At the First Table

Prisoners languishing in the gaol of the Spanish town Zamora in the early seventeenth century could look forward to few pleasures. Those awaiting torture faced a particularly bleak future. The only bright spot on the horizon was probably a visit from the Cofradía de Nuestra Señora de la Misericordia (The Brotherhood of Our Lady of Mercy). This pious confraternity provided anxious inmates with little cakes and biscuits, prior to their interrogation. Even if these small treats did not significantly improve the well-being of prisoners, Campbell demonstrates in this interesting and useful study that their distribution certainly helped the confraternity. The acquisition, dissemination, and consumption of food in early modern Spain was, she argues, “fundamental to displaying, imposing, and reinforcing collective identity and social relationships” (99). The confraternity’s prison philanthropy, together with its own more elaborate festive banquets, helped to consolidate its self-image as a group of benevolent, socially secure Christians.At the First Table explores the performative nature of eating exemplified in such vignettes. Food practices were central to creating the class, gender, religious, and institutional identities that structured early modern Spanish society; Campbell’s book pulls together the substantial but dispersed research on early modern Spanish foodways into a compact and readable volume. Individual chapters introduce the range and styles of food typically consumed, the concepts of the body that underpinned ideas about healthy eating, the relationship between diet and social status, and a range of other topics. Unsurprisingly, the book focuses most heavily on the groups that left the greatest archival traces, such as religious orders and other corporate bodies, but it makes a sustained effort to explore the full range of people inhabiting the Peninsula. Campbell gives considerable attention to women’s involvement in the marketing and preparation of food (although, curiously, she offers little discussion about enslaved people, either as producers or consumers.) Her overall argument is that early modern Spaniards “used food practices to categorize themselves and others” (50).The broad contours of the early modern foodways described in this volume are not unfamiliar. Few readers will be surprised that for the new urban elites, “offering large banquets, hosting privileged guests, and purchasing sweets and exotic spices were forms of social performance” (133). Rather, the book’s signal contribution lies in its wealth of detail about how early modern Spaniards performed such manoeuvres. Campbell’s analysis is based partly on a range of early modern sources—from etiquette guides to municipal ordinances—and partly on existing scholarly work; she characterizes At the First Table as, to some degree, a synthesis. She has a keen eye for telling examples that add depth to her discussion of food’s role in structuring social and cultural hierarchies. We learn not only about the consoling pre-torture biscuits disseminated by the Zamora confraternity but also about the mesilla, or naughty table, where university students who violated college regulations had to eat on their own, and the investigation that the city council of Madrid in 1599 launched into whether drinking aguardiente (a distilled spirit) brought any particular health benefits.Campbell identifies a movement away from a shared medieval food culture toward an increasingly differentiated culinary world. Early modern Spain witnessed the emergence of diverse regional cuisines and a growing gulf separating high and low eating cultures. Food became a powerful way to demonstrate wealth and status, as well as an important marker of religious conformity. The Inquisition authorities, not to mention ordinary Spaniards, took notice of people who failed to observe Christian fasts or who betrayed Jewish or Muslim belief through other dietary practices. Christians who flouted Catholic norms also courted trouble, although it was rarely as serious as that faced by suspected non-Christians. Women, too, took care to eat modestly, and everyone paid close attention to seating arrangements.Campbell contrasts this highly stratified early modern world with today’s culture, which she believes to be less rigid in its treatment of individuals. Unlike early modern Spaniards, she writes, “we think of religious identity as individual and personal” (70); “we consider gender to be performative and flexible” (188); and we “no longer [think it] vital to seek the distinction of being seated ‘at the first table’” (178). This view, which underplays the continuities in food’s ability to index and create social hierarchies, may be too optimistic, representing our society as more egalitarian than it is. Campbell also makes a few perplexing claims, such as that early modern Spaniards ate grapefruit, a hybrid not invented until the eighteenth century (she presumably meant toronja, or citron), or that a late seventeenth-century text offers one of the earliest culinary references to potatoes and tomatoes (we know of references from the 1590s, from cities as diverse as Vienna and Antwerp).Campbell’s purpose, however, is not to analyze twenty-first century society or to offer an antiquarian dissertation on the European careers of particular foodstuffs. Her aim is to explicate the place of food in early modern Spain, which she does effectively. At the First Table is an immensely useful handbook that shows clearly how food formed part of the web of connections and divisions that structured this world

Aesthetics · Art · Consumption (sociology) · Criminology · Foodways · Identity (music) · Performative utterance · Prison · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Latin American history and culture

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