The convivio is a metaphoric place where the society sees its own identity, it is the expression of the "social" man, who lives and eats with other people. In Modern Age satisfy someone's hunger is a dramatic problem, sorrowful: countries and cities have known the hunger with frequency and higher intensity than in past. In the medieval imaginary a main component of a powerful person was to have a strong appetite and the possibility to satisfy it. This image was modified and during XVIIth century the administrative and diplomatic abilities are more important than the brutal strength. It's more important to be able to offer, to show, to display food more than to eat a lot.
The elaboration of the convivial forms, like the table's etiquette, is a long way that reaches maturation between XVIth and XVIIth century. Two are the fundamental directives: the aristocracy consolidates its power and it's contrasts poor people; besides it developes a city society contrasted to the country simplicity. These new values and behaviorsoppose the vulgarity and rusticity. The first rule is to eat "according to the quality of the person", the diet has to remind the age, the sex, the "humoural constitution", the state of health, the kind of job; then the climate and the season. An expensive dietary program made for of powerful persons.
Gentlemen eat precious foods, elaborate, refined; the farmers eat common and rough foods. Who doesn't respect these rules is lost. The error often become a tragedy: in "Bertoldo! of Giulio Cesare Croce the court's physicians try to recover the illness of the peasant with delicate foods, unsuitable to his coarse stomach, while he prays "to bring him a pot of beans with onion inside and cooked turnips under the ash".Only this way, eating according to his nature, he would be saved. In this period it's reduce the consumption of meat, expecially wild, while it's growing the consumption of vegetables and flour.
Hunger it's a constant problem for people as it testifies the literature both learned and popular. The most effective antidote to the fear of hunger is the dream. The dream oftranquillity, food's comfort and the abundance. The dream of a Abundance's country where the food is plentyful, good and easy to be reached; where gigantic pots of potato dumplings are inverted on mountains of grated cheese; where the vineyards are tied up with sausages and wheat's fields are fenced with meat roast and shoulders of pig.The culture of ostentation and waste it's not understood out of the hunger's culture, so these "two" cultures are dialectically postponed one to the other. Hunger it's unknown to the privileged classes; however not the fear of the hunger. Vice versa, the world of the hunger is a world of abundance and ostentation: even the country society knows moments of squandering of food, in occasion of great festivities and principal recurrences of the life (births, marriages, deaths). In these recurrences and celebrations food's squanderby poor people is an approach, an emulation of the rich ones. All have to see, all have to know: in Naples, in XVIIIth century, a team of town crier shouts from the streets the list of dejected animals and the quantity of foods that are consumed during Christmas festivities.
At the beginnings of Modern age, geographical discoveries and great trips influence also food's idealization and new foods come into the diet. However these new products didn't enter immediately in feeding and it took three centuries to see them on every day tables.An adaptation was also necessary to the diet's products. This was the case of the corn. Only hunger's reasons convinced the farmers to experiment their cultivation in their own fields, to a prevailing destination of auto consumption. All agrarian books notice that the corn's cultivation and the use of flour of corn it's consequence of shortage and famine. For many ways potato's European stories are similar. Even in this case there was a late introduction, connected to promotion solicited by intellectuals and land owners; on the other handconnected to the urgency to resolve hunger's problems. After the event we saw which and how many refine gastronomic elaborations are possible with these strange tubers; but we can't forget the spirit that European farmers of two centuries has welcomed it. It seemed beast's food and even for farmers. Meaningfully, even the potato was welcomed by the European farmers with the expectation that could be used according to the traditional canons of the home food culture: also, there was an attempt of homologation, of "reinterpretation."
Church's message didn't help a serene balanced attitude towards food and body's demands. After the council of Trento the Church kept on denying the legitimacy of pleasure as natural component of the human equilibrium and propose models of food behavior marked by notions of sacrifice and renouncement. Examples of bodily mortification don't miss, sometimes they digress in the pathology. We remember Giuseppe da Copertino: for him not only the deprivation, but even the same consumption of food becomes tool of penitence in an accurate search of disgusting and nauseating tastes. A culture that finds in Lent's normative an important moment of verification and control of the "private" behaviour of the believers. Formal aspects of the matter are also exasperated. It's discussed with subtle reasonings about good of every single food that has to be consumed in time of fast. It derives an ambiguous and contradictory food culture of it: a culture of the "to do but not to say", where a substantial tolerance of fact gets married to a substantial intolerance of principle. Nobody can denied the pleasure of the throat and to be together around a table, but they are speaking about sins, like every form of betrayal to the desires of the flesh. Neither we had to forget that food's and sexual pleasure are intimately connected, both in technical and mechanic sense, like in metaphoric and analogical sense.
A nonstop fortune in all treatises is the dietetics: not only in the specific medical literature, but even in gastronomy, agronomy, botany, and even ethic and religion. A clean opposition between health and pleasure grew in West Christian culture; the reasons for the ones and the others will be invoked not in mutual support, but in competition. Also in the XVIIIth century, the primary demands of the health and the hygiene had a polemic character against the gastronomic pleasure and the art of the kitchen. The claim of the citizenship against the artifice, of the simplicity against the excess of elaboration, of the raw one against the cooked one, it's a main component of the ideological upheaval promoted by the enlightenment thought against the society and the "traditional" culture. There is a lot of biblical image of the Eden in the "natural" heaven theorized by Rousseau and evoked in so much literature of the time. To these utopias are put beside scientifically rigorous projects that oppose the lucidity of the reason and the precision of the chemistry to the voracious passion of feudal world; the tastes and the strong foods are convicts and exiles. This is olny the first level of a vast attack to social and cultural values that are individualized as hinder to the civil progress. "How can be carnivorous a true democrat?" wondered Rousseau. The discourse is ideological more than gastronomic. A further test that every discourse on the food is a discourse on the society, on the world, on the life.
Up to the sixteenth century the oil was used in Europe both to cook meats in the days when people had to eat thin, both to season the salad. In the north Europe the oil was cheap, dark and rancid and it was not used for its goodness but for the necessity to follow religious laws that was imposed almost one day on three. If in the north Europe people dreamt a colourless oil, in taste of the south instead, being of good qualities, it was rigorously tasted of olive. This food habit ended for the northern countries after the Lutheran reform that didn't impose alimentary rigors anymore. A breedings extension introduced butter use also to season salad and increasing variety of sauces and creams both in England and in France. New and old drinks. It's recognized that in the Middle Age and up to XVIIth century the use of alcoholic drinks was greater than today, this habit it's owed to quite a lot reasons, there was the conviction that they were therapeutic drinks, it was difficult to find clean water and they gave euphoria. Besides the wine in XVIIth century quite a lot drinks descendants of the alchemy are distilled, brandy was already known since XIIth century but the use of Rum, Whiskey, Vodka, Maraschino, Rosolio and ratafià now compete with wine and beer. With the arrival on the continent of tea and café, of which are immediately recognized the stimulating ownerships, they also change the tastes and the life styles. Salesclerks, artisans and all the workers generally began the day with a ration of beer or wine getting their heads heavy and working therefore slowly. The use of the new drinks that keep awake improves the life. The corn. Famines persisted even in XVIIIth century and corn's use it's spread just to take the place of the lack of food. The output of the American plant is higher than rye and wheat but if it's used as only food it brings to the pellagra that spread just in XVIIIth century and it persisted in Europe even in XIXth century and in Italy up to the beginnings of our century.