Too animal, too physical, too vulgar, too intimate, too intense... Taste remains the most under-valued of the five senses. In Goûter le monde, Viktoria von Hoffmann attempts to understand why authors have paid so little attention to it so far. The Christian heritage, the deadly sins, Cartesianism... they may have all played a part but they are not solely responsible for this discredit. Culinary practices aside, the historian draws a rich and tasty portrait of this neglected sense.

There was a time when doctors would drink their patients’ urine to determine the source of their ailment. The disease was bound to have a taste! Taste appeared to be a sign in ancient cultures, at a time when the whole world was considered in terms of analogies. The way things tasted was a reliable indication of the effect they would have on the body. Since pleasure and the desire for a tasty morsel were dictated by temperament, this was something we could of course rely on. Equally, the gustative quality of excremental fluids served to make a diagnosis. Doctors must undoubtedly be grateful today for the invention of the blood test...

It is this ancient culture, which seems so different from ours as shown in this anecdote, that Viktoria von Hoffmann endeavours to understand in Goûter le monde. A soon-to-be published work (1) that draws inspiration from the doctoral thesis defended by this modernist historian and FNRS postdoctoral researcher at the University of Liège. “I defended it in 2010 but I didn’t want to publish it as such. I left it aside for a year and a half, which allowed me to approach the subject with greater maturity. I then completely rewrote the text with the idea of writing a book.”

This book is based on an observation: of all the senses developed and mastered by man, taste is rarely ranked among the most important. A “lower sense”, as described by the researcher, considered as “the most crude and yet the most necessary since, without it, we don’t exist”. While, from a historical point of view, sight and hearing have earned themselves a place of choice in the noblest spheres of the mind and reflected upon in numerous works, nothing or very little has been written about taste. Of course, there are several works relating to the history of food, but up until now, they have often focused exclusively on food practices. “These works describe how people cooked, what ingredients they used, etc. By extending my source material to texts from philosophy, medicine, chemistry, mysticism, demonology, aesthetics, etc., I wanted to show that the history of taste was much richer than that.”

But this history first begins with silences. “The silences of taste”, the title of her first chapter. “When I began my research, it was quiet worrying: I couldn’t find that much. In treatises of the senses, for instance, there were pages and pages of texts celebrating the wonders of sight, but very few on taste. It was only gradually, as I advanced in my reading and analysis of the sources, that this silence began to make sense, slowly revealing the cultural construction of taste as a lower sense. I noticed that taste wasn’t mentioned precisely because it was considered of little value. Consequently, scholars and highly educated people didn’t consider it worthwhile to spend time on this contemptible subject.”

(1) Goûter le monde. Une histoire culturelle du goût à l'époque moderne, Bruxelles, P.I.E. Peter Lang, coll. "L’Europe Alimentaire”,2013.