Rachel Laudan

I was delighted when last week the Old Foodie, who ferrets out the most wonderful quotations, posted this:

“Pleasure is the thing proposed, and because there can be none without some Appetite, new ways are invented and contrived to make an Artificial one, when that which is Natural is either wanting or satisfied. They must have whets before they Eat, and lest that should not do, they muft have the most studied and exquisite sauces when they eat, and if by the help of both thefe they fhould happen to eat too much, then they must have proper stomach Liquors to carry it off, and to create a new Appetite. So that Mens Lives seem to be a continued Circulation of Eating and preparing to Eat; and the great intention of Cookery is to make Men Eat who have no mind to Eat, and to Eat on after the natural and reasonable ends of Eating are serv’d.”

It’s from John Norris’s Practical Treatise Concerning Humility in 1707. The Old Foodie rightly points out that this advice hardly encourages one to revel in gastronomic delights.

It does, however, encourage me to keep up my detective work on a a deep and principled divide going back to Antiquity between two schools of thought about cooking and appetite. John Norris, presumably a Protestant, was drawing on Stoic ideas when he wrote this passage.

The role of sauces in stimulating unnatural appetites was something I’d run into frequently. I hadn’t, though, thought about the role of “whets” or appetizers in doing the same though it’s pretty obvious once it’s mentioned. And the “proper stomach Liquors” bear further thinking about. Is this just the general eighteenth-century belief in acid stomach juices? Or is there some hint here of temperance in wine and spirits?