The Cambridge World History of Food

The basic ingredients that have historically comprised the southern European diet are well known and have recently received much attention for their health promoting benefits. Also central to the culture of food as influenced by Christianity was the development of monasticism. Physicians promulgated a theoretical food system, humoral physiology, which had a profound impact on the culture of food in southern Europe. Major influence on the foodways of southern Europe derives from the social connotations of particular foods and methods of preparation. The influence of the courtly aesthetic declined in nineteenth-century Europe in the wake of popular revolutions, and the democratization of governments ushered in a similarly leveling tendency in taste. Three ideologies of food, Christian, dietetic, and courtly, reveal some of the ways southern Europeans have thought about food and indicate the kinds of considerations that entered into their food choices.