Of Eggplant, Ham, and Identity

Abstract

In his much-anthologized “Tres cosas me tienen preso,” the Spanish poet Baltasar del Alcázar (1530–1606) compares a dish of ham, eggplant, and cheese to the beautiful Inés, and finds her wanting. While the poem can be read as a comic conflation of sex and food as dueling human appetites, here I suggest that the cultural connotations of ham (a quintessential Christian marker in Renaissance Spain), eggplant (a food strongly associated with the Muslim and Jewish “other”), and to a lesser extent cheese reveal the poet’s own cultural anxieties and represent an attempt to resolve them.