5project Muse 49126-1905153

At the First Table
Jodi Campbell
Published by University of Nebraska Press
Campbell, Jodi.
At the First Table: Food and Social Identity in Early Modern Spain.
University of Nebraska Press, 2017.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/49126.
For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/49126
1
Basic Food Practices and Beliefs
For preindustrial Europeans, in the age before the

convenience of supermarkets, refrigeration, and preservatives, a substantial
part of every day was taken up by the acquisition and preparation of food.
This also represented a substantial part of the household budget; in one
typical Barcelona merchant household, nearly 80 percent of the family’s
yearly essential spending was for food.1 The vast majority of this food came
from local gardens and pastures. García Gómez estimates that in the early
sixteenth century up to 90 percent of the food consumed by an average
rural family came from a radius of ten miles around their home, and cities
drew most of their food from their immediate surroundings as well.2
Most households kept stores of staples such as grain, flour, and legumes
that could be maintained in a cool, dry pantry. Given the lack of good
storage options for perishable items, townspeople generally made daily
purchases of meat, fish, fruits, and vegetables in the markets. Hunting was
also a common pastime; part of elite privilege was the right to hunt large
game animals, but ordinary people especially in rural areas hunted rabbits
and birds.3 Basic food preparation was also more complicated than we are
accustomed to. The responsibilities of feeding an early modern household
were labor-intensive, and they included fetching water, carrying grain
11
back and forth from a local mill, carrying prepared dough to and from a
neighborhood oven, maintaining a vegetable garden, caring for domestic
animals such as chickens and perhaps a pig, fetching fuel (firewood or
coal) and tending the kitchen fire, and purchasing other needed items at
the local marketplace. Those who maintained a household’s food supplies
needed to be familiar with techniques for cleaning and dressing animals,
smoking or curing meat, and making fruit and vegetable preserves. Such
processes were often described in basic recipe collections and books on
household maintenance.
Most houses had only a very simple kitchen with a cooking fire and an
iron tripod or chain to support a copper cooking pot, or a three-legged
bronze pot set directly over the fire. A typical household would also have
earthenware pots for cooking soups, stews, and legumes over a low fire
and a simple turnspit or gridiron for roasting. Humble families would
have a small selection of wooden or clay pots and bowls; wealthier ones
used metal serving dishes (silver or gold in the finest cases, for special
occasions) and glass drinking vessels. Tables were likely to be mounted
on trestles, easy to set up and remove, rather than permanent pieces of
furniture. (Medieval French folk tales describe the ownership of a per-
manent table as a mark of prosperity.4) The “dining room” is a modern
phenomenon. Medieval and early modern houses did not have a separate
space dedicated exclusively to eating, so members of the household would
eat around the kitchen fire or in whatever area of the house (or outdoors)
was most convenient depending on the number and rank of those sharing
the meal. Diners carried and used their own personal knives, used for
cutting food as well as other quotidian tasks. At the table, they would
eat with their fingers or a spoon, usually sharing food out of a common
bowl. Large forks were used for supporting meat that was to be carved,
but individual forks did not come into use until the sixteenth century
and were not common in ordinary houses until much later.
Given the simplicity of kitchens and cooking utensils, the most common
Spanish dishes in humble households were stews and pottages. Cooking
in one pot preserved both fuel and nutrients and allowed a vegetable
12
and legume-based diet to be easily flavored with the addition of small

amounts of meat or fat. These dishes were also readily available outside
the home. Madame d’Aulnoy, the French baroness who visited Spain in
the late seventeenth century, noted that “there are Cooks Shops almost
at every Corner of a Street: these have great Kettles set upon Trivets;
there folks may have such ordinary Things as Beans, Garlick, Leeks, or a
little Broth, in which they steep their Bread.”5 The most famous of these
dishes was the olla podrida, or “rotten pot,” a stew of any combination
of meats, vegetables, and legumes. Its curious name, according to the
sixteenth-century lexicographer Sebastián de Covarrubias, came from the
fact that it was cooked slowly until “its contents start to fall apart and for
this reason it is called rotten, like fruit that is too ripe, although in this
case this ‘rottenness’ is what gives the dish its flavor and attribute.”6 Olla
podrida was remarkably adaptable, incorporating individual preferences,
seasonal ingredients, and regional differences.7 Covarrubias sang its praises
in a full column in his dictionary, noting that while it provided a common
supper, it was also substantial enough to provide the main meal of the
day: “It satisfies with meat, and everything else that is added. . . . In some
houses they prepare olla only at midday, and then for supper they get by
with a salad and some fruit.”8 Prepared by those with few resources, its
dominant ingredients were likely to be garbanzos or turnips. It could also
hold its own as part of a fine banquet: when the Countess of Olivares
hosted a dinner for the visiting Cardinal Barberini in 1626, she provided
olla podrida alongside chicken, squab, capon, and other roasted meats,
and the royal cook Francisco Martínez Montiño included it as part of a
suggested menu for a Christmas banquet.9 Vegetables (most frequently
cabbage, leeks, eggplant, and spinach) were generally criticized by Renais-
sance medical treatises as being too cold and moist to be entirely healthy,
but they played a significant role in the diets of ordinary people and
were frequently incorporated into soups and stews. A complete meal was
rounded out with fruit, nuts, olives, and sheep or goat cheese.
Early modern Spaniards enjoyed strong flavors and combinations of
tart and sweet, achieved by combining acidic liquids (most frequently
13
wine, citrus, vinegar, or agraz, the juice of unripe grapes) with sugar or
honey. The Benedictine monks of San Martín of Madrid regularly pur-
chased “vinegar and honey for the spinach,” and early modern recipe
books featured meats and vegetables seasoned with various combinations
of sugar, cloves, pepper, saffron, ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon.10 Such
spices were used for flavor as well as for color, an important factor in the
visual presentation of meals. Sauces were common, often made with a
wine base thickened with blood, almonds, or bread crumbs and sweet-
ened with honey or sugar. Martínez Montiño, head cook to King Philip
IV and author of one of the seventeenth century’s principal cookbooks,
recommended a sauce of quince, onion, black pepper, cinnamon, wine,
vinegar, and sugar for all kinds of game birds and rabbits.11 In a list of
popular dishes from 1617, the most common seasoning combination
for roast meats was lemon, pepper, and cloves.12 Sugar (usually mixed
with wine or vinegar) appeared among the seasonings for several roast
meats and as an ingredient in stuffings and soups. Spaniards quickly
developed a taste for the combination of almonds, cinnamon, and sugar,
as these ingredients became more widely available after the 1400s. The
Benedictine monks of San Martín in the seventeenth century celebrated
holidays and the presence of guests with substantial purchases of sugar,
almonds, honey, raisins, marmalades, and marzipan, and the Portuguese
traveler Pinheiro da Veiga marveled that in Valladolid in 1605 he found
over a hundred shops specializing in sweets.13 Travelers from the rest of
Europe often found that Spanish food was rather heavily spiced for their
taste. Madame d’Aulnoy in the late seventeenth century complained that
Spaniards took excellent fish and made pastries that “would be good, were
they not stuffed with Garlick, Saffron and Pepper.”14 The predominance
of sugar and imported spices in recipe books and household accounts
reflects the taste of those with greater financial means; the rest of the
population was more likely to rely on honey and locally available herbs
such as thyme, marjoram, basil, bay leaf, fennel, and sage.15 There were of
course other significant variations in what people ate by region, season,
and status, a fact that shall be discussed at greater length later, but these
were the basic patterns familiar to households across Spain.
14
The most important element on most early modern

European tables was bread. Consider the symbolic weight that it car-
ries in religious and community identity: one “breaks bread” in sharing
a meal with family and friends; family and household units are often
described in medieval texts as “those who share bread.” In the Judeo-
Christian tradition, bread as manna represents the generosity of God
and, for Christians, becomes the body of Christ in the Eucharist. Bread
and wine for the Romans were important symbols of civilization and cul-
tural advancement, and their consumption throughout Europe followed
Roman settlement patterns. Early Christian writers cultivated bread as
a religious metaphor, as in the case of St. Augustine, who described new
Christians as being ground into flour through exorcism, leavened into
dough through baptism, and baked in the oven of the Holy Spirit.16 Sim-
ilarly, the omnipresent stories of saints’ lives in late medieval and early
modern Europe frequently drew upon the image of spreading Christian
faith as planting and harvesting wheat. The religious symbolism of bread
was strengthened with the rise of Islam, when bread-eating Christians
could contrast themselves with Muslims who consumed grain in other
forms. The treatise describing the management of the household of the
fifteenth-century Dukes of Burgundy, admired across Europe for its ele-
gance and its cuisine, explained that panetiers and cup-bearers ranked
more highly than the cooks in the kitchen hierarchy, because the bread
and wine they served were symbolic of the Eucharist.17
Bread thus functioned as a metaphor for spiritual as well as material
sustenance—and reasonably so, since it was the predominant foodstuff
in the early modern diet. Scholars estimate that while the medieval diet
may have been relatively varied, there was an increasing shift toward the
production of grain, especially in the Mediterranean regions. By the year
1000, bread was the most important dietary component for most of the
European population, and by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries grain
provided up to 70 percent of the daily calories consumed by early modern
Europeans. Grain-based soups (such as gachas in Castile and farinetes and
ordiates along the Mediterranean coast) were also common, following the
influence of the Arabic harisa.18 Estimates of bread consumption agree
15
that an average adult in Spain could expect to eat close to one kilogram
(2.2 pounds) of bread each day. Even in difficult years in the seventeenth
century, when grain supplies in Mallorca were rationed, authorities still
promised a minimum of 810 grams (1.8 pounds) per person per day.19
Regardless of the season, feast days or fast days, bread and wine provided
the foundation of the diet of groups who resided and dined together, such
as students and monks, and it was also the central element of offerings to
the poor by charitable groups or at funerals. In the larger context, bread
(as grain) was also the largest engine of the European economy, both as
measured by the value of the domestic grain grade and the proportion
of the labor force engaged in agricultural production.20
Bread was also a symbol of community, not just out of religious sym-
bolism but in a more practical way, as mills and ovens were communal
structures shared by a village or urban neighborhood. Individual house-
holds could possess mortars for the grinding of small amounts of softer
grains, or hearths that maintained simple cooking fires, but the tasks of
milling flour and baking bread required large amounts of energy and
were most efficient when shared.21 The number of mills grew dramatically
throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages; they were usually water-driven
and required a certain amount of specialized labor and maintenance of
the millstones. Mill operators would transport, weigh, and grind the grain
and then return the ground flour to its owner, keeping in payment the
maquila, a predetermined percentage, as a fee. Communal ovens were
similarly specialized: they were large, brick-lined structures, often up to
twenty feet wide and fired by wood, to which family members or servants
would bring prepared dough to be baked, in return for a set fee or a pro-
portion of the finished product.22 For those who had no access to grain
or for other reasons preferred to buy baked bread, licensed bakers were
contracted to provide certain quantities for sale daily in public plazas. In
Valencia, there were separate terms for bakers according to whose bread
they produced: forners, who baked the dough brought to them in return for
a portion in kind, and flequers, who sold for coin the bread they prepared
themselves.23 Municipal regulations in Morón (Andalusia) established
that the communal ovens had to be heated by dawn each morning to
16
bake the dough brought by residents or anyone else. If anyone needed

to bake after that time, they were to inform the baker, who was obliged
to maintain the oven ready until nightfall.24 Such communal ovens, used
by a large percentage of the population, thus became important centers
of gathering and communication.
The centrality of bread production also meant that control of these
structures was important and potentially profitable. During the course
of the Reconquest, mills and ovens in newly conquered areas were appro-
priated by the crown and redistributed as gifts to key supporters. When
licenses were granted for the construction of new ones, these tended to
go to members of the local governing council.25 Whether old or new, pri-
vately or publicly owned, they were generally operated on yearly contracts
and were subject to close municipal regulation of the price and weight
of both the grain and final baked products. City officials recognized the
importance to social order of maintaining the bread supply. In the book
of aldermen’s guidelines for Madrid, the chapter on bread shortages is
one of the longest, emphasizing that city officials were responsible for
supervising the importation of bread into the city and making sure one
alderman stayed in each bakery to make sure the bread was properly and
fairly distributed. The guidelines acknowledged that “aldermen face the
most work during bread shortages, which are common when it rains or
snows too much in the spring, and in the months of April, May and June.”26
Even in times of plenty, city officials were concerned about avoiding fraud
in the production and sale of bread.
What was this bread like? Pan in Spanish is today a mass noun, as bread
is in English—one eats some bread, not a bread. However, in the early
modern period, it was a count noun, and while “a bread” could be as large
as five to six kilos (thirteen pounds), pan generally referred to a round,
hard loaf of slightly less than a kilogram in weight, while a panecillo or
“little bread” was a quarter that size.27 Even the best-quality bread would
have been harder and darker than that to which we are accustomed. Part
of its usefulness lay in the fact that it could keep for several days or even
weeks, though in noble or court households it was more customary to bake
every day, if only for the lord’s table.28 The durability of ordinary bread
17
made it somewhat difficult to manage gracefully at the table. Conduct

books and other guidelines for any group that shared communal meals,
such as monks and students, all emphasized the importance of cutting
off small, manageable pieces of bread and not tearing them off with the
teeth.29 However, its hardness also made it useful as a utensil. Food was
often served in communal dishes rather than individual plates, and one’s
slab of bread could be used essentially as a plate.
Wheat was considered to be the best of the grains, and finely ground
white flour was used to prepare bread for those of the most wealth and
status. (Wheat flour becomes lighter in color as the germ and bran are
sifted out, resulting in a finer and softer but less nutritious bread.) Elites
had access to a much greater variety of foodstuffs, especially meat, so that
bread probably formed a smaller percentage of their overall diet than it
did that of the majority of the population. It was ubiquitous enough
to not merit specific mention in most banquet descriptions or festival
accounts, but the panter, responsible for the provision and serving of
bread, was a key member of any elite kitchen staff. Curiously, this office
was also responsible for the provisioning of lettuce, radishes, and peaches,
though this may be simply because these were grown along rivers where
mills and ovens were situated, and consequently those who regularly
purchased flour or bread would have easy access to these products as
well.30 In Madrid, once the court was established there in the sixteenth
century, bakers produced what was known as “court bread” made from
trigo candeal, a variety of wheat known for its soft, white flour, as well as
delicate panecillos de leche, or “milk breads.” Both were exclusive enough
that bakers were required to register the names of those for whom such
breads were made.31
Bread could also be made from other grains, such as rye, millet, oats,
spelt, barley, and, in times of greater need, acorn, chestnut, or garbanzo
flour. Here too there was a hierarchy: in some cases the grains used for
bread depended on what was most available in the region, but more com-
monly bread was determined by social class within any given community.
The ministros mayores, or ecclesiastical officials, of the Royal Hospital
of Santiago de Compostela received substantial daily rations of wheat
18
bread, even though wheat was relatively rare in the region, while the
nurses and servants received smaller rations of rye.32 Even peasants who
grew wheat usually used it in payment to landowners, while the bread
they made for their own consumption was made from the “lesser” grains.
This was especially true in regions with lower wheat production, such as
Galicia, in the northwest corner of Spain: the accounts of landowners
there show that wheat flour was reserved for only elite families and their
guests, while servants and day laborers consumed bread made from rye
or millet. These divisions reflected deeply embedded social habits at
least as much as they did price differences, as they held true even in
times when more wheat was available.33 The coastal areas of the Basque
country to the east were similarly lacking in wheat until they began to
import the grain in the fifteenth century; this is one of the few regions
that developed the production of corn.34 Meanwhile, in Valencia, Jaén,
and parts of Catalonia, wheat production was high enough that even
the most humble urban residents could depend on wheat bread, though
their rural counterparts were likely to rely on lesser grains.35 In parts of
rural Catalonia, not as in most of the rest of Spain, even peasants could
regularly eat wheat: rye was consumed only in times of genuine dearth,
and donations of bread to the poor specified that they should receive
wheat bread.36 On the whole, though, wheat bread, and especially that
made from soft candeal wheat, was a crucial symbol of status and wealth.
Bread ’ s most important companion at the table

was wine; both had deep roots in Roman and Christian culture that were
maintained throughout the medieval period. Pan y vino, bread and wine,
was the shorthand used for basic sustenance across the social spectrum
from wealthy monasteries to rough poorhouses, and both were present
in the strictest religious fasts as well as at fine banquets. Until the rise of
water treatment facilities in the nineteenth century, drinking water was
more dangerous than healthful, so preindustrial Europeans satisfied their
thirst with beer and wine. Their levels of alcoholic consumption sound
startlingly high to us, though we must keep in mind that the average
alcohol content of both beer and wine was much lower than it is today.
19
Average wine consumption could reach a liter and a half per person
per day, or more for elites; its purchase represented nearly a fourth of
an average family’s total expenditure on food.37 Even in convents and
monasteries, daily rations were often as much as one liter per person.38
Wine was believed to give strength, and thus it was thought to be partic-
ularly appropriate for soldiers, manual laborers, and those who suffered
from poor health. When in November of 1429 Queen Blanca of Navarre
received complaints that her army was having difficulty with provisions,
she ordered her suppliers to redress the problem and to “make sure they
do not lack wine.”39 Lobera de Ávila wrote approvingly in his sixteenth-
century treatise on health that wine “facilitates the mind, gladdens the
heart, gives good color, makes proficient the tongue, and provides good
maintenance and substance.”40 The guidelines for the Hermandad del
Real Hospicio de Pobres Mendigos del Ave María y San Fernando, a
brotherhood established for the care of the poor in seventeenth-century
Madrid, prescribed regular rations of wine for everyone except children
and those considered to be demented.41
The only times when medical and dietary treatises recommended avoid-
ing the consumption of wine was during times of plague, when “cold”
foods (in the Galenic sense) were prescribed to avoid infection.42 There
were occasional criticisms of the dangers of excess consumption of wine,
which we will consider in a later section.43 For the most part, though, wine
was considered to be an important and necessary element, as Granada’s
municipal authorities noted in 1559 regarding the Alhambra’s five wine
taverns, commenting that they provided “great utility and advantage to
its residents and visitors, as is well known.”44 The consumption of wine
was an integral part of Spanish social activities and celebrations: while
under normal circumstances wine brought into a city had to be taxed,
during important religious festivals in Toledo that drew large numbers
of pilgrims and travelers, individuals were allowed to bring in up to half
an arroba, or approximately eight liters of wine, as long as they drank
it themselves rather than selling it.45 Indeed, a common (and greatly
feared) punishment for misbehavior in groups such as soldiers, monks,
and university students was to lose their ration of wine for a period of time.
20
As with all other foodstuffs, wine served to indicate and emphasize

social differences. Murcia, for example, produced its own wine, but finer
wine from other regions was imported for special occasions. In the summer
of 1465, the city celebrated the naming of a new set of public officials by
buying six and a half cántaras of white Aragonese wine for the members
of the city council (a cántara equaling roughly eleven liters) and three
cántaras of local wine for “the people of the town.”46 In the Galician
convent of San Payo in 1650, the daily ration of wine for the abbess was
over two liters per day, while the nuns who had been longest in residence
received one, and their servants got just over a quarter of a liter.47 While
plain wine was the predominant social drink, the Spanish taste for spices
was reflected in a variety of wine-based drinks, which probably made
good use of wine of lower quality. These included carraspada, a watered
wine simmered with honey and spices, and hippocras, red wine warmed
with brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and essences of amber and musk;
the same mixture with white wine was a clarea. The ingredients in these
“mixed” drinks, since they were a combination of sweet, spicy, and alco-
holic, sparked some conflict over the rights to production and sales as
they grew more popular through the seventeenth century. Taverns were
licensed to sell wine but not food; therefore they did not have access to
the additional ingredients for drinks such as hippocras. Its production
therefore fell to confectioners and apothecaries, who monopolized sales
of hippocras in the seventeenth century, in spite of the ongoing protests
of tavernkeepers, who thought they should be the ones profiting from
sales of the wine-based drink.48
The technique of distillation led to the growing popularity of brandy
and aguardiente (distilled from fruit or grains, especially barley and rye)
across Europe by the fourteenth century. These never reached the level
of popularity of wine, but just as the Spanish taste for a variety of spices
and sweets seemed to expand in the seventeenth century, so did the con-
sumption of spirits. The emerging taste for aguardiente can be seen in
Madrid city regulations, which tentatively allowed its production in
1599 with “a license to sell during four months, with reports on whether
its use seems to be advantageous,” while just a few years later the city’s
21
concerns were more about collecting the appropriate taxes on its sale and
determining whether it could be sold at all hours.49 A small cup of liquor,
often accompanied by letuario (a sweet paste made from honey and orange
peel), purchased from street stands, became a customary breakfast for
early modern city-dwellers. In regions like Mallorca that did not produce
their own wine, aguardiente was actually cheaper. Diluted with water, it
formed the principal drink of the populace as wine did elsewhere. In its
social associations, aguardiente was a masculine drink, considered most
appropriate for soldiers and workers.50
Beer has one of the longest histories of any manmade beverage, hav-
ing existed in Europe for millennia, though it was largely replaced by
ale (brewed without hops) in the Middle Ages. It regained popularity
in northern Europe first, and was reintroduced to Spain in the 1530s by
the emperor Charles V, who had been raised in Flanders and was accus-
tomed to drinking beer. It did not, however, achieve much popularity
there. Until the eighteenth century it was only consumed by the northern
European residents of the court and a handful of nobles who drank it
in imitation of the emperor.51 Lobera de Ávila included a chapter on
beer in his Vergel de sanidad, but he kept it brief, noting that “as in Spain
there is much good wine and water, there is little need of beer and it is
not customary, so I will say no more on this matter.”52 Many Spanish
Benedictine monastic communities recommended beer only when there
was no possibility of obtaining wine, and indeed they found it sufficiently
uninteresting that they decided it was an appropriate beverage for Lent.53
One seventeenth-century recipe book at least found it useful in raising
chickens, noting that after a week of giving them beer, they would end
up “as fat as turtledoves.”54 While English recipe and household books of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries regularly included information
on domestic beer production (and in fact brewing became one of the
more respected professions associated with women in England), similar
recipe collections in Spain almost never mentioned beer. It occupied very
little of the attention of the alcaldes de casa y corte in Madrid, the officials
whose responsibilities included licensing and regulating the prices and
sales of food and drink. In fact, it was difficult enough to find that in
22
1624 the ambassador of Denmark requested permission to grind barley

in the mills of the court in order to produce his own beer.55 Even in the
late eighteenth century, the Enlightenment writer Benito Bails noted
that it was simply foreign to Mediterranean culture.56
While most drinks had some alcoholic content, a variety of non-
alcoholic drinks were common in Spain, especially those that favored the
Spanish taste for spices. Even though drinking plain water was uncommon,
Spaniards were fond of flavored waters made with cinnamon, rosemary,
lemon, orange blossom, or fennel. One of the most popular urban drinks
among all social ranks was aloja, a mildly fermented mixture of water,
honey, yeast, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and pepper. This was most fre-
quently sold at street stands; by 1671 there were forty-six different licensed
sellers of aloja in Madrid alone. (As we will see later, as their popularity
grew, aloja and flavored waters came to be associated with idleness and
frivolity in the eyes of local authorities.) Fresh milk was too challenging
to preserve to be a common drink, though it was often used in recipes;
almond milk appeared more frequently. In the early seventeenth century,
the popularity of aloja and flavored waters was boosted by the use of
ice (nieve, literally snow), which could be brought down from nearby
mountains, packed in straw and stored in special wells. Ice of course was
not a new invention, but it was expensive and difficult to obtain in the
sixteenth century.57 Entrepreneurial landowners with estates near the
mountains soon dedicated themselves to collecting and storing snow for
urban markets, and a veritable ice craze began in the early seventeenth
century. Especially in the court, ice became a prized commodity, given
occasionally as a stipend to palace servants and granted by the royal family
to convents and monasteries during the summer months as alms. Aloja
vendors used it to make flavored sorbets and drinks with shaved ice in
an early modern antecedent of the snow cone. Chroniclers noted its
popularity among all social ranks: municipal authorities in Madrid noted
that “everyone, from the rich to the poor, uses ice,” and when the royal
family prepared a lunch to take to an Inquisition ceremony in July of 1632,
they did not neglect to pack their own ice.58 Some Spanish physicians
attempted to preserve the elite connotation of ice, suggesting that while
23
cold drinks were appropriate for those who heated their brains through
intellectual endeavors, they could be dangerous to manual laborers whose
stomachs were not well prepared for the cold.59 While medical opinion
was initially opposed to the new fashion of drinking iced beverages, phy-
sicians eventually incorporated it favorably into their Galenic framework,
arguing that it “protects against the plague, cures burning fevers, is good
for irregular heartbeats, gladdens the sad, represses the vapors of wine,
and therefore lengthens life.”60
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans experienced
their first encounters with the stimulant beverages that would become
essential to the modern world: coffee, tea, and chocolate. Spain was the
conduit by which chocolate, cultivated by the Aztecs, first reached Europe
in 1520.61 Prepared with ground cocoa beans as a bitter drink, it was
one of the few New World products to catch on quickly in Spain. The
seventeenth century saw the increasing addition of sugar, though it was
not customary to prepare chocolate in solid form until the nineteenth
century. Curiously, its reception was rather the reverse of the pattern
we have seen with beer: chocolate became popular in Spain and Italy at
least a century before it was accepted in the rest of Europe. As we shall
see in chapter 3, chocolate took on particular significance in Spain as a
social drink, prepared at home to share with guests or sold at numerous
street stands.
Coffee also made its first appearance in Europe in the late sixteenth
century, and coffeehouses developed as spaces for social and political
interaction. In spite of its quality and omnipresence in today’s Spain,
coffee caught on much more slowly there than in the rest of Europe. By
the eighteenth century in England and France, coffeehouses had become
inextricably intertwined with public debate and Enlightenment ideas,
and coffee went so far as to replace wine as the essential drink of social
gatherings. Nevertheless, in Spain the wine tavern remained the most
important site for social engagement. Some coffeehouses appeared in cities
in the mid-eighteenth century, but they never became the hotbeds for
political discussion that they were elsewhere.62 Very few Spanish treatises
on food mention it, and then not until the eighteenth century; its first
24
appearance in Madrid’s food-licensing regulations is in 1760.63 Benito

Bails in the late eighteenth century described the differences in coffee
drinking across Europe (Spaniards drink one cup with sugar after a meal;
Swedes drink three with milk; the Dutch drink it in the morning with
bread and butter) but he dismissed the concoction as useless and without
nutritious value.64 Coffee gained some ground with Spanish elites after
the rise of the Bourbon royal family and their cultural ties to Italy, but it
could not replace wine as a drink of the common people. Similarly, when
the first shipment of tea reached English shores in 1657, it was quickly
transformed from an exotic, unfamiliar brew into the cornerstone of
British culture—but it hardly registered in the minds or kitchens of early
modern Spaniards.
If the majority of Spaniards shared these elements

of a common food culture, to what degree can we speak about a national
cuisine in the early modern period? Although I have been using the terms
“Spain” and “Spanish” to refer to the people and culture that are part of
today’s modern nation and have tried to paint a general picture of patterns
across the peninsula, it is important to remember that such a nation did
not exist in the early modern period. Even in the 1500s, after the heirs of
Ferdinand and Isabella inherited the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon
together, and following the annexation of the Crown of Navarre and
the Kingdom of Granada, “Spain” combined (and continues to reflect)
a group of historically distinct regional cultures.
On the largest scale there was a continental western European cuisine,
especially in the medieval period. Montanari and others argue that the
earliest cookbooks, from fourteenth-century Spain, France, Germany,
England, and Italy, feature generally the same recipes, flavors, and ingre-
dients.65 An important subset of western Europe was the Mediterranean
region, which maintained some elements of the classical Greco-Roman
tradition as well as incorporating Arab contributions following the spread
of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries. Elements of culinary culture
were shaped of course by climate and geography as well as regional culture.
Trade networks, political influences, even intermarriage between members
25
of ruling families also came into play, and sometimes particular cities such
as Naples or Venice seemed to have strong enough individual personalities
to have a distinctive cuisine. Early modern cooks themselves referred to
particular cuisines, sometimes by nationality and sometimes by more
specific influence. Ruperto de Nola’s Llibre del coch has recipes identified as
French-style mustard and Genovese torte, while the seventeenth-century
collection of the royal chef Martínez Montiño mentions Aragonese soup,
Savoyard pastries, Portuguese-style spinach, and English fish pie, though
in both cases these are just a few recipes out of many, and their labels may
be for snob value more than an indication of an actual regional style. Still,
Teresa Vinyoles argues that as early as the fourteenth century there were
clearly defined regional tastes, at least at elite levels, and that courts thus
become important sites of culinary exchange.66
What were the characteristics of these regional cuisines? One would
think that Andalusia, the region that had been longest under Muslim
control in the medieval period, would retain a culinary culture distinct
from that of the rest of Castile (into which it was incorporated over the
period 1212–1492). Castilians who settled in this region during the Recon-
quest did adopt and maintain many Arab food products and ingredients,
such as sugar, rice, citrus fruits, couscous, and eggplant, but they also
worked to impose their own. As the Castilian conquerors were generally
a minority (only forty thousand came from the north to settle in the
kingdom of Granada over the period 1485–1499), they struggled with
conflicting priorities.67 They needed to rely on the existing Andalusian
agricultural workforce and infrastructure, especially in rural areas, but at
the same time to adapt it as quickly as possible to Castilian control and
preferences, and to pressure the resident population to adopt Christian
customs. This meant maintaining citrus and rice production while adding
livestock and wheat and establishing separate Christian marketplaces
and storehouses. The result was a mix of Muslim and Castilian culinary
traditions, or perhaps it would be better to say that Castile incorporated
Muslim elements and established them as part of its own cuisine.
The Basques of northeastern Spain arguably have the most distinct
historical tradition, with roots in that region going back to the Stone Age
26
and a language that bears no clear relation to any other. In the Middle
Ages their territory was relatively geographically isolated from the rest
of the peninsula and relied on a largely subsistence economy, and so they
did not develop a distinctive cuisine. With the founding of new cities
like San Sebastián and Bilbao in the late twelfth century, however, they
developed increasing trade connections with Castile. After the incorpo-
ration of the Basque kingdom of Navarre into the kingdom of Castile in
the early 1500s, they imported foodstuffs that were most valued by Cas-
tilian society, particularly oil, wine, and wheat.68 The sole early modern
cookbook produced in the Basque country, El cocinero religioso, written
by an Augustinian friar under the pseudonym Antonio Salsete in the late
seventeenth century, was representative of monastic cuisine more than of
Basque cuisine. It incorporated elements from across Spain, copying several
recipes from Nola and Martínez Montiño, incorporating a few typical
Andalusian plates and including one of the first references to tomatoes and
potatoes, all of which suggest that Basques were receptive to influences
from all over the peninsula. The influence did not seem to go in the other
direction, however. The only particularly Basque recipes mentioned in
Salsete, for mushrooms and turtle meat, had almost no influence outside
the Basque region in the early modern period, and Castilian and Catalan
cookbooks did not identify any particular preparations as being in the
Basque style. Lope de Isasti’s 1625 chronicle of Navarre includes several
descriptions of local food, but he refers to apples, cabbage, onions, and
chestnuts, which were characteristic of the entire peninsula. In sharp
contrast to the reputation the Basque country holds today as a center
of high-quality and innovative cuisine, in the early modern period the
region did not seem to have a unique culinary identity.
The biggest divide, both in potential culinary difference and in regional
identity, was that between Catalonia and Castile. Catalonia, the region
in eastern Spain surrounding Barcelona, was a relatively independent
county in the Middle Ages until it became a principality of the Crown of
Aragon in the early twelfth century. After the dynastic union of Castile
and Aragon and the establishment of a permanent court in Madrid, in
the center of Castile, many Catalans resented what they saw as an undue
27
outside influence on their affairs. Today’s Catalan independence move-

ment draws on this longstanding resentment as well as on the Catalan
perception of possessing a distinct culture and history from the rest of
Spain. Catalan food scholars point to the region’s culinary history as
part of the evidence for this difference.69 The earliest peninsular recipe
books, the early fourteenth century manuscript Llibre de Sent Soví and
Ruperto de Nola’s Llibre del coch, published in 1520 but probably written
in the late 1400s, were both written in Catalan. Naples for a time in the
fifteenth century was part of the Kingdom of Aragon, and the style of
these cookbooks reflects Catalonia’s strong cultural ties to Italy. Nola
identified himself as having been a cook in the court of King Ferdinand
of Naples, and the Roman culinary writer Maestro Martino da Como
borrowed a good deal of his fifteenth-century Libro de arte coquinaria
from the Llibre del coch. So Catalan cuisine, at least the elite version as it
was identified by written recipe collections, was firmly rooted in a broader
western Mediterranean regional cuisine. If we follow the cookbook trail
within Spain, most of the direction of influence does seem to have been
from the Catalan coast toward the Castilian interior. Nola’s Llibre del coch
was published in the sixteenth century in at least five Catalan editions and
ten Castilian ones, becoming the first cookbook to be printed in Castile.
García Marsilla has argued that these early Catalan cookbooks did not
reflect any Castilian influences, although since there are no contemporary
existing Castilian recipe collections, the absence of influence is difficult
to prove.70 Similarly, the Castilian Diego Granado Maldonado copied
many of the recipes in his 1599 Libro del arte de cozina from both the
Catalan Nola and the Italian Bartolomeo Scappi.
With the Catalan economic crisis of the fourteenth century and the
establishment of the court in Madrid in the sixteenth, Castile became the
dominant political and economic power of the growing Spanish empire.
Its culinary influence seems to have followed suit, though by this time it
had incorporated many elements of Catalan cuisine. To the extent that
there was such a thing as an early modern “Spanish” cuisine, it seems to
have been a compilation of Italian, Catalan, and Castilian influences, such
as those pulled together in Granado Maldonado’s Libro del arte de cozina,
28
as well as contributions from Muslim Andalusia, Portugal, and the Low

Countries, as reflected in Martínez Montiño’s 1611 Arte de cozina.71 This
blended “Spanish” cuisine, while not yet what one would call a distinctly
national cuisine, was recognized and influential throughout Europe in
the early seventeenth century.
Food Hier archies : Theory and Pr actice

In addition to its basic nutritious benefits, food was associated with a wide
range of medical, social, and religious characteristics. In early modern
Europe, foods were identified in terms of their place in the traditional
Galenic framework, perceived as being hot, cold, wet, or dry in accor-
dance with their association with the bodily humors of choler, black bile,
blood, and phlegm.72 Galen perceived the principal causes of illness to
be external, such as corrupted water or air, and so food was an important
corrective. A well-balanced, healthy human, rather than being at the
precise center of the Galenic axes of cold/hot and wet/dry, tended a
little bit toward the warm and the moist. Foods that aligned with that
tendency, or helped to draw the body back to it from an excess of cold
or dryness, were therefore considered to be the most beneficial. Most of
the written evidence about food reflects these ideas; treatises on food and
health identified the qualities of various foods and provided guidelines
for the proper quantity, proportion, and timing of their consumption as
well as how they could best be combined.73 Eggs, for example, being hot
and moist, should not be consumed with wine, which shares the same
characteristics. Red meats tend to generate choler, and so they should be
eaten with sauces that temper that inclination. Greens and fruits, cool
and more easily digested, should be eaten before heat-generating meats.
This understanding also influenced the preparation of foods, particularly
those that fell in the more dangerous cold and wet categories: fish could be
improved by frying, and fruits such as grapes were better dried as raisins.
(The latter idea coincided nicely with the Muslim culinary preference
for dried fruit, adopted in southern Spain.) The Spanish preference for
sauces also fit well with this system, as they could be used to balance any
unhealthful qualities of the foods they dressed.
29
These humoral characteristics determined a body’s personality as well

as its physical health. According to the preponderance of humors in the
body, those who were of a sanguine character were cheerful and had
strong digestive systems that were not easily upset; their only concern
was to avoid excessive consumption of alcohol. The choleric were out-
going and possibly quarrelsome and were advised to avoid fasting. Those
with an imbalance favoring black bile were thought to be easily angered
and unsociable; they had a more delicate digestion and should avoid
overeating, especially of meat. Finally, phlegmatics had a tendency to be
overweight because of their slow digestion, and it was recommended that
they eat light foods and seek regular exercise.74 When King Ferdinand
VI became feverish and depressed in 1758 following the death of his wife,
his physician noted that the monarch’s natural temperament was melan-
cholic, having an excess of black bile, and that he had exacerbated this
imbalance by being inclined toward the consumption of meat and thick
soups. The doctor supervised a limited diet, based on his careful study of
the works of Hippocrates, hoping to rid the king’s body of the excess bile
that troubled it. When this was not successful, after consulting with other
doctors, he settled on the remedy of a broth with the most potent cool
and wet characteristics—including tortoise, frog, and serpent—but the
king “was not willing to try this more than once.”75 While challenges to
the Galenic model of the four humors arose as early as the 1530s with the
work of Paracelsus, it remained influential in medical thinking through
the mid-nineteenth century.
Early modern Spaniards drew on these concepts and blended (or
even contradicted) them with their own regional preferences and ideas
of social organization and power relationships. Indeed, the ubiquitous
olla podrida went against all the Galenic recommendations; it was “a
food fit to kill a man,” in the words of the Dominican physician Scipi-
one Mercurio.76 Beginning in the fifteenth century, in a combination of
Aristotelian and Christian ideas, western Europeans began to overlay
the Galenic system with the perception that the natural world and the
world of human beings were both created by God in a parallel vertical
hierarchy of society and nature. Among fruits and vegetables, those that
30
were lowest to the ground, such as bulbs and roots, were considered to
be the most base. Those grown on bushes or vines were slightly better,
and orchard fruits, being the highest, were superior. Therefore garlic and
turnips, being low and earthy, were best suited to peasants, while tree
fruits were only appropriate for lords. The same vertical hierarchy held
true of creatures, so that birds were superior to land animals, which in
turn were preferable to fish.77 Chicken occupied the curious position of
being considered a superior food, belonging to the category of winged
creatures, while in a practical sense the birds themselves were earthbound
and widely available even to poor and rural residents. Elites managed this
contradiction by preferring game birds and doves to domestic poultry,
while prosperous peasant families raised and ate hens as a key sign of social
differentiation to separate them from their poorer counterparts.78 An
eighteenth-century refrain listed in the Diccionario de Autoridades held
that “carne de pluma quita del rostro la arruga,” meaning that the flesh of
fowl, being the most delicate and pleasant, could erase the wrinkles from
one’s face.79 The cultural value of poultry even led it to be suspected of
being overly luxurious; fowl ranked high in the fears of those who were
concerned about the moral dangers of gluttony.80 A Florentine notary
complained about a gift of partridges from a friend, suggesting that the
gift would have been appropriate had he still been serving on the city
council but that coarser and less luxurious foods should be his lot now
that he was out of that prestigious position.81
Similar cultural associations as well as economic and agricultural pat-
terns affected the consumption of meat animals.82 The population growth
of the High Middle Ages, combined with the necessary expansion of land
cultivated for cereals, resulted in a sharp decline in pasture land and thus
meat consumption in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially for
urban populations.83 Europeans were more carnivorous in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, following the population collapse of the Black
Death, which made more natural resources available per capita. As the
population recovered over the next two centuries, however, pasture land
and forest were again brought under cultivation to produce wheat, and
relative meat consumption declined.84 In the sixteenth and seventeenth
31
centuries, then, consumption of meat came to differentiate between social

groups, as a privilege of the wealthy, as well as between urban and rural
populations. In the medieval period, game animals (both birds and beasts)
were prized because of their association with noble privilege. Actual con-
sumption of them dropped in the early modern period with the increase
in pasture animals, but they still retained their symbolic value. Within the
category of domestic meat animals, sheep and lamb ranked highest, then
beef and pork.85 Rural families tended to send calf, lamb, kid, and other
such profitable meats to urban slaughterhouses while relying on pork,
chicken, and older sheep and cows for their own consumption.86 Goats
were raised throughout Spain but were used more to produce milk and
cheese than for meat. Kid goat was a valued delicacy for special occasions,
but mature goats were rarely consumed. Beef was valued in other parts
of Europe, but in Spain it was cheaper and generally of poorer quality
than other meats since oxen and dairy cows were used principally for
labor and milk production and would not be consumed until they had
outlived their usefulness.87 Pork did not appear as often as other meats
in documentary evidence, but this does not mean it was not frequently
consumed. Since it was possible for many families to keep their own pigs,
pork consumption could have been fairly high without leaving much of
a paper trail.88 The Valencian town of Gandía limited its residents to two
pigs on each property and repeated decrees in Madrid requiring people
to keep their pigs off the streets as late as the mid-seventeenth century
suggest that this was common practice even in a fairly large urban center.89
Its lower position in the meat hierarchy may have been due simply to this
wider availability, especially to the poor, who had less access to fresh meat
but could slaughter perhaps one pig a year and preserve much of it in the
form of sausage and cured ham throughout the year.
There were certainly regional and particular variations on these themes,
but in general they reflect early modern social attitudes, and this food
hierarchy was clearly incorporated into people’s choices and behaviors.
The fourteenth-century Catalan scholar Francesc Eiximenis used the
example of a medieval Italian king, of peasant origins, who became seri-
ously ill when he tried to eat the refined foods of the court. He was able
32
to recover only when he returned to the simple, plain food of his youth.
The moral for Eiximenis was that each man should eat foods appro-
priate to his nature—although according to his example, one’s origins
trumped one’s eventual acquired position, since the king in his story was
physically not able to eat foods considered appropriate to royalty.90 In
general, though, it was considered appropriate for those in power to eat
more of everything, especially meats of quality; for a ruler, eating too
little could be perceived as a failing.91 Such divisions applied to both
gender and status. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested
that roasted foods were perceived to be best for men, while boiled foods
were more appropriate to women. Similarly, sweet flavors were associ-
ated with women and salty ones with men.92 Eiximenis’s conduct book
for women, Llibre de les dones, suggested that they be allowed only dry
wine rather than sweet, assuming that their natural attraction to sweet
wine would lead them to drink it in excess.93 In rural Catalonia, where it
was customary for lords to provide their laborers with food, the lords of
the Catalan castle of Montesquiu purchased lamb for themselves, while
they provided meals of pork to the men who served in their ironworks.94
Provisions for the Navarrese army in the early fifteenth century included
both mutton and chicken, but the records indicate that the chickens
(and the highest-quality wine) were reserved for the officers and noble-
men.95 Juan de Soto’s 1619 treatise Obligaciones de todos los estados, with
its chapters on the proper behaviors associated with different categories
of people, emphasized repeatedly that one’s food consumption should
not overreach one’s status. Soto admonished scribes and notaries “not
to eat more feathers for the sake of the one they carry,” in other words,
not to consume so much poultry in an attempt to display their status as
legal authorities. “An ordinary and moderate diet is enough. . . . There
is fish for them on Fridays, without needing to bring trout and eel and
oysters and salmon and all such things that are suited to kings, princes
and lords.”96 Similarly, the physician Giacomo Albini warned that elites
(such as the princes of Savoy, whom he served) should avoid legumes
and tripe, which were not refined enough for them to digest, while the
stomachs of the poor were better suited to such rough fare.97
33
The proportion of meat in any meal rose sharply according to one’s

position in the social hierarchy. Roasted meats and combinations of meat
and bread or pastry (empanadas or tortes) were prevalent among those
with greater resources. Elites prided themselves on their high levels of
meat and poultry consumption, reflecting both their superior purchasing
power and their elevated social status. Charlemagne, revered as an icon
of kingly and warrior virtues, was said to prefer roast game to any other
food, and he required four hunters and a falconer to provide meat for
his table. Whether or not these accounts are strictly accurate, they reflect
the popular associations made between masculinity, power, strength, and
meat.98 We know that by the beginning of the early modern period, the
regular consumption of meat had risen through urban and rural com-
munities across all of western Europe, but were the poor able to purchase
meat? We often assume that peasant life was plagued with poverty and
malnutrition, particularly a lack of protein. Literary portrayals of early
modern society convey images of peasants desperate for crusts of bread
and elites stuffing themselves at sumptuous banquets, but both are likely
to be exaggerated and not representative of ordinary quotidian dining
habits. Spanish picaresque literature is full of people scrounging for crumbs
(some of the most memorable scenes in the anonymous novella Lazarillo
de Tormes are of the main character and his blind master matching wits
to filch scraps of food from each other). Certainly peasants would not
have feasted regularly on lamb chops or steaks, but given the predomi-
nance of stew-like dishes and one-pot meals, it would not have been too
challenging for poorer families to regularly include at least small amounts
of bacon, lard, or what were considered lesser meats (beef, pork, organ
meats) in their meals.99 The Portuguese chronicler Fernão Lopes noted in
his description of the siege of Lisbon in 1384 that the poor went without
meat, which suggests that normally they did have access to it.100 Even in
the seventeenth century, when average meat consumption was lower,
descriptions of Madrid suggest that the poor were able to purchase meat
on a regular basis. In Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera’s recommendations to
Philip III about improving the city of Madrid, he argued for having at
least two meat-market stands (one for mutton and one for beef ) in the
34
main marketplace and two more near the slaughterhouse. The addition
of the latter was important since the slaughterhouse “has become so large
that it is difficult for the poor who live nearby to have access to only one
butcher’s shop.”101 If authorities did not assume meat to be a regular part
of their diet, surely lack of access to a butcher would not have registered
as a problem. Similarly, the records of that city’s municipal authorities
show the proprietors of bodegoncillos (small taverns or cantinas) arguing
that their services were important for supporting the poor, since they
provided cheap meals “for the sustenance of poor people and workers
who have no one to cook for them,” such as a serving of chopped liver
for only two maravedís.102 Meat was important enough to require the
introduction of millions of sheep and cattle to the Americas, and by 1600
Spanish colonists there consumed more meat than any other sedentary
population in the world. When Gaspar Castaño de Sosa embarked on an
unauthorized expedition to New Mexico in 1590 with over one hundred
and seventy men, women, and children, even as their rations ran low, he
managed to provide each of his followers with at least a pound and a half
of meat daily.103 The viceroy Francisco de Toledo in 1575 proclaimed that
indigenous laborers should receive each day half a pound of mutton, beef,
or pork.104 In Spain, it is possible that the urban poor may have had more
access to meat than their rural counterparts, due to the concerns of city
authorities who wanted to avoid unrest due to food shortages and the
presence of slaughterhouses that processed enough animals to guarantee
a supply of cheap cuts of meat and offal. However, the rural poor may
have had more flexibility in raising their own chickens and pigs (though
they were likely to sell the most valued parts of these) and having some
access to hunting rabbits, small birds, and such.
For the most part, the conceptions of food accord-

ing to the Galenic tradition coincided harmoniously with popular ideas,
particularly in relation to basic elements such as meats and vegetables.
Occasionally, however, the two systems came into conflict with each other,
or with people’s individual or collective preferences. The position of tripe
and offal is an interesting example of conflict within the cultural hierarchy
35
of meat. Despojos—the organs and offal of meat animals and poultry

including necks, lungs, intestines, gizzards, feet, and muscle meats such as
heart and tongue—were the least expensive meats, theoretically ranked
lowest in the meat hierarchy. They were considered appropriate only for
the poor, for whom they were often the most accessible form of animal
protein. Offal was considered to be a food category unto itself; there was a
separate stand in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid, distinct from the fish, poultry,
and meat stands, where despojos were sold.105 (The animal hierarchy was
reflected here as well, as the innards of sheep and poultry were more valued
than those of pigs or cows.) Early modern food treatises as well as practical
urban customs indicated that such meats were best suited to the lowest
ranks of society. Of the names of the various categories of offal, several
carried negative connotations: “menudo” (tripe) also meant “despicable,
or of little consequence; plebeian,” and “despojos,” offal, was a term also
used for any sort of unwanted surplus.106 This attitude was reflected in the
social use of such foods. In Antequera, in southern Spain, butchers were
not allowed to sell organ meats and blood until the poor had had a chance
to purchase them first; city ordinances there emphasized that “the poor-
est . . . are those who sustain themselves on said entrails and offal because
of their low price.”107 Similarly, Madrid’s municipal regulations reserved
offal from the slaughterhouse to feed the poor who were held in the city
jail or who lodged in the city’s hospitals.108 The constitutions of the city’s
Hermandad del Real Hospicio de Pobres Mendigos (Brotherhood of the
Royal Hospice of Poor Beggars), dedicated to providing regular meals for
the poor, stipulated that mutton heads and sweetbreads should be provided
for their dinners.109 As late as the 1780s, the results of a questionnaire about
food consumption in Cataluña stated that the wealthy ate lots of meat,
especially lamb, while the poor consumed organ meats.110
Nevertheless, several clues indicate that elites had a particular taste
for offal and sought to procure it in spite of its association with poverty.
While in theory despojos were principally reserved for the poor and the
provision of hospitals, they appear in the kitchen accounts of the queens of
Aragon and the barons of Pinos i Mataplana in the fourteenth century.111
The alcaldes of Madrid, whose job included the appropriate distribution
36
of slaughterhouse products in the markets, received frequent petitions

from high-ranking officials for a share of organ meats, and twenty beef
tongues were set aside for the commissary-general of the Santa Cruzada
for the annual meal that he offered to the members of the Council of
Castile.112 Part of the appeal of offal in the early modern period may have
been that it occupied an uncertain zone between foods that were clearly
prohibited on fast days and those that were allowed. Fridays required total
abstinence from meat, but Saturdays were days of semi-fasting, where
“Saturday foods,” including despojos, were allowed. These became popular
enough, perhaps simply for being a form of meat that could be consumed
during Lent and fast days, that the price of offal in the public markets
was regularly higher on Saturdays than during the rest of the week.113
Fruit was another food category whose position in early modern society
was different in theory than it was in social and cultural practice. Fruit is
one of the most difficult foodstuffs for the historian to trace, since it does
not leave much of a paper trail: unlike wine, oil, meat, and grain, it was
not considered essential enough to include in records of city contracts,
and most fruit production and trade were local and informal. In general,
commentaries on fruit placed it low on the food hierarchy in terms of its
practical and moral characteristics. Galenic theory viewed fruit more as a
condiment than a true source of nourishment, and not a favorable one at
that: too cold and wet, bad for digestion, potentially a cause for fever, and
even encouraging of “wanton appetite” and moral weakness.114 Eixime-
nis in a chapter on remedies for gluttony wrote that one should abstain
from fruit because of its moral dangers.115 The seventeenth-century jurist
León Pinela attributed the death of the crown prince Carlos in 1568 to,
among other things, having eaten an excess of fruit.116 Vilanova directed
that fresh fruit could be eaten for medicinal purposes (usually as either
a laxative or a costive, depending on the fruit) but that it should not be
eaten simply for pleasure.117 In 1612 Pedro Aznar Cardona wrote a treatise
supporting the expulsion of the moriscos (those of Muslim background
who had converted to Christianity), justifying his arguments in part by
saying that the morisco community possessed valuable land but used it
to cultivate fruit rather than anything of real value.118
37
In spite of these negative connotations, elites seem to have favored the

consumption of fruit, at least in southern Europe. Bartolomeo Scappi, the
sixteenth-century Italian who wrote one of the most influential cookbooks
of the early modern period, included descriptions of typical meals and
menus—“typical” for the Vatican, at least, where he served as personal
chef to Pius V. These menus, probably designed for groups of fifty or sixty
people, included substantial amounts of fruit, such as a first cold course
consisting of twenty pounds of sugared strawberries, thirty pounds of
cherries, three hundred plums, and one hundred and fifty apricots.119
These tastes were reflected in the principal Spanish cookbooks. Diego
Granado Maldonado’s 1599 Libro del arte de cozina was greatly influenced
by Scappi, and Domingo Hernández de Maceras’s early seventeenth-
century recipe collection includes a variety of preparations of cherries,
melons, peaches, and pears.120 Aragonese court guidelines recommended
that each diner should be served fruit at the beginning of a meal and
that those seated at the royal table should be given an additional serving
after dinner.121 Individual tastes seem to reflect these values. Ferdinand
I of Aragon wrote to the batle general (a royal official) of Valencia with
requests for fruit for his personal consumption and received regular ship-
ments of cherries, peaches, lemons, figs, oranges, and pomegranates.122
Teresa Vinyoles relates a case of an Aragonese lady in the late fourteenth
century who asked a visiting friend to bring her pears; when the friend
forgot the request, the lady wept for her loss.123 The Dukes of Gandía
in the seventeenth century regularly consumed fruit, and even more so
when honored guests shared the table, suggesting that it was considered
to be a particular delicacy.124
It seems then that early modern Spaniards not only enjoyed fruit but
also associated it with elite status. The charitable institution Pia Almoina
of Barcelona provided regular meals for hundreds of poor residents,
and though meat was included in these meals during most days of the
year, fruit was not served, as they considered it not appropriate for the
needy.125 Sumptuary laws in Castile in 1563 placed limits on the number
of servings of fruit that could be included in banquets, as part of an
ongoing effort to control the growing expenses of weddings and other
38
formal occasions.126 This distinction may have arisen because orchard

fruits had to be cultivated, and they were generally produced on sei-
gneurial lands; they required careful tending and produced relatively
little in relation to the land they occupied.127 They were therefore inac-
cessible to peasants and relatively expensive for town dwellers. In elite
households, expenditures on fruit were nearly always higher than those
on vegetables, suggesting both greater expense and higher consumption.
Moving down the social scale, such expenditures even out between fruits
and vegetables at the level of urban merchants, while the poor almost
certainly consumed far more vegetables than they did fruits.128 All of
this suggests that despite the disdain of medical and dietary treatises,
fruit was informally a luxury item.
Nevertheless, not all fruits were created equal. Fruit, like other categories
of food, contained its own social hierarchy: sour cherries (guindas) and
peaches were on the more expensive end of the spectrum and favored by
elites, while melons and black grapes were considered more appropriate
for the humbler classes.129 Similarly, Felicity Heal has noted in English
gift-giving patterns that fruit was valued enough to be a common gift
but that easily acquired fruits such as apples and pears were perceived as
“gifts of the poor,” while greater pride was taken in offering rarer fruits
such as apricots and peaches.130 As we will see with other elite foods, the
acceptability of fruit seems to have become more widespread through
the early modern period. In the sixteenth century, the university students
of Alcalá de Henares had access to seasonal plums, pears, and cherries,
especially on festival days.131 By the seventeenth century, middle-range
urban families in southern Spain regularly consumed figs, grapefruit,
oranges, and cherries, suggesting that these products were easily within
their reach and perhaps even a symbol of their financial success.132 A
seventeenth-century fictional dialogue among students suggests that
fruit had become more common. These young men certainly would not
have been included among the elite and wealthy, but when a prospective
student asks about the culinary customs of his companions, their response
includes a listing of pears, apples, cherries, plums, grapes, and peaches,
incorporated into any meal of the day.133
39
Food and the Urban Communit y

Given the powerful associations between food and social status, it is
not surprising that the provision and consumption of food was closely
interwoven with ideas of urban community and the practice of local
authority. Different categories of people and an enormous variety of
foodstuffs shared public space in the urban context, generating endless
possibilities for social performance and the need for a certain degree of
administrative control. We usually envision meals as being shared by a
family around a domestic table, but for early modern Europeans this
was probably the exception. For elites, the distinction between dining
privately at home or publicly with companions was not necessarily clear,
as such households were staffed with large numbers of servants and other
dependents, and meals frequently could include dozens of guests.134 Urban
residents also had a wide range of beyond-the-home dining options: one
could purchase prepared food at any number of lively street stands, pastry
shops, and marketplaces as well as from strolling vendors. Indeed, many
urban dwellings did not include kitchens, so many residents bought their
meals on the street rather than preparing them at home. There were also
several kinds of places to sit down for a meal, from inns to taverns, though
formal restaurants as we think of them did not begin to appear until the
late eighteenth century. Although conduct books and social expectations
dictated that aristocrats should not partake of food in such public areas,
these sites brought together a wide range of people together from the
rest of society. Lope de Vega’s plays and poems are full of references to the
variety of people and food that came together in the streets of Madrid.
The servant Martín in La moza de cántaro marvels that “the court sustains
so many things, I do not know how it is possible. Who could imagine so
many different people and professions selling different things? Cakes,
buns, biscuits, nougat, chestnuts, marmalade treats, electuaries and pre-
serves, a thousand sugar figurines, flowers, rosaries, rosettes, doughnuts
and marzipan, spirits and cinnamon-waters.”135 Quevedo’s description
of the marketplace of Salamanca promises a similar wealth of culinary
delights: “Here you will find the kid goat and the spotted calf; here the
40
lamb; here the honey in its comb, and the trout in its trap; here the firm
chestnut, guarded by its hedgehog armor; the walnut, imprisoned in its
shell; and here, with the brown pear, you will find the golden pippin.
Stay, and state what you lack.”136 Sharing food in a public context, as
it is today, was an important form of social and political connection.
Merchants in Valencia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries met in
taverns over meals to discuss business.137 Food and drink even played an
important role at the corrales de comedias, open-air theatrical playhouses
that proliferated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their principal
attraction was the latest works of Lope de Vega or Calderón de la Barca,
but an important element of the experience was the chance to partake
in aloja, wine, fruits and confections.138
By the early fourteenth century, increased regional specialization, the
gradual reduction of transport costs, urban growth, and growing con-
sumer markets all led to a greater volume of trade and a wider variety of
products from which city dwellers could choose. The increased mobility
of groups such as soldiers, merchants, officials, scholars, and pilgrims also
led to greater demand for foods that could be purchased and consumed
on the go. The preparation and sale of certain foods was designated to
corresponding urban spaces. One could construct a food map of any early
modern city, the details of which would be shaped by practical issues of
supply and public access, municipal authorities’ need to maintain quality
control, and cultural associations with space. In Madrid, for example, a
typical seventeenth-century resident might begin his day in the Puerta
del Sol on the eastern edge of the city with a shot of aguardiente and a
serving of letuario, a sweet confection of honey and orange peel. During
the course of the day, he could pick up fruit, small cakes, savory pastries,
and other treats from street vendors or have a quick plate of prepared
food from a bodegón, especially in the neighborhood around the Plaza de
Santa Cruz. If he wanted to enjoy a glass of wine at a tavern, the options
were nearly limitless. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Madrid
boasted nearly four hundred of them, including public taverns established
in the monasteries of San Jerónimo and the Jesuits.139 Given the range of
41
dining options, people of every social rank could partake of street food
in one form or another.
In spite of this mix of different foods, dining establishments, and cus-
tomers, most of these eateries reflected and reinforced the social hierarchy.
There were small bodegones, informal cantinas that prepared simple
and cheap meals for a clientele of mostly urban workers, sometimes in
established buildings with an assortment of tables, sometimes hardly
more than temporary street stands (bodegoncillos de puntapié). In the
minds of contemporary Spaniards, such businesses were defined by their
customers rather than their products: the 1726 dictionary of the Real
Academia describes a bodegón as “the cellar or entryway where food is
prepared for poor and ordinary folk.”140 Their offerings included pork
rinds, sausages, pig feet, and mutton tongue, mostly meat products but
all of them ranked on the low end of the perceived food hierarchy. In
Barcelona, street vendors sold a stew called malcuinat, cooked over small
portable stoves, that was often the only hot meal available to those with
limited resources.141 Empanados (fried breaded foods) were common
street food, usually worth four or eight maravedís (roughly the same price
as a loaf of bread) and also associated with the working poor. For more
elegant and expensive fare than that offered in the street stands, both in
terms of food and wine, there were the figones, which were allowed to sell
foods like partridge and venison that were considered more appropriate
to the upper classes. Later we will see how municipal authorities actively
reinforced these social differences via food regulations.
While Spanish cities and towns offered a remarkable variety of prepared
foods, for those who cooked at home, meat and produce were available
in open-air markets. While Seville had been known as the gastronomic
capital of Spain, Madrid, with its dramatic growth after becoming the
permanent seat of the court in the 1560s, soon gained a reputation for
providing extraordinary variety (and we will discuss later the negative
side of the city’s growing reputation for gluttony). Of the sixteen public
plazas in Madrid in the seventeenth century, nearly all of them were
dedicated at least some days of the week to the provision of food. In
spite of the city’s location in the geographic center of the peninsula, two
42
hundred miles from the nearest coast, fresh fish and seafood were always
available. For preparing meals at home, nearly every main ingredient
could be found in the market of the Plaza Mayor, which, according to a
seventeenth-century chronicler, “seems to enjoy the privileges of Paradise,
in that against the laws of nature it is a garden that is always fruitful.”142
The same chronicler boasted that “there was no bird so fleet nor fish so
hidden that if it existed in any land, Madrid could not get hold of it.”143
Walking clockwise around the plaza, one would have passed stands for
beer, sweets, bread, frogs, wine, pastries, fruit, fish, aguardiente and let-
uario, chicken, eggs, more bread, vegetables, tripe, mutton, and goat.144
Secondary food markets were set up in the plaza of San Martín, the Puerta
de Santo Domingo, and the Red de San Luis, all around the edges of the
seventeenth-century city. More specialized sites included the streets of
Postas and Mayor for chocolate vendors, the plazas of San Salvador and
Arrabal for fish, the Plaza de la Cebada where grains and vegetables were
sold, and the plazas of Puerta Nueva and Santa Luisa for butchers who
provided beef, mutton, and goat. Animals were provided for in the Plaza
de la Madera’s marketplace for grain and hay.
As cities and their food supplies grew, the provision, maintenance, and
quality control of markets and eating establishments became a significant
responsibility for local authorities. Cities by their very nature relied on
imports of food from the surrounding region and from greater distances;
even a town with three thousand residents required 4,500 acres of land
to produce enough grain for its needs.145 Municipal grain policies began
to develop in earnest in the thirteenth century, seeking to guarantee a
supply of grain, control prices, maintain quality, and avoid popular upris-
ings.146 During the conquest of the Muslim kingdom of Granada in the
late fifteenth century, Ferdinand and Isabella (as well as local authorities)
were concerned about maintaining the stability of the food supply in the
newly conquered regions. The town of Alhama surrendered on February
28, 1482, and on the next day Seville was ordered to provide it with seven
thousand animals, seven thousand sacks of grain, and over a hundred
thousand liters of wine.147 In the context of the Reconquest, armies were
careful to protect and maintain ovens, mills, and marketplaces in good
43
condition, so that conquered towns could return to self-sufficiency as soon

as possible. This was for practical reasons, but also meant as an expression
of “princely paternalism,” through which rulers followed a moral imper-
ative to protect their subjects. Nascent capitalism still operated within a
framework where market forces were not allowed to endanger the body
politic when it came to the supply and price of food.148 Subjects may
have understood droughts and disease to be acts of God, but they were
also aware that food shortages were at least in part the responsibility of
city officials. In times of dearth or crisis, local authorities acted to protect
local interests, and this could lead to conflicts between different terri-
tories over scarce resources. In 1470, the city of Toledo was so short of
grain that it sent a delegation to Córdoba, some 180 miles to the south,
asking its permission to purchase grain from their stores. The officials
of Córdoba not only denied their request but also issued a decree that
the Toledans could not travel through their territory in possession of
any grain purchased from any other region. Toledo in turn protested to
King Enrique IV, with the plea that such a denial went “against all charity,
humanity, and divine and human law,” but it is not clear whether the king
was able to take any action.149 During the food crisis of the late 1640s,
there were hunger-related uprisings in southern Granada, Córdoba, and
Seville; Madrid refused to send grain in fear that its own citizens might
riot as well.150
Concerns over the availability of food also marked the relationship
between urban populations and the surrounding countryside; in every
case, the city had the upper hand. In times of dearth, city authorities
could requisition grain from the surrounding area, prohibit the removal
of grain from the region, control how much was milled, manipulate prices,
provide rations to city residents, and even demand forced loans of money
or grain. Municipal food regulations also reflected a degree of concern
about maintaining sustainable food supplies, by placing restrictions on
the depletion of fish stocks, limiting hunting to certain seasons, and
other such cautionary measures. As we have seen earlier, city authorities
were deeply concerned about maintaining bread supplies in the interest
of public order. Meat supplies were less crucial, and they merited only a
44
brief note in the Madrid regulations: “If on any day there is a shortage of
meat, the contracted providers shall be fined, so that they shall be aware
that they need to provide enough or face greater penalties. . . . In the
worst case, someone trustworthy should be sent to purchase more from
the regional fairs.”151 The privileged position of the court was reflected in
the fact that city regulations dictated that in times of bread shortages, the
royal household was to be supplied first and hospitals and convents after-
ward, at the aldermen’s discretion.152 Regulations and decrees regarding
the production, sale, and price of bread number in the hundreds in the
records of Madrid’s alcaldes de casa y corte, more than those concerning
any other foodstuff. City authorities kept careful track of the production
of wheat in areas within sixteen leagues of the city and the amounts that
each region was obliged to provide each week. In 1630, facing concerns
about maintaining the supply of bread for a growing population, local
officials decided to extend the wheat obligation to a broader geographical
range.153 Barcelona, meanwhile, had less authority over its surrounding
areas and depended more on imports of grain from Sicily and Provence; its
poor were therefore more susceptible to fluctuations in price and supply.
In early 1334, following a year of poor harvests, city councilors wrote that
citizens were “perishing from hunger” and that they feared the city was
on the verge of “tearing itself apart,” foreshadowing a spate of riots and
violence that broke out later that year in response to rumors of grain-
hoarding.154 While this was essentially a practical and political issue, one
curious side effect was that after the fourteenth century, hagiographies
came to record a new form of miracle along the Mediterranean coast of
Spain: the providential arrival of ships loaded with grain.155
With growing urban populations, municipal governments came to
take an increasingly active role in inspecting and guaranteeing, to the
best of their ability, the quality of the food supply as well as its quantity.
Far from being a trivial duty, this was perceived as an important con-
tribution to maintaining social order. The Augustinian Juan de Soto’s
recommendations to King Philip III on the proper role of all “estates and
offices” included a chapter on local magistrates and governors, emphasizing
that an important part of their role was the supervision of marketplaces
45
to guarantee fair prices, quality supplies of meat, wine, and bread, and
accurate measurements.156 (Curiously, Soto’s chapter on merchants and
grocers tends to assume the opposite, that their natural behavior will
be to cut corners: “although certainly some of them must do their job
well, there is such temptation in it, to not give each customer what he
is owed, or to not be content with modest earnings, that it will be nec-
essary to admonish them in the Lord and advise them as to what they
ought to do.”157) In Madrid, the records of the alcaldes de casa y corte are
replete with licenses, price lists, quality checks, and other indications of
the ongoing concern that alcaldes had with guaranteeing the safety and
availability of food. These officials granted licenses for, and supervised
the sale of, items as minute and diverse as olives, sugar, sausages, biscuits,
asparagus, eggs, and paprika.158
Beyond the guarantee of quality and quantity, municipal authorities
played a role in the public reinforcement of social hierarchy by determining
what kinds of people had access to certain kinds of food. Even at the low
end of the social scale, while bodegones and taverns sold food and drink
to humbler folk, they were instructed not to sell food to slaves and blacks.
Officials in the Andalusian town of Baeza, for example, complained that
“the taverns and inns and other houses are providing food and drink to
the slaves of this city, with the result that they leave their masters and
lords to go out and eat and drink.”159 City ordinances in Madrid included
directions in 1596 to the owners of bodegones to not provide food to slaves
and blacks, and in 1617 tavern owners were prohibited from selling alco-
hol to slaves or even letting them enter the taverns.160 Madrid authorities
also expressed repeated criticisms of elites who did not impose distinct
forms of dress and hairstyle on their Muslim slaves and servants. This
may have reflected fears that if slaves and blacks socialized freely with
Christian Spaniards, eating and drinking in public places, it could be too
challenging to tell them apart, and the former would be too inclined to
think of themselves as equal.
On the higher end of the social scale, local authorities sought to
guarantee certain foodstuffs for their most important citizens. Cities
established yearly contracts with people who provided basic items such
46
as meat and bread for the city, and quantities of the best fruit, meat,
fish, and grain were set aside from those supplies for certain elites. The
wealthy of course had access to superior foods because of their greater
purchasing power, but these basic divisions were inscribed into local
government as well. The municipal ordinances of the Andalusian town
of Loja in the late fifteenth century, for example, directed that butchers
and fishwives should reserve their choicest products for the mayor, clerics,
and aldermen. Similarly, the town’s aldermen were guaranteed a regular
supply of mutton, with the promised slaughter of three animals per day
for themselves and the sick.161 In Toledo, the guardians of the chapel of
don Sancho (the first king of Castile) in the cathedral had the privilege
of keeping the equivalent of ten pounds of meat from each cow and one
pound for each sheep that was butchered in the city, in spite of complaints
that this drove up the price of beef and mutton.162 In Madrid, once the
court was established there, these decrees included special supplies for
the royal household and those of ambassadors. City officials kept lists of
what each ambassador’s household was allowed to have, both in terms
of provisions from the marketplace as well as hunting rights in the Casa
de Campo. For example, the official supplier of meat to the court was
instructed to provide one veal calf each week and one kid goat each day
to the house of every ambassador, and a 1617 decree established that the
ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor could augment his own pantry
with up to 160 doves and 80 partridges a day and 450 rabbits a week. At
the same time, as we have seen, these decrees reserved tripe, giblets, and
heads for hospitals and the poor.163
The basic food practices of early modern Spaniards were shaped by a
range of beliefs and practical realities, from the daily challenges of acquiring
and preparing food to the importance of consuming foodstuffs appropriate
to their status and nature. Their choices reflected a careful adherence to
Galenic medical beliefs related to the bodily humors as well as popular
ideas about the qualities of foods and their relationship to human society.
The kind of bread people baked, the amount of wine they drank, the
spices with which they seasoned their dishes, and their choices of meats
and vegetables were shaped by both legal frameworks and informal social
47
pressures. For monarchs at the national level and city officials at the local
level, policing these hierarchies and guaranteeing a sufficient and healthy
food supply was part of their political and moral responsibility. This
chapter has served to provide a general overview of early modern Spanish
culinary customs and the most important connections between food and
the social hierarchy, particularly in the urban context. The following one
will examine groups and collective identity, to show how food worked to
solidify connections between members of certain social categories and
to define their boundaries in relation to others.
48

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At the First Table

Published by University of Nebraska Press

For additional information about this book

For preindustrial Europeans, in the age before the

and legume-based diet to be easily flavored with the addition of small

The most important element on most early modern

bake the dough brought by residents or anyone else. If anyone needed

made it somewhat difficult to manage gracefully at the table. Conduct

Bread ’ s most important companion at the table

As with all other foodstuffs, wine served to indicate and emphasize

1624 the ambassador of Denmark requested permission to grind barley

appearance in Madrid’s food-licensing regulations is in 1760.63 Benito

If the majority of Spaniards shared these elements

outside influence on their affairs. Today’s Catalan independence move-

as well as contributions from Muslim Andalusia, Portugal, and the Low

Food Hier archies : Theory and Pr actice

These humoral characteristics determined a body’s personality as well

centuries, then, consumption of meat came to differentiate between social

The proportion of meat in any meal rose sharply according to one’s

For the most part, the conceptions of food accord-

of meat. Despojos—the organs and offal of meat animals and poultry

of slaughterhouse products in the markets, received frequent petitions

In spite of these negative connotations, elites seem to have favored the

formal occasions.126 This distinction may have arisen because orchard

Food and the Urban Communit y

condition, so that conquered towns could return to self-sufficiency as soon

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