Dining with Pleasure

            This is Jamie Ferri.  How does a nice bowl of eggs, sugar, and warm and cold beer sound for breakfast?  Are your stomach muscles aching for this delicious combination of ingredients?  Some people during the Middle Ages would certainly say so.  I would personally much prefer a bagel with cream cheese. Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, discusses the pleasure people took in the consumption of beer soup and other commodities of the Old World such as pepper, chocolate, coffee, alcohol, and drugs.  Each of these items was more than meets the eye and they brought pleasure to people in very different ways than they do today.

            Beer had always been a source of pleasure similar to the way it is today.  People gathered at bars and respectfully bought rounds of drinks for each of his or her friends.  It was a social drink and it was nutritious enough, or so some thought, to be drunk in a soup for breakfast.  (Not particularly my cup of tea; pun intended.)

            “Pepper, cinnamon, and nutmeg were status symbols for the ruling class emblems of power which were displayed and then consumed.  The moderation or excess with which they were served attested to the host’s social rank” (Shivelbusch 6).  This must seem completely alien to today’s modern culture where the more money you spent on your diamond ring, the richer you are, therefore the more fabulous you are.  The pepper on the table is just as insignificant as the table itself, unless of course, it is made of gold  (See “MTV: Cribs”).  The spices also served a practical purpose.  Because this was a time before preservatives, peppering spoiled meat was apparently not so terrible, or at least tolerable.  Perhaps this enhanced the act of eating to a more pleasurable experience rather than one for survival and nutrition.

            Chocolate and coffee, or as we say in New York: “chawclate and kawfee”, were two new and elegant discoveries in the Old World.  These warm, dark beverages were enjoyed in quaint coffeehouses where people drank with their pinky-finger pointing outwards.  Chocolate was a luxury beverage for the elite, quite the opposite of the cup it is today with marshmallows and Swiss Miss on the package.  The coffeehouse was a “commercial communication center”(52), and many of these establishments actually turned into places to conduct business.  Modern day Starbucks can be seen as a meeting place perhaps to conduct small business as well. 

These new kinds of pleasure introduced people to the pleasurable and social aspects of food and drink.  While we may have switched from the porcelain mugs of the quaint coffeehouse to the plastic cups at the drive-thru, we as a culture have embraced dining as one of the finer human desires.