At the First Table

Jodi Campbell

Published by University of Nebraska Press

Campbell, Jodi.
At the First Table: Food and Social Identity in Early Modern Spain.
University of Nebraska Press, 2017.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/49126.

For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/49126
 Conclusion

In early modern Spain, people perceived themselves

and others as belonging to clearly defined categories of gender, status,
age, occupation, and religion. Each of these categories carried certain
assumptions about proper behavior and appropriate relationships with
others. Such behavior and relationships could be expressed in a number
of visible ways, such as clothing, terms of address, or relative position in
a procession. In a culture that valued appearances and relied on these
visible cues for the proper maintenance of social order, food was a par-
ticularly useful mechanism for the performance of social identity. Dining
habits could publicly convey people’s social position, religious loyalties,
expectations of others, even the authority of their officials and rulers at
the local and national levels. A person’s various categories of identity
were associated with certain food choices by medical tradition, informal
custom, and law. Dining customs such as gifts of food and the seating
order of guests were meant to reinforce the proper social hierarchies in
people’s relationships with each other. One’s appearance was meant to
closely correspond to one’s actual nature in regard to these categories — a
monarch’s stomach was not suited to turnips, peasants were not meant to
eat lamb, monks and nuns expressed their faith through an ascetic diet

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of fish and vegetables, and the proper social order depended on everyone
acting their part.
Reflecting early modern Europeans’ understandings of themselves
as a society of orders, the majority of food customs were practiced to
emphasize and reinforce difference in degree and kind. Anyone attending
or observing a banquet could see that the guests at the first table were
superior to those at the second table. Kings projected their authority by
hosting large banquets, or by dining alone in front of an audience, in either
case with carefully ritualized protocols of table service. Family members
ate separately from their servants. Ambassadors and other political elites
enjoyed a level of access to special foods such as rabbit, partridge, and lamb
that others lacked. Christians enthusiastically embraced the consumption
of pork and kept close watch on their neighbors to see whether a stew
prepared on a Friday night or a distaste for blood sausage might suggest
the hidden practice of heresy. Confraternities prepared meals of cabbage
and beans as charitable offerings to the poor and consolidated their own
communities with feasts of mutton, fruit, sweets, and good wine. Women
were responsible for preparing food for their families, though authorities
tried to limit their food-related activities outside the home and feared
that women were too susceptible to their desires for sweets and idleness.
Men were the only ones who were able to elevate food preparation to
a respected profession and proudly publicized their accomplishments
through cookbooks and service in aristocratic households. Peasants were
prohibited from hunting large game animals, while nobles enjoyed such
activity as entertainment. Even the nature of charity shifted away from
direct, individual donations of food at festivals and funerals toward the
greater marginalization of poor people, framing them no longer as objects
of Christian charity but as vagabonds and ne’er-do-wells who needed to
be controlled by civic authorities.
While these assumptions and behaviors served to highlight the differ-
ences between social categories, there was also a degree of flexibility in
how one displayed oneself, especially regarding social status. A common
stereotype of the early modern social structure holds that the noble estate
was clearly defined and distinct from the rest of society, but the definition

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and practice of nobility was far more nuanced and uncertain. Some tra-
ditional landed elites found themselves economically challenged while
some urban merchants found themselves newly wealthy; sales of noble
titles blurred the distinction of heritage. Maintaining a certain appear-
ance was the best way to claim a particular social position, and creating
such appearances was within the reach of an increasingly large sector of
the population. Those with little wealth could spend extravagantly on
fine dinners, masking their poverty elsewhere. Those with wealth but
no title could invest in luxury spices and tableware in imitation of their
presumptive superiors; anyone with access to a degree of education could
develop their rhetorical skills and table manners to present themselves as a
worthy dining companion. Foodstuffs and customs that in the fourteenth
century were the exclusive province of aristocrats became increasingly
available to a wider population by the seventeenth.1 Sugar, cinnamon,
manjar blanco, and fruit all began as markers of elite status and trickled
their way down to be appropriated by broader urban markets. The same
was true of table manners; where a fourteenth-century nobleman could
distinguish himself by picking up his food with three fingers instead of
five and not wiping his mouth on the tablecloth, some generations later
even poor university students were learning to make proper use of sil-
verware. Even monks and nuns came to be less rigidly distinct from the
lay population in their eating habits. Though they traditionally pursued
regular fasts and a limited diet as a way of demonstrating their spiritual
dedication and rejection of worldly temptations, their meals gradually
came to resemble those of the rest of society as they increased their con-
sumption of meat, wine, and sweets. The only exception to this gradual
softening of the social hierarchy was the royal family, which in Spain
succeeded in setting itself ever more apart from its subjects. The king’s
retinue experienced a shift from being peripatetic and relying on principal
subjects for the provision of food to settling in a fixed court and providing
food and lodging to courtiers and guests. This shift echoed a change in
the idea of kingship itself, from an emphasis on collegiality among the
powerful to the supremacy of the monarch; with less commensality came
greater symbolic distance between ruler and subjects.

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The emphasis on appearance and the social developments of educa-

tion and table manners all reflect a greater appreciation of the value of
self-control, or “self-fashioning” in Stephen Greenblatt’s famous term.2
Lineage and title were still significant, but people came to be identified
by their occupations, abilities, and earned wealth as well, all elements
that reflected their individual achievement rather than their inherited
value. This development paralleled the growing criticism of excess that
characterized discussions of the empire’s economic situation in the sev-
enteenth century. Just as elites turned their attention away from loading
their tables with dizzying quantities of food toward sophistication and
the tasteful selection of ingredients, so moralists criticized the gluttony
and wastefulness of the court, and those outside the circles of power
could vaunt their moral superiority and freedom from corruption as
represented by their simple, honest cuisine. Treatises on food, education,
and the economy all agreed that good government and social order relied
on everyone from citizens to monarchs to curb their appetites and govern
their desires. While Europe continued to be characterized by a stepped
social hierarchy and the perception of distinct social categories until well
into the modern period, food habits in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries show the beginning of a gradual smoothing out of the extremes.
Hosts no longer competed with each other to impress their guests at
banquets featuring hundreds of different dishes; practicing Catholics
could gradually reduce the number of days they were expected to fast.
Food remained (and remains) one of the most important mechanisms
of social interaction, but with the transition to modernity, it would no
longer be vital to seek the distinction of being seated “at the first table.”

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