A Natural History of the Kitchen

Abstract

On the evidence of early modern European cookbooks, the wild birds deemed edible around 1600 included cranes, herons, swans, and cormorants. By 1750, none of these were considered palatable. While culinary historians have explored the transition from medieval to modern food marked by François Pierre de La Varenne’s Le cuisinier françois (1651), less attention has been afforded to another major transition in the European diet—that of eating a large variety of wild and domesticated animals to eating only a few. Historians of science in particular have largely ignored this transition, yet this shift in the definition of what was edible held profound implications for the changing roles of animals in both diets and scientific study. Two kinds of printed sources that are not commonly consulted together—cookery books and works on natural history—afford a new comparative glimpse of early modern animals and their varied meanings. In 1600, cookbooks and natural histories included many of the same animals and talked about some of the same things, since the category of “use” applied to both. By the time Vincent La Chapelle’s The Modern Cook appeared in 1733, these works had entirely diverged in content. Animals in cookbooks became a means to an end rather than a topic of study, while natural histories ceased to talk about uses and considered instead comparative anatomy and classification. Looking particularly at birds, this article tracks changing meanings surrounding both animals and diets in early modern Europe. The turkey emerges as the critical indicator of these changes in its naturalization from a wild exotic species to a familiar farmyard animal.