In good taste: Europe’s first systematic study of cheese

Blog series European studies

Author Julia King, Lead Curator Incunabula and 16th-Century Books

‘Let us begin, with God’s Grace, the Summa lacticiniorum, which, even though it seems very ordinary, will nevertheless include many useful and pleasant things, especially since many hate cheese, many love it and live on it, and many willingly understand its diversity and nature.’

So begins the Renaissance Italian physician and cheese-enthusiast Pantaleone da Confienza (b. 1420) in the Summa lacticiniorum (A Compendium of Dairy Products). Published no later than 1477, it is part medical advice, part travelogue, and part gourmand’s guide to cheese.

Confienza, as a physician, understood food within the Galenic system of humours, where the body needed to maintain a balance between hot, cold, wet, and dry influences in order to maintain the four humours (blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm). Food was one such influence, and in the Summa, he advises those with a hot and choleric disposition to eat younger and softer cheese (which had an intrinsically colder humour) in order to preserve a good bodily balance.

The humoral system also influenced his writing on the nature of different types of cheese. For example, one chapter is called ‘The reasons why some cheeses are full of holes and others are not’. While we now know that holes in cheese come from bubbles of carbon dioxide caused by bacteria that occur during the cheesemaking process, the Summa explains that in fact these bubbles are caused by improperly mixing the cheese, so that wet and cold air is enclosed in the cheese and produces hot and dry bubbles when the cheese is heated.

However, despite his medical background, when reading the Summa lacticiniorum, one fact cannot be denied: Pantaleone da Confienza really liked cheese. He records his travels throughout Europe, and describes his encounters with regional cheeses. He includes Italian specialties we might recognise, like parmesan, or others we might not, like Florentine pecorino marzolino, a fresh sheep’s milk cheese sometimes made with the rind soaked in tomato juice. He also discusses the relative merits of cheese from other parts of Europe, including France, Germany, Switzerland, and England.

Fortunately, Confienza likes English cheese. He reasons that ‘In England there is a great abundance of animals, especially sheep, from which the English collect so much wool that it seems almost incredible. And the wool is so perfect that everyone knows that the pastures must be good, and therefore the milk and dairy products good.’ He goes on to describe seeing English cheese in the marketplace at Antwerp, but has a suggestion: ‘I believe if they were made more buttery they would be much better and would not be so crumbly and consequently not so hard to digest’!

In the 1470s, around the same time that the Summa lacticiniorum was published, European attitudes towards food and food writing were changing. While many still wrote about the medical implications of diet, others were beginning to think about food in terms of taste and pleasure. In Italy, authors like Bartolomeo Platina (1421-1481) wrote what is considered to be the first cookbook, De honesta valuate et valetudine (On Honest Pleasure and Health; Venice, 1475; IB.20432), which was one of the first to emphasise that food should not only nourish, but should also be enjoyable.

At the same time, one of the markers of social standing in Confienza’s Renaissance Italy was what kind of food you ate. Older attitudes stretching back to the Middle Ages about so-called ‘peasant food’ suggested that peasants should eat heartier food that was more earth-bound (like vegetables, nuts, raw fruit, and cheese), whereas the nobility should eat more refined foods like birds, wildfowl, and fish.

A new fashion in the 15th and 16th centuries saw the humanists of Italy moving towards an idea of gusto, or ‘good taste’. Supposedly rustic food became refined, with authors like Pietro Aretino (1492-1556) writing about the delights of dipping toast in olive oil and a 1536 publication of the Dieci tavole di proverbi (Ten Tables of Proverbs; Rome, 1536; 1075.k.19) declaring egalitarian tastes with the proverb ‘Formaio, pero, pan, pasto da villain. Formaio, pan e pero, pasto da cavaliero’, or ‘Cheese, pears, bread, food of the peasant; cheese, bread and pears, food of the knight.’

The Summa lacticiniorum sits in the space between these two food cultures: for Confienza, cheese is both medicine and object of pleasure, able to be eaten by peasant and noble alike. Buon appetito!

Further reading

Albala, Ken, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley, 2002). Shelfmark: YC.2002.a.5180

Gianetti, Laura, Food Culture and the Literary Imagination in Renaissance Italy: The Renaissance of Taste (Amsterdam, 2022). Shelfmark: YD.2022.a.2898

Lyon, Karen, ’The Four Humors: Eating in the Renaissance’, Folger Shakespeare Library website.

Montanari, Massimo, Cheese, Pears, and History in a Proverb (New York, 2010). Shelfmark: YC.2010.a.14594.