Chapter 1: Meat and Mains
Chapter 2: Bread and Grains
Chapter 3: Vegetables and Legumes
Chapter 4: Fruits and Sweets
Chapter 5: Wine
Martha M. Daas is associate professor and chair of the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Old Dominion University.
Compiling Christian, Muslim, and Jewish texts across health
manuals, cookbooks, agricultural sources, religious writings, and
literary texts, Daas has laid the groundwork for food studies in
medieval Iberia. Each of the five chapters centers on a food group
(meat/mains, bread/grains, vegetables/legumes, fruits/sweets, and
wine) and pivots to cover the considerations of class, geography,
politics, religion, and sex that characterize each food. --A
thorough foundational work that will be equal parts useful and
delightful for scholars, students, and foodies alike!
In the Middle Ages, the Iberian Peninsula was a cultural
intersection, home to Christians, Jews, and Muslims. These
religious groups' tastes and restrictions contributed to Iberian
foodways, made even more complex by their differences in social
class and wealth. Bread and wine were staples of most diets (many
Muslims drank wine), although the rich consumed more meat than the
poor did. In drawing this picture, Daas employs a variety of
sources, including books on cookery, medical texts, agricultural
manuals, and literary works. She ties the intersection of diet with
health consciousness to the belief that human beings might incline
toward one of the four humors, becoming either choleric, sanguine,
melancholic, or phlegmatic. A food or drink of one type might
counterbalance a natural tendency toward another humor. Five
chapters cover meat, bread and grains, vegetables and legumes,
fruits and sweets, and wine. Each chapter discusses the three
religious communities' cultures and strictures, including
inquisitorial inquiries. The prose is clear, and quotations from
other languages are translated. Recommended. General readers
through faculty.
Martha M. Daas's book is a valuable contribution to the study of
food in Medieval Iberia forboth scholars and students. It draws on
a variety of cultural material (i.e. agricultural, culinary,
historical, literary, and medicinal) from the three major religions
to demonstrate at a larger scalehow food and its representations
oscillate between pleasure and prohibition. Each chapter
isorganized by food-type facilitating the dialogue of sources
outlining the similarities anddifferences of how various items were
discussed, consumed, and employed across religionsand centuries.
While anchored in the past, this work invites the reader to
consider food'scontinued relevance in today's world as a parallel
tool of inclusion and exclusion.
There are few book-length studies available in English about the
ways people thought about and consumed food in medieval Iberia.
Daas' comprehensive study of medieval Iberian foodways, Medieval
Fare: Food and Culture in Medieval Iberia, will undoubtedly be
useful to those interested in Food Studies and in Medieval Iberian
culture.The complexity of medieval Spanish society is manifest in
the foods that were grown and consumed by the various religious and
ethnic communities of the Peninsula. Daas' study explores the ways
in which Spaniards of differing religions and ethnicities used food
at times to come together and at others to accentuate their
differences. In this book, we find the type of bread or stew one
ate could signal to others not only which faith-community they
belonged to, but also their social status. Tracing the history of
food preparation and consumption (with chapters devoted to bread,
wine, meat, sweets, and more), Daas brings together literary and
historical sources, as well as the work of other well-known
scholars such as Olivia Remie Constable and Carolyn Nadeau to paint
a picture of the complexity of medieval Spanish foodways.
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