Good Humors

NOTE: The following transcript corresponds to an earlier version of this show. Some passages may not match the rebroadcast audio above.

BRIAN: Ed, you know I’m always thinking about food, and actually a lot of us are often thinking about food. But I have to admit, I have never considered food from the angle of the American Revolution.

ED: Yeah, Brian, that’s so brave for you to admit the one day Peter’s not here. But nevertheless, the fact is that we’ve looked into this, as you know, and it turns out that there are a lot of implications about food and the American Revolution.

BRIAN: That’s exactly what Trudy Eden showed us. She’s an early American historian, and she brought along an English cookbook from this period.

TRUDY EDEN: A popular cookbook in the popular press.

BRIAN: And in addition to the recipes you’d expect to see in a cookbook, it also contains a series of diagrams. So picture this. You have a bird’s eye view of the dinner table. It’s dotted with no less than 29 dishes, all laid out symmetrically. There’s some familiar items– pork, asparagus, turnips– and some less familiar ones, like orange pudding and roasted larks. You’ve had roasted larks recently, haven’t you, Ed?

ED: For lunch, actually, Brian. Yeah.

BRIAN: Exactly. We asked Trudy Eden to walk us through this meal.

TRUDY EDEN: I think maybe the best way to approach this is by thinking of yourself as a diner, and walking in. The table would probably have been set with all of the dishes. Not everybody ate everything that was on the table. And the hostess would not be offended if you had, say, four dishes next to you, and you only ate from two.

ED: But how to decide which two dishes to eat? Today we might think in terms of balance. You been eating lots sweets lately? Then maybe I’ll skip that orange pudding and go for an extra helping of the asparagus. And back when this cook book was published, they also thought about balance. Except for them, the stakes were much higher.

TRUDY EDEN: The 17th and 18th century, even the 19th century, was a very holistic world. So we aren’t just talking about somebody’s physical health. We’re talking about their physical health, their mental health, their level of intelligence, their level of morality. It includes absolutely the whole person, and it’s not just about the body.

BRIAN: Eating the wrong thing to degrade you, the thinking went, both mentally and spiritually. On the other hand, if you are well, you could become smarter, more cheerful, a better person all around. It was based on the theory that the body is composed of four basic humors. Each combining various levels of hot, cold, wet, and dry. The goal was to maintain a balance of all four humors.

TRUDY EDEN: If you had a cold and were an early modern person, you would say, oh, my gosh. My nose is running, I’m cold, I’ve got all this fluid coming out of my nose, and the best thing for me to do is to maybe exercise a little bit, get some of that moisture out of my body. And eat foods that are hot and dry, because that will reduce the amount of cold and moist in my system.

ED: Now this so-called humoral, as opposed to humorous, theory could be very specific. It wasn’t simply eat more vegetables. It was eat more cucumbers with mustard, which meant that having a lot of dishes to choose from was a huge advantage.

TRUDY EDEN: The more variety you had, the more tools you had to put your body in balance. What you needed on Monday might not be what you needed on the following Monday. And what you needed in the spring wouldn’t be what you needed in the summer. But if you had all of this variety, you could manipulate yourself and keep yourself in balance.

ED: And Brian, this is how we connect up with the question with which we began this segment. How did food choices connect with the American Revolution? And the answer is that people who could achieve the perfect balance were seen as the most fit to rule. It’s obvious now that this way of thinking reinforced the status quo, because only the wealthy had access to the variety of food that was necessary to achieve that balance. Which, in turn, made them fit to rule, and maintain that access to food. The theory wasn’t as great for the lower classes, where it was really hard to get cucumbers and mustard.

BRIAN: But something interesting happened when English people started colonizing the new world. The soil in America was rich, and crops grew well. More people were able to own their own land and provide for themselves. While hunting had been off limits for all but the nobility in the old world, here in the United States, anyone with a gun could go off and stalk his own dinner. And this widespread food security, as Trudy Eden calls it, had surprising political implications.

TRUDY EDEN: It wasn’t just the wealthy people who were food secure, and who were there for the most capable of governing the country. It was a whole huge population of people. A large portion of the country had the kind of food security, had the kind of lifestyle, where they could govern themselves and be the best people they possibly could be. So if you want your rulers to be the best people, then why not a democracy?

ED: Here’s the thing the turn toward self-government wasn’t a rejection of the old world way of thinking. It was an extension of it.

TRUDY EDEN: What simply happened in the United States was that more people hopped over the line of food security, and so you had a larger group of people who were food secure, and were entitled to have a say-so in their society.

ED: So if we look at the American Revolution from the perspective of food, it doesn’t really look very revolutionary at all. In fact, even back in England, the ability to make correct food choices was called– wait for it, Brian– self-government. So when colonists in America started talking about self-government in a political sense, they weren’t subverting that older world view. They were actually embracing it.

BRIAN: Helping us tell that story was Trudy Eden, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Northern Iowa. Her book is “The Early American Table.”