Last week in Brother Bu Tianshi’s class, he mentioned how a certain quantitative tendency entered the general consciousness of modern people. Brother Bu Tianshi said that in history, some things simply “happened”; the spirit of the age shifted, and sometimes there was not much in the way of a reason.
Indeed, one cannot find a strict causal-law explanation in history, but one can still find many “explanations.” For example, I tend to explain the quantitative tendency of public thinking by the rise of print media. This is because printing brought with it an unprecedented demand for repeatability and operability, and this repeatability was realized through text rather than oral instruction and hands-on demonstration. To achieve reproducible operational guidance through nothing but text, beyond direct teaching and personal example, the descriptive language itself had to become standardized and quantified. In a period when oral culture held sway, even if texts existed, they were only an added embellishment, or a tool for aiding memory; actual repeated performance still depended on the skill and proficiency of the artisan. In such circumstances, even if there were a need for textualization, it would not bring about standardization and quantification.
I mentioned that the history of cookbooks can serve as a typical case. Before printing became widespread, cookbooks had long existed, but at that time the main significance of a cookbook was probably not to enable other potential readers to reproduce a dish from it; rather, it was first of all a personal record or a privately transmitted one. But the rise of printing caused all textual acts to carry a strong tendency toward publicization from then on. Once the significance of recording recipes was no longer private prompting but public dissemination, the way recipes were written would naturally begin to change. The author had to imagine a reader he had never met, who, facing this text alone and without any guidance beyond it, could reproduce the dish according to the clues it provided. Thus the focus of recipes shifted from describing the dish itself to describing the operations involved in making the dish.
Contemporary Western cookbooks have reached the pinnacle of quantification: recipes describe the exact grams and calories of ingredients, and European and American home kitchens often even come equipped with scales; cooking implements such as ovens are also as precise and reliable as laboratory instruments. However, the entire transitional process from the Middle Ages to the present is still not very clear. Existing research on the history of recipes has focused more on changes in ingredients and flavors, while remaining vague about the operative aspect. A History of Private Life does note that cooks in the Renaissance discussed the ways of cutting meat more than before; in the Middle Ages, the difference between nobles and ordinary wealthy people lay in the kinds of meat they ate (poultry, game, and pork), whereas in the Renaissance the distinction lay in whether the meat was cut finely. Does this corroborate the historical process by which “the operational process” became objectified? It is hard to say; further investigation is needed.
Brother Bu Tianshi said that this is a kind of “microhistory” study, but whether it is really micro or not depends on how one understands the mainstream of history. If one really followed the program Wu Guosheng proposed—“science is an island, technology is an ocean”—and wrote a history of technology accordingly, then a chapter ought to be reserved for cookbooks. In fact, any work of theology, philosophy, or science is only a drop in the ocean of history; today, the circulation of any obscure cookbook from a street stall may well exceed that of an outstanding scholarly monograph, and historically it was probably similar: every household might own a cookbook, and in Europe and America there is even a tradition of giving printed family cookbooks as gifts to friends. In terms of shaping the spirit of the age, the influence of cookbooks was probably no less than that of any kind of academic writing.
Moreover, people interact with natural objects and, through certain inheritable, repeatable, researchable, and improvable methods and tools, transform natural objects so that they conform to their purposes. Such operations did not first occur in chemical laboratories or alchemical workshops, but in the kitchens of every household. Technology and nature met face to face in the kitchen: how should the relation between natural objects and technical objects be understood? Before people headed for the laboratory, had they already established some universal tendency of the age in the home kitchen? For example, A History of Private Life notes that compared with the Middle Ages, people in the Renaissance preferred the “natural original taste,” that is, they tried as much as possible to display rather than conceal the flavor of the ingredients. This shift resembles the change in interests from alchemy to chemistry—from transforming nature to revealing nature—and it even predates the dawn of chemistry itself.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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