… and now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
It is assumed that a fully self-present moment of origination, a pure expression of unmixed and unprecedented intentions, usually lost to time, lies at the core of most any early modern …
How does that sentence end? Is it art? Photography? No. It ends, “most any early modern cookery book.”
Yes, I (and the author of this book) am sweeping cooking into the ever-expanding net of what can be considered an artistic endeavor. Is nothing sacred?
The book is Aquecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Injections: Literature, Culture and Food Among the Early Moderns by Robert Appelbaum. Here is the above quote in context:
… It is assumed that a fully self-present moment of origination, a pure expression of unmixed and unprecedented intentions, usually lost to time, lies at the core of most any early modern cookery book. Yet such an origin may well be not only difficult to find — given the difficulty of recovering manuscript material from six, seven, or eight centuries ago — but inherently mythic, a researcher’s fantasy. Even the individual recipe may lack an “original.” What masterly incipit can be found for chickens hunter style, say? When did the “livers and gizzards” get added to the pot? What about the egg yolks? When precisely did a roasted chicken steeped in liquid of a certain kind, with certain additives like livers and egg yolks but not certain other available additives (like onions or saffron), become “hunter style”? One will never find out in many cases, not only because the traces of origin have been lost to legend, but because the recipes themselves often function less as inventions sprung from the mind of a creator than as momentary codifications of sensual experience that afterward take on the appearance of original inventions. Although individual writers and compilers certainly play a role in recording recipe collections, what is first of all in question is less an invention newly strung from the pen of a master cook than an impersonal engagement in the process of a writing of a certain kind — something Jacques Derrida calls the function of the “scriptor” — though which a variety of codes referring to the production of individual dishes are assembled.
… Yet this advanced, elitist, and masculinist oeuvre is all the same a sweet science. It opens a window onto a system for adding taste, texture, and variety to the diet. It appeals to the appetite, to the pleasures of the table and of the community of the shared dish. It adds value to the meal and the necessities, biological and social, that the meal is designed to serve. Indeed, it adds meaning to the meal. The dishes have names. They have provenance. They have status. They come to the table not only as an item for consumption, catering to hunger, but as a distinctive product of craftsmanship or art. They may serve not only to gratify the appetite but to instill a sense of pride in what is being served, whether in the kitchen workers who produced them, the diners invited to the table, or the head of household presiding over the meal, all of whom may well invest a good deal of ego in the food they are involved with. The dishes, to put it another way, are tokens of a civility that has been encoded and encouraged by labors of learning. Situated in the midst of a practical culture where a certain range of products are available for use, where cooks will be brought up in the kitchen and understand basic operations, but where a certain presumably sophisticated form of cookery, with a certain range of dishes, textures, and tastes, needs to be transmitted and repeated, the early cookbook succeeds in providing the text, at once cogent, useful, and orderly, of a portable culinary ethic appealing to pride and disseminating civility.
There is also lots of yummy stuff in that excerpt that has nothing to do with art and everything to do with good cookery. [ link ]
-Julie
