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From “Eating Right in the Renaissance” by Ken Albala
Regimiento y aviso de sanidad, que trato de todos alimantos y del regimiento della.
Medina del Campo: Francisco del Canto, 1586 {second ed., first ed. 12 1569}
In 1569 Nunez de Oria discussed cooking methods. Apart from typical advice about roasting fatty meats and boiling drier ones and the ban on all fried foods, he adds that most families pay no attention to these rules. There is more circumspection among Turks and Moors, which is why Christians suffer many more fevers and other diseases. Most people have no idea which meats are best to cure with salt, and “the greater part of men eat beef in these lands, ignoring their great malice.” These comments attest that in the author’s mind Arab influenced cuisine or at least custom among Muslims is much more sober and informed, but Spaniards have strayed from dietary principles.
Another example is found in his discussion of rules about how and when to eat cheese. The first rule is never to eat it with diuretic and aperitive herbs like parsley, celery, fennel or pepper, as is done in quesadillas and other dishes. These herbs force the cheese undigested into the kidneys, causing obstructions and stones. Cheese must only be eaten after meals, as a seal to the seething stomach. Obviously, this was also a rule most Spaniards ignored. Thus, the cuisine in which we might expect some of the closest affinities between cooking and medicine, at least according to one physician, was quite negligent in this regard.
On the other hand, when Nunez de Oria does approve of a particular dish, and he even offers recipes, the medicinal logic is difficult to discern. For example, he admits that he is fond of the cuclillo, or cuckoo. Being hot and dry, it would naturally be best boiled according to the logic he spoke of previously, but the recipe suggests it be roasted, well larded or basted with fat, cooked with pepper and cloves, and finally served with a cinnamon sauce, which he claims makes it easy to digest. Adding hot and dry spices to an already hot and dry food defies all medical logic, and the idea that this makes it easily digested seems tacked on to justify a dish whose origin is plainly culinary rather than medicinal. On several occasions he is forced to admit the recipe he offers could not be healthy, as he does with a dish of conger eels, salted and dried and then cooked with garbanzo beans, leeks and dried chestnuts, which he considers a typical dish.
From "The Place of Spain in European Nutritional Theory of the 16th Century" by Ken Albala
When we turn to the dietary of Francisco Nunez de Oria, we are in an entirely different cultural milieu. His work is definitely not directed toward a courtly audience. In fact, he has nothing but scathing remarks for his contemporaries who wallow in luxury and excess. Unlike Lobera, he is also very sensitive to the social meaning of foods-which are commonly eaten by nobles and which by the poor. His remarks suggest that he includes himself in neither category. For example, in discussing langoustines he says "they are not disfavored, nor a bad aliment and are even placed on the tables of grandees" while merluz (cod) "are not admitted on the tables of courtiers because they are a vulgar food." He also mentions that tuna "is used much among the senores and grandees, and is a dish worthy of the Emperor."
Presumably to avoid making enemies in great places, Nunez rarely criticizes Spanish noblemen in particular, but he has no reservations concerning foreign nobles. In that respect the tenor of his work is quite different from that of the very cosmopolitan courtly Lobera. This work is purely Spanish, and borders on the xenophobic. For example, Nunez mentions that the French courtiers are so obscenely fashion-conscious that they imitate whatever the king does, even if he eats something vile and common. Interestingly, although Nunez does have extensive comments about the eating habits of foreigners and ancient peoples, they seem mostly to be taken from a few recently published texts, most frequently Bruyerin-Champier (De re cilbaria-Lyons, 1560) which had clearly not been held back from the censors.
The much earlier authors Platina and Gazius, whom he mentions several times could easily have been imported in previous years. But apart from these few names, Nunez, too, seems for the most part oblivious to the developments on the continent. His opinions are still overwhelmingly Arabist and he most frequently cites Avicenna, Haliabbas and Isaac. There are a few times when he mentions Paul of Aegina and Aetius of Amida, who were recently recovered Byzantine authors, but his use of these authors is very superficial and seems to be used merely to impress. His real mentors are the Arabic authors, and the most decisive evidence of this is his preference for cabrito (kid) as the healthiest of meats following Avicenna, and Isaac who claimed it was the best of quadruped. Hellenists almost always opt for veal and chicken as the best meats, after remarking of course on the similarity of pork to human flesh, a citation taken directly from Galen.
I say peculiar to Spain because Nunez's exact contemporary Hugo Fridacvallis in The Lowlands and sharing the same king as Nunez, is nonetheless worlds away intellectually. Fridaevallis had completely absorbed Galen and Greek medicine direct from its source, as is evident in his De tuenda sanitate of 1568 published by the humanist printer Plantin. He claims that Galen is the Homer of medicine, the source of all following writers. Nunez, on the other hand, follows much the same authorities as Lobera, and mostly cites the Galenic works which were already known in the middle ages. In this case, once again, it is culture which influences the development or stagnation of ideas, and the state of medical theory which eventually can influence people's actual food choices.
The situation in Spain is similar, for while Italy, France, England and the Germanic countries continue to produce dietaries well into the 17th century: texts which increasingly overcome strict Galenic orthodoxy and begin to think about nutrition in new ways. These texts are ultimately a prelude to the entirely innovative ideas of the scientific revolution, but Spain does not experience it, at least not yet. Nunez's is the last dietary work written in Spain in this entire era. It was reissued, but no new dietaries appeared in the next century, which means that without the stepping stone of recovering then overcoming Galen, Spain is for the time being left out of the scientific revolution.
This is not to say that Nunez's work is entirely unoriginal and devoid of interest. His discussion of New World foods is particularly extensive, and unlike his contemporaries elsewhere who usually after trying to make sense of new foods using the humoral system eventually end up condemning them outright, Nunez is merely content to describe. He discusses potatoes found by Columbus on Hispaniola, and bread made from cassava or yucca. He also remarks "in those Spanish islands called New Spain, they have a seed that's called Maize, of which they have bread more suave than of wheat." The Spaniards there were apparently of the opinion that it was not as nourishing as wheat bread, but without an authoritative physician to fall back on, he gives no definitive opinion. Thus, ironically enough, while hampering the development of new ideas in general, Nunez's still basically medieval theoretical stance makes him more open to new foods than his contemporaries elsewhere. If what tastes good is nourishing, as Avicenna said, then why not eagerly embrace the panoply of new products arriving from the Americas? He suggests that colonists living on native produce eventually have no trouble accustoming themselves gradually to the new foods.
In the rest of Europe it would take some time for the new products to be accepted, and this may have been, in part, because of theoretical considerations. Certainly the dietaries are unequivocal in their condemnation. Another interesting consequence of this intellectual lag is that nutritional theory was exported from Spain to the New World and subsequently melded with Aztec ideas which were vaguely assimilatable to the humoral system. It was, however, still Arabist ideas that were brought by the colonists, and which apparently still exist throughout South America as part of folk medicine and popular ideas about nutrition.
Aloxa, a honey drink, translated by Brighid ni Chiarain - mka Robin Carroll-Mann
La aloxa es cierto genero de agua miel que se haze con especias calientes, bevese en tiempo de estio, porque dizen que refresca, y no se engañan mucho en ello, porque aunque sea verdad que por parte de las especias y la miel calienta, empero por la mucha porcion de agua refresca, y las especias hazen penetrar la agua por todo el cuerpo, por que se abren los caños y poros del cuerpo, y ansi casualmente de per accidens refrescan, aunque de suyo calienten.
Aloxa is a certain kind of honey water which is made with hot spices; it is drunk in summertime, because they say that it refreshes, and they are not very wrong about that, because although it is true that the spices and the honey heat it up, however, the much larger portion of water refreshes, and the spices cause the water to penetrate throughout the body, because they open the channels and the pores of the body, and thus coincidently and per accidens [Latin for "by accident"] they refresh, although by themselves they cause heat. Francisco Nuñez de Oria, "Aviso de Sanidad" (Advice on Health), Madrid, 1572
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