Food and the Spanish Nation Islamic Influences in Early Modern Spanish National Cuisine
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2020
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
This thesis discusses the visibility of Islamic influences in the cuisine of early modern Iberia and its cultural and political implications on the emerging discourse of a "Spanish" national identity. Formerly divided into numerous independent and competing kingdoms, the Iberian Peninsula was mostly unified under Christendom in 1492 and the new joint monarchs, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile, chartered several imperial expeditions under the name of the crown. Having this semblance of unity, the peninsula's inhabitants started to think of what notions such as "Spain" and "Spanishness" meant and how factors such as race, geography, and culture constituted this nascent sense of national identity. Eventually, the idea that "Spaniards" were descended from a long line of non-convert Christians became firmly ingrained in society, meaning Hispano-Muslims and mudéjares (Muslim converts to Christianity) were not considered to be "Spanish" despite their longstanding legacy in the Iberian Peninsula. However, food, which is significant to discussions of national identity as it plays a crucial role in forming individual and collective identities, presented a more complicated picture in how early modern Iberia dealt with the cultural imprint of Al-Andalus. Cookbooks published in early modern Iberia mirrored their medieval Al-Andalusian counterparts in terms of their content and conventions, from including ingredients and recipes particularly prized in the culinary sphere of Islam to approaching food from a medicinal perspective. But food culture in early modern Iberia also distanced itself from that of Muslims, as seen through privileging pork (which is prohibited in Islam) and cookbooks heavily focusing on Christian dietary laws such as food for Lent. All in all, there remains no doubt that constructions of a "Spanish" national identity through food in the early modern period extensively borrowed from the gastronomy of Hispano-Muslims, but overt segregations of tastes in numerous instances complicates the issue of whether the culinary legacy of Al-Andalus in the Iberian Peninsula was truly recognized.