A couple of random book notes:
The Banquet:Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe  was a book I plucked from the “New Arrivals” shelf. Of course.  I gave it a quick read last week, and enjoyed it on a variety of different levels. First, it’s interesting and thought-provoking to consider what people in the past ate and enjoyed. A pie made of veal eyes? An emphasis in the books was to look at the food and rituals associated with banqueting across cultures, with special attention paid to Italy, France and England. The case the author makes is that the late Renaissance was a transition period in cooking, from the heavily spiced, essentially mashed-together cuisine of the Medieval period and the more “refined” and nationally defined cuisines of the Early Modern period – of great interest is watching those national cuisines gradually take shape. Due notice is given to those who criticized the excesses of banqueting, who were not only religious figures and moralists, but physicians as well. Much of the medical critique was related, not just to issues of weight and such, but to the consequences of imbalance for the humours.

I find myself with a growing interest in the humours of late, inspired in part by this episode of the BBC4’s In Our Time. When we speak so glibly of the past being another time inhabited by individuals and societies with different worldviews, I don’t think we grasp quite how deep those differences go. For hundreds of years, for example, Europeans’ senses of themselves and the universe were shaped by a belief in the humours and (to take it to another area) astrology (the subject of another In Our Time here.) I can’t help but muse on what all of that meant for the way people lived their lives, looked at the world and thought about God. I would be fascinated to read some materials on the role of the humors and astrology in theological thinking and spirituality of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Keeping with the food theme (and I made a great lentil soup yesterday, btw – I liked it, anyway. So did Katie, surprisingly.), I skimmed through many of the pieces in Best Food Writing of 2007 , some of which were sharp, most of which were not. The most interesting and (in the context of the subject matter) most important was a piece on St. Francis’ Table – an apostolate of Capuchins in Toronto, which is something more than a food kitchen – it is a restaurant (patrons are asked to pay a dollar) serving the poor of the city.
Hmmm…a dollar a head. Not bad. Or maybe those guys could just save their pennies for 275 days and grab the prix fixe at Per Se. Whaddya think?
The Banquet continues…