Vegetables: A Biography, by Evelyne Bloch-Dano, offer the stories of eleven different vegetables - artichokes, beans, chard, cabbage, cardoons, carrots, chili peppers, Jerusalem artichokes, peas, pumpkins, and tomatoes – offering tidbits from science and agriculture to history, culture, and, of course, cooking. Here are a few excerpts from the book that detail their history during the Middle Ages:
Evelyne Bloch-Dano adds that:
Medieval taste is characterized by a passion for color (green, yellow, red, and blue) and for spices, added “in great abundance” to all sorts of preparations. The common belief that spices served to hid the rotten smell of meat had been debunked by historians, since meat in the Middle Ages was eaten fresh and was first blanched. Reading the recipes, we notice above all that spices were added to all dishes: pies, soup, and meats. They were believed to have therapeutic virtues; the medicinal dimension of food was at the forefront in the Middle Ages. All the same, the wide latitude left to the cook and the clarity in the instructions show that the addition of spices was above all a matter of taste. Spices also belonged to the realm of the imagination: they perfumed the Garden of Eden; they spoke of distant lands, of oriental landscapes that inspired dreams – such as the seed of paradise, which came from West Africa – and made those who traded in them quite wealthy, giving birth to powerful economic networks. Indeed, the exchange value of spices is the source of the French expression payer en espèces – literally “to pay in spices” or “in kind” but now meaning “to pay in cash.”
Vegetables: A Biography was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2012. The original French version, La Fabulwaw histoire de legumes, was published in 2008. For more information, please visit the University of Chicago Press website.
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