Tasting Difference: Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature

By Gitanjali G. Shahani

Tasting Difference examines early modern discourses of racial, cultural, and religious difference that emerged in the wake of contact with foreign peoples and foreign foods from across the globe. Gitanjali Shahani reimagines the contact zone between Western Europe and the global South in culinary terms, emphasizing the gut rather than the gaze in colonial encounters.

From household manuals that instructed English housewives how to use newly imported foodstuffs to "the spicèd Indian air" of A Midsummer Night's Dream, from the repurposing of Othello as an early modern pitchman for coffee in ballads to the performance of disgust in travel narratives, Shahani shows how early modern genres negotiated the allure and danger of foreign tastes.

Turning maxims such as "We are what we eat" on their head, Shahani asks how did we (the colonized subjects) become what you (the colonizing subjects) eat? How did we become alternately the object of fear and appetite, loathing and craving? Shahani takes us back several centuries to the process by which food came to be inscribed with racial character and the racial other came to be marked as edible, showing how the racializing of food began in an era well before chicken tikka masala and Balti cuisine. Bringing into conversation critical paradigms in early modern studies, food studies, and postcolonial studies, she argues that it is in the writing on food and eating that we see among the earliest configurations of racial difference, and it is experienced both as a different taste and as a taste of difference.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501748714

Book preview

TASTING

DIFFERENCE

Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature

GITANJALI G. SHAHANI

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For Rohit and Arihaan

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Spices: The Spicèd Indian Air in Shakespeare’s England

2. Sugar: So Sweet Was Ne’er So Fatal

3. Coffee: Eating Othello, Drinking Coffee

4. Bizarre Foods: Food, Filth, and the Foreign in the Culinary Contact Zone

5. Cannibal Foods: Powdered Wife and Other Tales of English Cannibalism

Coda: Global Foods

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is fitting that a project on cultural encounters should be shaped by many generous people in many different parts of the world. My debts to them are manifold.

At Emory University, I had the good fortune of working with an exceptional group of scholars and mentors. Sheila Cavanagh’s generous support and good humor have steered me through many years in academia. Deepika Bahri has been a cherished mentor and friend, whom I have looked to for so much. My interest in early modern cross-cultural encounters took shape in the course of my work with Patricia Cahill. She has helped me map out many iterations of this project and generously shared her insights over several years. Rick Rambuss offered valuable advice as the director of graduate studies. The late Lee Pederson’s kindness made my years in Atlanta memorable, and it is hard to think of the North Callaway building without him.

This book benefited tremendously from the resources of the Folger Shakespeare Library. I am particularly indebted to Ginger Vaughan for including me in her seminar Emerging Ethnographies in Shakespeare’s England, where I was first introduced to many of the primary texts that found their way into this project. At this seminar, I also had the good fortune of meeting Brinda Charry, who has since been a wonderful collaborator and dear friend. I am grateful for the support we both received in the course of our early collaborations from Ania Loomba, whose own work has made possible many fields of inquiry we continue to pursue. Jyotsna Singh has been an integral part of my academic family, and I am deeply grateful to her for all that she has done, both for me personally and for our field at large.

At the Shakespeare Association of America meetings, where I have regularly presented early versions of this project, I have received valuable feedback from colleagues. Kim Coles and Jean Feerick have been especially generous in their feedback on chapter 1. Kim and I subsequently had the opportunity to collaborate with several scholars working in early modern food studies, including Ken Albala, Robert Appelbaum, Joan Fitzpatrick, Rebecca Laroche, Jennifer Munroe, and Barbara Sebek. I am grateful for these academic collaborations and the many wonderful friendships that followed. I am deeply indebted to Jennifer Park, who was kind enough to comment on early versions of several chapters. She generously shared her expertise on mumia and pointed me to important primary and secondary sources, which were especially useful to my introduction.

Valérie Loichot’s work on food and postcolonial studies has been valuable to my work. I am especially grateful to her for sharing her original photographs of Kara Walker’s Sugar Baby, which I discuss extensively in chapter 2. Working in the field of early modern race studies has sometimes been a difficult terrain to negotiate, and I am grateful to the scholars who came together at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in 2016 to discuss the state of our profession, including Jonathan Burton, Kim Hall, and Marianne Montgomery, all of whom have supported my work in many different ways. Fran Dolan was generous in inviting me to present parts of my research on the spice trade with students in her graduate seminar at the University of California–Davis. More recently, I had the opportunity to share the theoretical frameworks in the introduction at the program in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of California–Berkeley, where I benefited from comments by students and scholars in the Bay Area across various disciplines.

I am grateful to be surrounded by a group of gifted scholars and generous friends in the Department of English at San Francisco State University. Bruce Avery, Jen Mylander, and Lehua Yim were part of a cohort of early modernists with whom I shared many early incarnations of this work, along with many enjoyable meals. Lehua has on several occasions used her own research time in the archive to locate sources for me, helped me navigate through parts of chapters when I stumbled, and supported me in countless other ways. Along with Sara Hackenberg, Julie Paulson, and Lynn Wardley, she has been part of a writing group that made this experience genuinely engaging. My chairs and coordinators, Bill Christmas, Sugie Goen-Salter, Loretta Stec, and Beverly Voloshin, have consistently supported this project, along with many other colleagues who contribute to the stimulating intellectual climate of our department. I am fortunate to have Shirin Khanmohamadi’s office so close to mine, and the many productive conversations we have had in the hallway continue to influence my work. Many of the ideas and arguments for this book took shape in courses on food, race, and Shakespeare that I taught in the English department. I am grateful to several generations of students who enriched these ideas with their animated responses and their genuine engagement with my work. Grants from the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at San Francisco State, along with release time from the College of Liberal and Creative Arts at various stages during my tenure here have helped me complete several chapters of this book.

An early version of chapter 1 appeared as The Spicèd Indian Air in Shakespeare’s England in Shakespeare Studies 42 (2014): 122–37. I am grateful to the editors for granting permission to reproduce this section in my chapter. A section of chapter 5 originally appeared as "Of ‘Barren Islands’ and ‘Cursèd Gold’: Worth, Value, and Womanhood in The Sea Voyage " in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 12, no. 3 (2012): 5–27. I would like to thank the University of Pennsylvania Press for permission to reprint that material here. My chapter on Bizarre Foods appeared as Food, Filth, and the Foreign: Disgust in the Seventeenth-Century Travelogue, in Disgust in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Natalie K. Eschenbaum and Barbara Correll (London: Routledge, 2016). I am grateful to the editors for their feedback on this essay and to Routledge for permission to use this material.

At Cornell University Press, I am most grateful for the opportunity to have worked with Mahinder Kingra. His feedback on early drafts helped me work toward a far more cogent volume. His patience with the many delays in my schedule bordered on saintly. The feedback I received from the two anonymous peer reviewers helped me reframe many important aspects of this book. I am grateful to both readers for their detailed suggestions and the care with which they read this manuscript, although any errors are my own.

Personally, I feel fortunate to have the inspirational example of my parents, Govind and Roshan Shahani, whose own scholarship has shaped mine in countless ways. I am indebted to them for first kindling in me a passion for literature, for being my best teachers, and, above all, for their love and support through everything. Nishant Shahani helped me leaf through several hundred recipes for my first chapter on spices. But it is his own culinary creations, with all the love that goes into them, that have brought me so much joy. Kala Shahani and Alan Mistri did not live to see this project completed, but it could not have been conceived without their blessings. The former taught me much through her stories of quiet determination and civil disobedience during the Indian freedom movement. The latter has taught me all I know about women’s intellectual labor in the realm of the household and inspired my work on recipe writing. Urvashi and Jagat Chopra have always helped me look for silver linings. Their optimism makes all obstacles seem surmountable.

My largest debt is to Rohit Chopra, who has offered feedback on every chapter of this book, located numerous sources that he knew I would find useful here, and supported me in ways I did not think possible. I am grateful to him for embarking on this journey with me and for sharing in its joys and pleasures. This book is dedicated to him and to our son, Arihaan Chopra, whose grit and good humor make this world a better place.

Introduction

In an evocative essay on local and global identities, Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born cultural theorist and activist, having moved to England in the 1950s, articulates his journey in terms of an edible metaphor.

I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s teeth. There are thousands of others besides me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself. Because they don’t grow it in Lancashire, you know. Not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom.¹

While waves of immigrant communities might mark their arrival in the Anglophone world in different historical moments, Hall would have all of us from the once-colonized world imagine our entry into Western consciousness at the very moment our teas, coffees, spices, and sugar—what has been called the Genussmittel or stimulants of empire—made their way there.² He compels us to ask what it means to be the sugar at the bottom of the tea or indeed the tea itself. How did we become foodstuff and the affective desires associated with it, the craving and the very object of appetite? How are the earliest encounters with our difference registered in the tastes of our food? And crucially, what is the taste of difference?

This is the story my book strives to tell. It traces the colonial histories and racial formations by which people become food, by which subjects become edible objects. I look at a range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts that register otherness in culinary, gastronomic, and cibarious terms, recording encounters with different foods and, via these foods, with difference itself. Thus for instance, the idea of India is forged in the English imagination via some of its earliest encounters with Indian spices. While Vasco da Gama had sailed from Lisbon’s Tower of Belém to the Malabar Coast of the Indian subcontinent as early as 1524, it was only in the 1600s with the establishment of the East India Company that England began its foray into the spice trade, increasing the scope and distribution of spices in ordinary English households on an unprecedented scale. Thus long before the average English household encountered an Indian, it encountered nutmeg and pepper in pies and possets, in homemade contraceptives and morning-after treatments. The spicèd Indian air, as Shakespeare called it, had made its way into England’s recipe collections and imaginative writing long before any large-scale migrant movement, thus shaping its conception of Indianness via the taste of its foodstuff.³ Likewise, the English housewife in the seventeenth century had no direct contact with the slave labor of the Caribbean plantation, but she sprinkled the products of their labor into her cordials and tasted their sugar in her sweetmeats and confections. It is in the writing about these tastes—in the imaginative literature of the period, in cookbooks, in dietary manuals—that a conception of racial, cultural, and religious difference is articulated. Indeed, the culinary realm is one that registers encounters with otherness on an unprecedented scale. While clothing and other physical markers have been optics for the analysis of difference in much work on the other, here it is the taste of difference that I analyze, arguing for its primacy in cross-cultural encounters that were impelled by foodstuffs.⁴

Put another way, what I am examining here is a variation of the principle that we are what we eat. Itself a corruption of the eighteenth-century gastronome Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s oft-quoted maxim on food and identity—Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are—this principle underscores the ways in which our identities are constituted through and knowable by our foodways.⁵ While acknowledging this important relationship between food and the self, my project approaches the maxim differently. What I ask here is how did we (the colonized subjects) become what you (the colonizing subjects) eat. How did we become what I have called throughout this work the taste of difference, alternately the object of fear and appetite, loathing and craving? Seeking answers to these questions takes us back several centuries, to England’s early ventures across different parts of the globe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the search for exotic foodstuffs resulted in the trafficking with difference. But before we delve into this period, I would like to briefly dwell in the present, when anxieties about food and otherness provide us with a template for understanding similar fears in the early modern period.

In the months leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we witnessed a collective frenzy in the news cycle about a grim future in which we were going to have taco trucks on every corner, the result of lax immigration policies that would allow the putatively dominant culture of Latinos to invade America.⁶ The controversy even generated its own hashtag, with #TacoTrucksOnEveryCorner trending on social media, while users variously sympathized with the sentiment, humorously posted pictures of taco trucks to signal its onslaught, and casually celebrated such a future with a bring it on attitude. Earlier in the same year on Cinco de Mayo, then GOP candidate and later president Donald Trump had taken to Twitter to post a smiling picture of himself ready to dig into a taco bowl with a caption that declared I love Hispanics.⁷ While bad hombres were to be kept out, apparently their food would be welcome right into the inner sanctum of the Trump Tower. The contradiction at the heart of such an image might at first seem puzzling. Is it the immigrant we seek to keep out, while welcoming their culinary offerings? Are their culinary offerings somehow divested of foreign implications insofar as the taco bowl itself is now assimilated as American food? Even if that were the case, though, the caption I love Hispanics with the taco bowl seems to suggest that it is both people as the source of difference and food as the manifestation of difference that is being celebrated at once. But the contradiction is more easily explained when we consider that food frequently becomes the means of rendering difference more manageable or more palatable, if you will. The much-hyped wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, for instance, has been touted as one that will guard the national boundaries to keep out bad hombres, but the somatic boundaries of the body politic remain more porous and open to foreign foods. Ethnic food thus becomes a means of categorizing and sampling the other on one’s own terms, without any real threat to a more homogeneous identity. To use bell hooks’s influential phrase, eating the other is not only a form of fetishizing and commodifying difference, but a way of mitigating its threatening nature and eventually conquering it.⁸

Sarah Lohman, author of Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine, finds that food is something that is often accepted in this country before we accept the immigrants themselves. . . . We happily buy hummus in our grocery store, but in the meantime, they were going to ban Muslims from entering this country.⁹ What Lohman articulates here are the contradictory impulses of fear and desire associated with food and the outsider. She points out that the Italians, who brought us garlic, were initially considered a separate race of people that were damaging to the climate of our country.¹⁰ The trajectory she charts for the American context does not neatly translate into other contexts, but the policing of boundaries in terms of people and their food is a persistent historical phenomenon.

In Britain, the postwar rise of the curry house has facilitated a different kind of migrant movement and brought with it a different kind of racial conflict. While former foreign secretary Robin Cook declared in 2001 that chicken tikka masala was a true British national dish, not only because of its growing popularity, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences, others have found that the South Asian migrant has not always been as readily accepted as the curry house.¹¹ Lizzie Collingham, author of Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, argues that although the British eat vast amounts of curry, they are not always welcoming towards the Asians who make it for them.¹² In fact, the consumption of large quantities of curry has not necessarily made the British any less racist, perhaps testing the claims of Cook’s curry analogy.¹³ Even the Brexit vote has been weighed in terms of its impact on the curry crisis and how it might affect a restaurant industry founded on immigrant labor. Who Killed the Great British Curry House? an article in The Guardian demands to know, noting that the real blow came when a harsh new politics of immigration came in, which made it harder for skilled South Asian chefs to work in the country, just as the wider British public were changing the ways in which they consumed curry.¹⁴ The crisis is one that embodies the confused politics of guarding national borders, while seemingly opening up national foodways. After all, how do you eat an Indian without the labor of an Indian or South Asian more generally?

Indeed, to go out for an Indian, as it has come to be known in British parlance, is itself a quintessentially English tradition, arguably as British as roast beef or Yorkshire pudding. Collingham describes the larger-loutish ritual of rolling into a curry house drunk and proving one’s machismo by ordering the hottest curry in the house.¹⁵ An episode of Goodness Gracious Me, the Indian-British comedy show, even lampooned such eating culture in a sketch where a group of young, inebriated South Asians Go Out for an English.¹⁶ They start by mocking the server’s British accent, mispronounce his name, and then obnoxiously proceed to order the blandest thing on the menu, even threatening to beat up the server when he suggests otherwise. The jest draws from its inversion of the rituals associated with getting drunk and eating an Indian, thereby purging the night’s excesses the morning after. As Anita Mannur points out in Culinary Fictions, the sketch works to castigate the forms of consumption rendered normal within the cultural imaginary of English pubgoers such that bland English food, rather than ‘excessively’ spiced Indian food, comes to occupy the space of abject culinary matter.¹⁷ In the episode, Englishness itself is understood in culinary terms, where Indianness typically occupies such a position. Beyond the jest, critical to my purpose here is the phrasing of the ritual—the eating of an Indian—in which an Indian subject is rendered edible object. Food is anthropomorphized in terms of its points of origins. If we are the sugar, the tea, the coffee, the spices, it would seem that they are also us. As foods, they are vested with difference, taking on the racial and national character from whence they came.

This process by which food comes to be inscribed with racial character and, in turn, the racial other comes to be marked as edible begins in an era well before chicken tikka masala and Balti cuisine, before the xenophobic fear of a taco truck on every corner. The literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century provides us glimpses of some of the earliest encounters with otherness via food. It emerges from a period that historians conventionally refer to as the Age of Discovery, during which time, along with nautical discoveries, scientific inventions, and cartographic innovations, we see the discovery of new spice routes, the establishment of sugar plantations, and the earliest coffee houses in England. In fact, as Jyotsna Singh and others have pointed out, the period traditionally designated as the European Renaissance is now increasingly re-configured as the Global Renaissance, characterized by various modes of boundary crossings, rather than conceived within national boundaries of Italy, England, and so forth.¹⁸ Singh’s work makes a strong case for understanding early modern English literature in terms of England’s networks of travel and traffic with diverse regions that range from the Americas to North Africa to East India, with imperial powers such as Spain and Portugal, and with non-European regimes such as the Ottoman Turks and Mughals in India. Such a re-Orienting of the Renaissance world picture compels us to consider the many forms of contact outside of Europe that influenced the English cultural, economic, religious, and political imaginary in ways that we would now describe as global. It provides us with a framework to examine the culinary networks of exchange that fundamentally shaped not just early modern England, but the contours of the modern world as we know it.

Tasting Difference chronicles how foods traveled through these networks of exchange and how their movements are imagined in the literature of the early modern period. It analyzes nascent discourses of racial, cultural, and religious alterity that emerged in the wake of English contact with foreign peoples and foreign foods from across the globe. In particular, it is the intricate trajectories of what Salman Rushdie has famously called the hot stuff —pepper, clove, cardamom, nutmeg, and mace, along with foodstuffs like coffee, chocolate, and sugar—that I chart in this book.¹⁹ Collectively, these foods account for a vast majority of overseas voyages, newly discovered trade routes, and joint-stock companies that were formed throughout the early modern period.

No doubt, the chronologies and trajectories of individual foodstuffs vary. Spices, for instance, were used by the elite during the medieval period in sacred and secular rituals of conspicuous consumption, propelling England’s somewhat belated ventures into the Iberian-controlled East India spice trade in the 1600s, when they take on a particularly racial dimension. Coffee, on the other hand, found its way from Ottoman territories into English public life much later in the seventeenth century, frequently via Jewish merchants, who supervised some of the earliest coffeehouses in Oliver Cromwell’s England. What they do share is the way they acquire the taste of difference, as racialized foods that are adapted to English rituals of consumption and absorbed into the English body politic. This taste is acquired over a period of time, concurrent with England’s mercantile and colonial trafficking with difference. It evolves throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, comprised of dominant, residual, and emergent cravings for different exotic foodstuffs.

This book looks to different parts of Asia, Africa, and the Atlantic, where culinary, cultural, and economic networks of exchange were being forged, resulting in an unprecedented access to new kinds of edible commodities and changing culinary tastes across Europe. Their entry into the English household and their incorporation into the English diet were accompanied by pervasive anxieties about mixing and mingling with foreign entities. Making their way from the world into the home, these commodities veered between strange and familiar, healing and poisonous, in the early modern imagination. The fear of heathens, the threat of racial contamination, the dread of what we might retrospectively term miscegenation, variously coalesced onto these foods, even as they became highly coveted objects of conspicuous consumption in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century marketplace. Despite their inanimate state, they took on a life of their own in the early modern mindset; they came to be personified as simultaneously alluring and dangerous incarnations of the cultural others that produced them. In the social life of these things—to use Arjun Appadurai’s conceit—we thus catch a glimpse of the lives that they were transforming across continents.²⁰

In examining these lives, I draw on a range of genres—plays, pageants, recipe books, dietaries, domestic manuals, travelogues, ballads, and broadsides—all of which registered the impact of newly imported foods through a variety of realist and fantastic modes. If some invoked spices against the backdrop of fairyland, others were decidedly more prosaic in their depiction of spices as everyday kitchen ingredients. If some portrayed them in association with naked natives and black Indian queens, others showed them in close proximity to the English housewife, as things she would use to cure bad breath, to season her cheesecake, or to condition her hair. If coffee in some ballads was a black Othello contaminating a pure Desdemona-like water, in others it was a salubrious potion used to cure the infirm and the inebriated. As rarities from distant climes, they seemed to arouse an insatiable appetite for the exotic. But as foreign bodies from heathen lands, their admixture into the body politic provoked an acute sense of discomfort about cultural and corporeal boundaries.

These anxieties about corporeal boundaries also extended beyond the immediate realm of the domestic to the broader global arena in which encounters with the other were being forged. Tasting Difference thus explores how, in a period when European and English travelers circumnavigated the globe on an unprecedented scale in search of foodstuffs, set up joint-stock companies to trade in them, and built warehouses to store them, the imaginative writing of the period registered the ensuing culinary and gastronomic changes. I am particularly interested in what travelers and emissaries themselves ate in the contact zone, how they chronicled their experiences, and the somatic effects they endured in the process. The archives of travel writing reveal moments when they savored the foods of the other and when they turned away in disgust. This project, as a whole, documents how the new foodstuffs they discovered were imported and incorporated