Abstract
Reviewed by: Allyson M. Poska, University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, VA, USA
Although historians agree that Spanish society during the early modern period was defined by a rigid social hierarchy, we actually know very little about how that social hierarchy was articulated or how it functioned. In her new book, Jodi Campbell provides an overview of the many ways that Spaniards, particularly elite Spaniards, used food and foodways to assert collective identities and to distinguish one social group from another.
Campbell has combed through a rich array of source materials, including household books, conduct manuals, recipe books, chronicles, municipal records, as well as plays and other fictional accounts, in search of moments in which food defined the many social groups that formed the basis of Spanish society. Bread was a critical expression of many Spanish identities. Transcending class lines, it was the staff of life for nearly all Spaniards and was the most common indicator of commensality, as breaking bread together reinforced social connections. However, Campbell’s focus is on the many ways that Spaniards used food to make distinctions among people more than its ability to create communities. As she reveals, on some level, every point in the consumption process reinforced the social hierarchy, separating people into groups by class, race, gender and/or religion. As municipal authorities in southern Spain oversaw provisioning for their inhabitants, they regulated the sale of foodstuffs to slaves and blacks (at the bottom of the social hierarchy) while at the same time, setting aside the choicest cuts of meat and highest quality grains and fruit for the wealthiest inhabitants of the city. On the streets of Spanish cities, gender determined who cooked and sold what foods and where. Lower-class women filled Madrid’s markets with an array of vegetables, eggs and small animals, as well as prepared foods, while the employment of a male cook increasingly became a sign of status in elite households. At court, the ascension of Charles I to the Spanish throne introduced complex Burgundian dining rituals that altered both who ate what and how the food was served, clearly differentiating between the new Hapsburg dynasty and its Trastámara predecessor.
As Spanish society moved towards an increasingly homogenous Christian community, food was a key indicator of religious heterodoxy or assimilation. Communities surveilled their neighbour’s eating habits, hoping to identify who might secretly be maintaining Jewish or Islamic dietary laws. However, Christians also struggled with dietary restrictions. Monastic communities found it difficult to comply with Benedictine limits on meat consumption originally established to separate those who had taken holy orders from the rest of the Christian community.
Finally, food consumption was an indicator of self-control, a quality that differentiated between the virtuous and those prone to vice in Spanish society. Both the Church and the State were invested in controlling the vice. While the Church advocated fasting as an expression of religious piety, the state regularly imposed sumptuary laws in an attempt to control perceived ‘excesses’ of spending on foodstuffs. In one of the most interesting sections of the book, Campbell describes changes in the use of food in charitable giving. The pre-Tridentine Church had asserted that the distribution of food to the needy aided both the physical and the spiritual health of both the givers and the recipients; however, over the course of the sixteenth century, both the Church and Spanish society increasingly emphasized personal responsibility and limited the definition of the worthy poor, leaving more and more Spaniards to fend for themselves.
Overall, this book is a good, sturdy overview of the role of food in Spanish society. As Campbell notes in the introduction, her discussions of the myriad ways that food functioned as an indicator of social identity fit neatly into those described by scholars of other early modern nation-states. The reader is, at times, frustrated by the fact the author’s decision to engage with so many different social groups and so many different meanings of food. While each of the subtopics is critical to her overall discussion, many of the subsections and the conclusion seem too brief. I really wanted Campbell to make more connections and spend more time articulating a more substantive conclusion. Nevertheless, At the First Table is the only book of its kind in English, and, as such, provides an important foundation for the study of food and foodways in early modern Spain.