Medicine and Diet in Castile in the Late Fifteenth Century

This study is of the text called Opúsculo de cozinas. It was written by a French doctor, residing in Vitoria (northern Spain), and previously the doctor of the Duke of Brittany, at the request of the Duke of Alba. The treatise may be dated to about 1486-1487 and it is related to the illness of the duke, García Álvarez de Toledo, from which he died in 1488, and for whom the doctor, el licenciado Antonio, had previously written a consilium and a regimen sanitatis (health regimen). The brief treatise initially had five parts, but only one of them, the first, survives, on the subject of meat. It is not a cookery book as such, as its title might lead us to believe, in which detailed explanations of culinary procedures are given, but it is a veritable medical and dietary treatise in which the different varieties of meat are spoken about, along with the medicinal properties of certain exotic spices, aromatic herbs and condiments, with which sauces were made for the purpose of improving the digestive properties of certain foods that were inadvisable but necessary on the table of a member of the high nobility. The treatise ends with a brief section devoted to the way of carving different kinds of meat in the French style

Art · Art history · Carving · Fifteenth · Humanities · Nobility · Political science · Traditional medicine · Visual arts · Classics · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Historical Studies on Spain · History · Law · Medicine