Food Matters: Alonso Quijano’s Diet and the Discourse of Food in Early Modern Spain, by Carolyn A. Nadeau

Abstract

Alonso Quijano is better known by his literary nom-de-chevalerie: Don Quixote. At the start of the novel Cervantes provides a description of the knight’s weekly diet: ‘a stew containing more beef than mutton, salad most nights, abstinence eggs on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and an occasional squab on Sundays’. In this book, Carolyn Nadeau unpacks this menu to delightful effect. As she shows, Don Quixote’s diet reveals a great deal about his social status, religious convictions, overall health and fragile mental state. Beyond this, she demonstrates the importance of food to many aspects of life in early modern Spain. The book is a study of the ‘food events’ (p. xii) embedded in cook-books, novels, legal records and other sources. These enable her to explain the significance of iconic dishes such as olla podrida—the ‘olio’ that Samuel Pepys enjoyed in 1669 London, establish ‘the concept of salad’ (p. 77) and, overall, show food’s centrality to early modern Spanish culture.