Food
"Nay, tell me, can civil and humane eyes yet abide the slaughter of an innocent beast, the cutting of his throat, the mauling him on the head, the flaying of his skin, the quatring and dismembring of his joints, the sprinkling of blood, the ripping up of his veins, the enduring of ill savours, the heaving of sighs, sobs and grones, the passionate struggling and panting for life, which only hard-hearted Butchers can endure to see?"
Unlikely as this may sound, these gory words were written by the father of the original Little Miss Muffet of nursery- rhyme fame. Thomas Moffet (1553-1604) had more on his mind than curds and whey. A chemist, entomologist and physician esteemed all over Europe, Moffet was the complete Elizabethan gentleman-doctor and a man of letters besides; he was up at Cambridge with Edmund Spenser and friends with Sir Philip Sidney. And, though his name is little remembered by food writers these days, he was a remarkable dietician. Moffet's Health's Improvement (1600) is a gossipy, gutsy book about food, diet and the human stomach.
Despite the passage quoted above, Moffet was not a vegetarian. On the contrary, he believed that "God appointed men to eat flesh and fish". He called fishing a "cruel and unmanlike thing", yet he approved of cock-fighting, believing that fear tenderised the flesh. He extolled England's wondrous shambles. Those sentimental about killing animals he dismissed as timorous "Adamites".
In some respects, though, Health's Improvement seems distinctly "modern". Moffet raves about bread, fruit and unrefined sugar and condemns fanatical slimming. Still more striking, he prefers free-range chickens and capons to battery birds, because of the vast difference in taste between "a strangled and captive capon" and "a gentleman feeding himself without art". Moffet's overall philosophy is moderation and variety: the avoidance of "surfeiting" on the one hand and "self pining" on the other.
If this makes Moffet sound a dull fish, I should point out that his interpretation of moderation and variety includes eating tortoises, puffins, udders ("a laudable taste"), swans, hares roasted with fresh lard and the eyeballs of young beasts and birds. The best oysters, he claimed, are "short, firm and thick of flesh, rising up round like a woman's breast, being in manner all belly and no fin".
Health's Improvement contains many outlandish tips. Beware of eating too much lettuce, for example - it "cooleth lust, dulleth the eyesight, weakeneth the body". Yet in smaller quantities, as all Beatrix Potter readers know, it is a soporific. An excess of pork is also bad, causing memory loss. Fatty food provokes "belchings and loathings". For good health, eat liquid food before breakfast, boiled food for lunch and roast food for dinner.
The philosophical underpinning of Health's Improvement was an Elizabethan interpretation of Galen. Diet was a question of balancing the humours and "vegetable spirits". Moffet believed that the stomach was like a cooking vessel heated by the liver. In summer this vessel can't concoct "gross meats" and a lighter diet should be eaten - astringent fruits and salmon, say. Good diets are holistic, with each ingredient matched to the other ingredients and to the temperament of the eater. Put "temperate meats" with "temperate sauces", such as vinegar with rabbit, orange with pheasant or mustard and green sauce with pork.
A bit fussy? Moffet didn't think so. "Let us neither with the impudent call diet a frivolous knowledge, or a curious science with the imprudent: but embrace it as the leader to perfit health, (which as the wise man saith) is above gold, and a sound body above all riches," he declared - surely as true as it ever was.
"Health's Improvement" is not currently in print but has been edited by V H Houliston as part of his DPhil thesis, Oxford 1986
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