Food and Health in Early Modern Europe

The bedside menu at the US hospital from where I write this review would horrify a sixteenth-century doctor. The kitchen offers items ranging from fish tacos to eggplant parmesan, alongside grilled cheese sandwiches and chilled apple juice. Far from aiding recovery, such foods would be likely to provoke illness, in the view of early modern medical orthodoxy, as David Gentilcore explains in this delightful book. To begin with, there is no wine, an essential element in any healthful diet. Secondly, foods such as fish (cold and phlegmy) or aubergines (which ‘have a mischievous qualitie’ [p. 85], as well as being eaten by dubious types such as Jews and Muslims) could scarcely be expected to maintain a body in good balance. Cheese was best suited to hard-working rustics, not convalescents, and chilled drinks, too, were best avoided under most circumstances. At the same time, the hospital menu demonstrates clearly the persistent conviction that diet and health are intimately connected: like the regimens recommended by early modern health manuals, the menu carefully indicates which foods best suit different conditions. The juxtaposition of early modern and contemporary dietary advice thus reveals continuities and change. Then, as now, doctors lamented that patients ‘dig their graves with their teeth’ (p. 22), and offered prolix accounts of how to eat your way to health

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