and delight the same way then as we do now?  I have noticed that 18^th century ambivalence towards haut-gout often emanated not only from the strange sensations it elicited, but also from fears over where a new food’s enjoyment could lead.  Eating foods with questionable sauces or smells was believed to have psychologically addicting properties, inevitably leading connoisseurs to seek out new gustatory thrills.  Such an affliction could cause genteel eaters to consume substances that lacked culture or cultivation –– substances such as these dishes below.  So much for the civilizing process.  

This image, as well as the French bill of fare above
come from the Universal Journal, or British Gazetteer:
April 15, 1727

Post-script: By the way, the meatless chicken was ordered from Big Lantern –– 16^th street and Guerrero.  Try it out sometime! 

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[1] Over the past fifty years or so, scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds have

 written about taste and disgust.  The experimental psychologist Paul Rozin has published oodles of articles about preferences and disgust, famously linking disgust to fears of our animal origins.  In his lucid and fascinating book, The Anatomy of Disgust, William Ian Miller treats disgust as an emotion that organizes the social and moral universe.  I’m still searching for more work on transforming associations of disgust into associations of taste, so if you know of any work please let me know!

[2] The rise of French cuisine has been well documented by scholars.  For the culinary changes happening in France, see Susan Pinkard, A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).  For the reception of French cookery in Britain, see Gilly Lehman, The British Housewife and Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).

[3] During the late 17^th century, botanists became exceedingly interested in creating taxonomies of flavor, the most famous of which was devised by F.R.S Nehemiah Grew.  (I’ll talk about him in an upcoming post.)  Yet nowhere in Grew’s taxonomy or anywhere else does “haut-gout” gain any scientific elaboration.

[4] I’ve always wondered whether Jonathan Swift got food poisoning from a French fricassee, for he loved to mock Augustan food fashions.  The Modest Proposal –– which recommended turning Irish babies into culinary delicacies –– can certainly be read as an indictment of connoisseurial eating.  

[5] Thomas D’Urfey, The Younger Brother, or the Sham Marquis (London, 1719).

Virtue and the Vegetable circa 1741

Vegetable diets were primarily pursued for economical purposes
Note in this title the words "cheap" and "palatable"

Amidst the pidgeon pies, the shoulders of mutton, and the hindquarters of beef, I have noticed, dear Readers, that I have neglected the "Pythagoreans" –– very small minority of 18th century Britons who chose to abstain from meat.

Like I said, this was a very small minority.  The majority of so-called "vegetarian" cookery books advertised vegetables as substitutes for those who could not afford meat.  If you came into a few extra shillings, throw in, by all means, the veal cutlets/beef bones/tongues and udders, etcetera.

At the Huntington Library today, I ran across two rather strange references from the famous 18th century socialite and taste-maker, Elizabeth Montagu.  (Read my previous post about her eating habits here.)

On May 5, 1741, at the age of 23, she remarked that she hoped an acquaintance "may not get the cholick with his vegetable diet, as it turns to vanity and wind he will be too much puff'd up with it."  


Like most people acquainted with the pleasures of a good steak, young Elizabeth seemed pretty skeptical about the virtues of vegetarianism.  I mean, this is coming from someone who grumbled having her dinner hosts dump an additional side of spinach on her plate after she helped herself to a second slice of lamb.  Indeed, this is coming from someone who enjoyed "2 dishes of chocolate" (recommended by her physician) for breakfast.  But only a week or so later, she seems to have a change of heart.  In a letter penned to her BFF, Margaret Cavendish, she explains:

"Must I leave your Grace for such a trivial consideration as my Supper.  They have sent me some chicken, but alas!  Can one eat one's acquaintance?  These inoffensive companions of my retirement can I devour them?  How often I have lately admired the provident care and the maternal affection of a hen, and shall I eat her hopeful son or fair daughter!"  

Tending chickens was a symbol of domesticity
made popular by authors like Samuel Richardson

She goes on ...

"Sure I should then be an unworthy member of the chicken society, I find myself reduced to a vegetable diet not as a Pythagorean, for fear of removing the soul of a friend, but to avoid destroying the body of an acquaintance.  There is not a sheep, a calf, a lamb, a goose, a hen, or a turkey in the neighborhood, with which I am not intimately acquainted ... I can never describe how nor tell why, but they look a little awfull, and pish and phoo with a dignity age will never give me, really it is droll..." 

Should we see this as surprising?  After all, I don't know any girl who didn't flirt with vegetarianism at some point during her 20s (including the Authoress of this Blog). But who knew that such sentiments extended so far back in history?  And what accounts for this change of heart?  Did young Elizabeth remain wedded to Pythagorean virtues?

Lessons in Coin Collecting

What might a humble coin collector tell us about the 18th century meal?  In my last couple of posts, I introduced a new character to my worthy readers: Josiah Colebrooke, the punctilious treasurer to the Thursday's Club.

(New readers: you can catch up here.)

But I haven't yet figured out why he had such a bone to pick with the Earl of Chesterfield: the man who sought to enter the club based on a display of wit rather than a delectable edible gift, thereby going against the club rules.

Who was Josiah Colebrooke, after all?  An apothecary by trade, his long-standing membership in both the Society of Antiquaries and the Thursday's Club (he was the treasurer to both) suggests that he was dedicated to learning, self-improvement and the study of the past.

In 1776, shortly after his death, I found this document (to the left) advertising the auction of his most prized possession:  his coin collection.  Turns out that the guy had amassed a lot of them over the course of his life.  The document runs seven pages long.

The records show that Colebrooke possessed a variety of Roman, Greek and Byzantine coins, but the great majority were of English origin.  For a man of such dedication, I was surprised to find that most of them weren't terribly valuable; most cost between a pound or two: a respectable sum for the average guy, I suppose, but by no means a fortune.

I mean, Colebrooke was constantly asking his fellow Thursday's Club members to shell out a guinea (1 pound and 1 shilling) left and right to pay for all their "venison carriages" and bottles of claret.  His beloved coin collection would have been a pittance to them.  

(The priciest one, in case you were wondering, cost nearly seven pounds and is described as: "A very fine penny of Henry I, with the young face, very scarce.")

A penny of Henry I:
Who knows if this was  Colebrooke's most treasured coin?

I scoured ECCO for traces of Josiah Colebrooke, and found that he is remembered best for his accounting skills, his interest in antiquarian studies, and his coins.  But what might knowledge of his hobbies have to do with his obsession with keeping to "club rules" and his hostility to the Earl of Chesterfield?

A couple ideas:

In Colebrooke's letter of protest over the admission of Chesterfield, he draws a distinction between principles of admission based on substantial forms, such as may be tasted, and ephemeral, immeasurable things such as wit and humour.  Perhaps there's a parallel between Colebrooke's love of coins for their material uniqueness rather than their monetary value (otherwise, he wouldn't be collecting them!) and his privileging of ingestible foods over ineffable performances of "wit."

When venison was gifted to the club, it was served
as a haunch, as a neck, and in pasty form.

Additionally, learning a little more about Colebrooke's professional and social life makes it ever more apparent that he and the Earl of Chesterfield were born in very different social worlds.  Colebrooke was a guy with a day-job and no title, and ended up spending his free time keeping the books for the clubs he participated in.  In the same letter of protest to the club, he doesn't hesitate to single out Chesterfield's elite status.

"a nobleman chosen a member of a dining club for communicating a petition to the king, will appear very abstruse ... posterity will be at a loss, to know whether this petition etc was not a name given to some new dish of that nobleman's invention" 

Well, I'm not quite convinced that any 21st century reader would be fooled into thinking a "petition" was an Enlightenment delicacy.  Regardless, does Colebrooke suspect that the perception of Chesterfield's apparent "wittiness" is informed by his noble birth?  Maybe.  For even if venison and turtle were known as elite foods, they actually seem to level the playing field within the confines of the club.  After all, anyone –– nobleman or gentleman, the rules say –– may present them as gifts and reap the social rewards.  And once served up on the table, everyone is entitled to appreciate them.

We often think of "taste" as marking distinctions between individuals rather than bringing people together.  But for the petulant Mr. Colebrooke, it seems like the provision and sharing of food created for him a "common taste" that softened status distinctions within the society.

Meeting Questionable Standards in 1757

Did I mention that the year 1757 –– the same year that this conflict between Mr. Colebrooke and Lord Chesterfield went down –– was kind of a big deal in the history of "taste" among philosophers?

(For readers just catching up, my last post outlined a controversy within the Thursday's Club over the question of "wit" as an adequate criterion for honorary membership.)

For Hume, food was always
an apt metaphor
(Can't you tell?)

First, in 1757, David Hume penned his famous essay "Of the Standard of Taste," which likened the art of flavor detection to that of aesthetic judgment.  Both of these faculties, according to Hume, operated in the same way:  

Wherever the organs are so fine as to allow nothing to escape them; and at the same time so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the composition: this we call delicacy of taste, whether we employ these terms in the literal or metaphorical sense....

Gustatory taste, for Hume, was a particularly apt example of aesthetic taste: our faculty of judgment.  But virtually on Hume's heels came the publication of Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.

If sweet was beautiful, what
tasted sublime?

Does anyone out there in the republic of bloggers happen to know what Edmund Burke's favorite food was?  The Enquiry makes him out to be quite the sugar fiend.  Indeed, "sweetness," in Burke's opinion, was "the beautiful of the taste."

But Burke didn't hold much confidence in our tongues.  After all, he asked, how can we really quantify the quality of our taste?  Do we truly enjoy the flavor of foods in of themselves, or do we simply enjoy the sensation of feeling full?  Do we really like the taste of opium?  Or do we like how it makes us feel?  Depending on our unique physiological constitutions, the sense of taste could be relentlessly subjective.  

Did the members of the Thursday's Club draw upon either of these ideas when it came to the subject of Lord Chesterfield and his witty letter?  As I write this, I'm still not sure.

For it seemed like Colebrooke's biggest bone to pick with Chesterfield was not whether a "standard of wit" could be devised.  Why of course it could!  (Guess he wasn't much of a skeptic.)  Instead, he appears more concerned about what the antiquarians of the future would think.

"The great difficulty and labour under is, how this minute may be interpreted by some future philosopher  into whose hands this manuscript may possibly fall ... when a higher entertainment is offered to our understandings, unless the ingredients that compose it are specified, posterity will be at a loss, to know whether this petition etc was not a name given to some new dish of that nobleman's invention..."

It's always comforting to know that even 250 years ago, someone was expecting that I would come along and try to explain the wheelings and dealings of this club to the entire blogosphere.  But I don't really know whether Colebrooke, by saying this, is merely rationalizing a dislike for the Earl of Chesterfield.  If he's so concerned about posterity, what aspect of the club's prestige is he trying to protect? 

A Dash of Wit at the Dinner Table

The Earl of Chesterfield:
A potential honorary member?  

So I've been racking my brain going over this minor confrontation within the Thursday's Club that occurred in 1757.  In October of that year, the Earl of Chesterfield (the guy pictured to the right) wrote a letter to the king that was apparently so witty and snarky that his cousin (who happened to be a long-term member) proposed him as an honorary member of the club.

But this wasn't taken too kindly by Josiah Colebrooke –– apothecary, antiquarian, and the club's faithful treasurer.  After all, if my readers remember, honorary membership was only bestowed upon those who had graced the club dining table with a) a haunch (or greater) of venison b) a turtle, or c) an exceptionally large chine of beef.

And Lord Chesterfield had done none of those things.


What to do?  In protest, Colebrooke pens a long epistle in which he asks for a copy of the letter to transcribe in the club minute books.

Here's an excerpt:

"A nobleman chose a member of a dining club, for communicating a petition to the King, will appear very abstruse, unless a description further than the word petition implys, be added; every one knows the meaning of the words Venison, Turtle, and Chine of Beef, the things are objects of our senses, we know the tast of them, but when a higher entertainment is offered to our understandings, unless the Ingredients that compose it are specifyed, Posterity will be at a loss, to know whether this petition etc was not a name given to some new dish of that Nobleman's invention.  You will pardon my taking up so much of your time, but as my records have hitherto taken notice of Substantial forms only, such as may be tasted, Tho Wit and Humour entertain the mind, yet as it will be very difficult to express them in a bill Fare without giving them at full length, I must beg the favour of you to furnish me with a Copy of this Petition..."

A sense of humor is all fine and dandy, Colebrooke seems to say, but how on earth does one measure it?  Indeed, while the sense of taste had been shown to be utterly subjective in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the art of flavor detection seemed pretty manageable when set beside the art of conversation.

So what happened?  Alas, dear readers.  The five empty pages in the minute book that follow this epistolary supplication testify to the failure of Colebrooke's plea.

Hopes Thwarted, Letter Lost: Empty Pages 

Will Lord Chesterfield get into the Thursday's Club?  Does Colebrooke make an ultimatum?  And how do contemporary understandings of "wit" and "taste" in the mid-18th century influence the course of events?

Readers, there is much much more to this story, so stay tuned.