ABSTRACT
The time has now come to do so, since the myths studied in this third volume [The Origin of Table Manners] go beyond oppositions between the raw, the cooked and the rotten to establish a deliberate contrast between the roast and the boiled, which, in a great many cultures, represent the basic modes of cooking. Along with other no less genuine oppositions, they figure in a French work of the twelfth century which deserves to be quoted at the beginning of this discussion. In a concentrated form, which gives a denser meaning to each term, it outlines the possibility of a structural analysis of the language of cooking: 'Others devote too much vain study to preparing meats, excogitating infinite kinds of decoctions, fryings and seasonings; craving, like women great with child, now soft, now hard, now cold, now hot, now boiled, now roast, now with pepper, now with garlic, now with cinnamon, now with savoury salt' (Hugues de Saint-Victor, De Institutione novitiarum, in Franklin, p. 157). This passage establishes a major opposition between food and seasoning; and it distinguishes between two extreme forms of the preparation of foods: boiling and frying, which in turn have several modalities classifiable in pairs: soft and hard, cold and hot, boiled and roast. Lastly, it also classifies seasonings in contrasted pairs: pepper and garlic on the one hand and cinnamon and salt on the other, by opposing - along one axis - pepper and what, a century later, were still called in French les aigruns (garlic, onions, shallots, etc.; see Amero, vol. 2, p. 92); and, along the other axis, sweet spices and salt.
