You Are When You Eat
by Romie StottIn an animal sense, feeding ourselves is the most important thing we do every day. What we eat changes us on a chemical, and corresponding emotional, level; how long food preparation takes, how much energy the food we eat gives us, and what times of day we set aside as mealtimes shape the rhythms of our culture as much as night and day. It is unsurprising that so many rituals, both religious and secular, revolve around food.
Food is as informative as fashion; what people eat tells you their social class, their likely lifespan, and how much leisure time they probably have. If you want to figure out the alliances between societies, look at what the people in them are eating. If peasants are eating meat, they're spicing it with something. If the nobility is drinking wine, it came from somewhere. If a war breaks out or an alliance breaks down, there will be a national diet shift as people seek out substitutes.
When writing about food, one of the worst things a fantasy author can do is to go with his instincts. We live in a strange period, culinarily - refrigeration and cheap transportation make it possible to get food from anywhere in the world, year-round. Advances in fertilizers, pesticides, and farm machinery have lead to high crop yields over large areas worked by very few people; not only does this make unprocessed food cheap, but it frees up a lot of labor which can then, for instance, be hired by groceries, restaurants, and vendors.
As recently as 150 years ago, even most city-dwellers had livestock and vegetable gardens - people were food producers as well as food consumers. Cooking without microwaves, electric ovens, gas ranges, and "instant" versions of foods like oatmeal was a time-consuming process. As a result, food wasn't prepared in single servings made to order; it was usually cooked in large amounts expected to feed the entire household. For thousands of years, the waking life of a married woman was almost entirely occupied with preparing and storing food - and in many cases, the life of a man was spent ranching or farming.
It is clear that food in fiction should not be taken lightly. Medieval oranges were bitter like lemons. Potatoes and corn1 didn't reach Europe until the discovery of the New World (and until potatoes, the Irish were too malnourished to have a population explosion). Tea didn't catch on in England until the Baroque. Although pasta existed in Italy as early as the 1200s (and before Marco Polo's trip to the Orient), it remained an unaffordable luxury good for the next 500 years. Tomatoes (another American plant) were under suspicion until very recently - as members of the nightshade family, they were variously believed to be poisonous, to cause leprosy, to be an aphrodesiac - even to be the source of werewolfism.
Period cookbooks can be an excellent resource when writing fantasy or historical fiction; you can find reprints at many historical sites, and originals in many libraries. (If you can't find any at your public library, try a university library, some of which are being brought online through Google.) However, be aware that cookbooks don't necessarily list the most common dishes - just the ones that are most complicated. Moreover, they are often a storehouse of easily forgotten "once a year" recipes - dishes served only at Christmas or only at weddings. Finally, cookbooks are intended for the consumption of the literate (a.k.a. wealthy) - they often don't portray the lifestyle of the average person.
Other good sources are inventories, shopping lists, and bills of sale, many of which have been preserved from as far back as Ancient Egypt2. Once again, these must be compared to other aspects of the historical record - a large purchase of grain could be used as cattle feed or stockpiled for year-round use, while an absence of vegetables could simply mean that most people grew them at home. Herbs could be seasonings, or they could be medicines. Pieces of artwork from Greece through the Renaissance picture women eating pomegranate rind not because it was a popular food but because it was an effective contraceptive.3
Regardless of your chosen genre, the research below can illuminate a world of food, herbs, and more beyond the ready-made one to which we have become accustomed.
Carnegie Mellon's Historical Recipes of Different Cultures provides small catalogues of Roman and Medieval recipes, along with notes on modern substitutions. The focus seems to be on recipes one could prepare at home today; the site's main weakness is its lack of precision regarding when and where a given recipe was used.
Ethnobotanical Leaflets - From agave to vanilla, and beyond, this site gives you the dirt on what parts of plants are edible, where they're used, when they began to be cultivated, and where they're still grown. An indespensible and comprehensive reference.
American Historical Recipes is a meta-list which links to sites on historic American regional cuisine, essays about the evolution of American cookbooks, conversion tables for coloquial measurements, and articles about Americans' eating patterns throughout the decades. Soul food, military food, Spanish colonial food, 1950s diners - if it's from the history of the U.S., it's here.
The Foody, UK & Ireland is a somewhat oddly organized site which provides recipes from the Roman, Medieval, Regency, and Victorian/Edwardian periods. Usefully, the site often provides cleaned up versions of recipes alongside quotes from their originals, and sometimes includes historical notes about particular dishes or ingredients. Navigate using the bar on the left; don't click "homepage" or you may have trouble getting back - "historic" is the index page of this section.
Atlantian A&S; Links - This Society for Creative Anacrhonism website mingles conteporary essays and primary sources about the history of food throughout the world, organized both by timeperiod and by culture. In addition, there are sections on historical ovens, ettiquette, and tablewear.
Medieval and Renaissance Food Homepage - A random and intriguing collection of scans of primary sources, collections of recipes, and essays about diverse topics like "The Rise of Bakers' Guilds in the Middle Ages," "Cheesemaking in Scotland," and "The Development of Cast Iron for Domestic Use." A quirky little site, useful if you're looking for inspiration.
The Food Timeline makes a few controversial claims - both coq au vin and tiramisu show up suspiciously late - but it is laudable in both scope and thoroughness. Foods as basic as almonds and as manufactured as moon pies all have their place on the list; click on them, and you'll find quotes, historical notes, and musings on questions like "why are cakes round?"
And for science fiction fans...The History of Food in Space is an article detailing culinary advances in the U.S. space program. Artificial gravity may remain far in the future, but we've come a long way from food in tubes.4
1. In some parts of Europe, corn is still not considered fit for human consumption; it is used as animal feed. Although there are literary references to corn which predate the discovery of the Americas, in these cases "corn" means "staple grain" - not "maize." English "corn laws" most commonly refer to wheat.
2. The most common archaeological site seems to be the garbage pit - these tended to be in out-of-the-way places unlikely to be buried beneath a road or building; they weren't ordinarily robbed, inherited, or melted down; and they were everywhere people were.
3. For a comprehensive and detailed overview of historical contraceptive methods, read John M. Riddle's Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance. Instead of taking the "look at those crazy and superstitious ancient people" approach, Riddle seriously examines the effectiveness of various herbs and techniques, examines historical debates about fathers' and mothers' rights, and provides a background against which to view today's birth control methods.
4. If you're more interested in what could be than what has been, Samuel R. Delaney's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a powerful example of how food can be used to illuminate an alien culture.
© Romie Stott
Romie Stott is the associate editor of Reflection's Edge. Her other articles can be found here.