From taste to good taste

In the beginning, Viktoria von Hoffmann’s aim was to cover the history of taste throughout Europe. Realizing the extent of the task, she finally decided to focus on France, the cultural Mecca and cradle of gastronomy. She turned her attention to the 17^th and 18^th centuries.  The choice of this period was intentional: among many other reasons, it was during this period that the use of the term “taste”, in the figurative sense, first appeared.

How would a term, so despised until then, end up being used within the framework of an aesthetic judgement, synonymous with “beauty”? “The figurative sense first appeared in the spiritual literature of the 16^th century", the author tells us. “The expression is very old in Christian tradition and traces can even be found in the bible. But for a long time, its use was very limited. It was the mystics of the 16^th century, authors of true best-sellers, who really began to spread the term.” Hence, thanks to Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross, taste left the material sphere of food and acquired a spiritual connotation. The words “Tasting God” convey the expression of an indescribable experience. Highly personal. Paradoxically, the Church, which so decried this sense, was to contribute to its reinstatement...

Over time, the expression shifted. “Good taste” was invented, referring to this quality that any honnête homme should have. A “grace”, knowing how to behave in all circumstances. Since by definition a gentleman was a man of taste, capable of judging the quality of works of art, the term “taste” would come to refer to aesthetic judgement. Therefore, in the early modern times, taste was endowed with a spiritual meaning for the first time, associated with a form of human interiority, allowing it to be reflected upon and discussed. But it wasn’t until the 18^th century that its gustative synonym was truly restored. The literate public began to discuss the subject. “People who were, perhaps, so greedy that they wanted to talk about this in a different, more positive way”, the researcher suggests. “In any case, this is the hypothesis put forward by some historians, such as Jean-Louis Flandrin.”

In reality, several phenomena crossed paths. First of all, the emergence of Empiricism and Sensationism counterbalanced the clear ideas of Cartesianism. Two philosophical trends that would give credibility to the five senses, and from then on, would be considered as essential and useful to the development of knowledge. A good thing for taste? Indirectly. Because although the philosophers of the time (Condillac, Locke, Buffon, etc.) celebrated touch or sight, gustation continued to remain peripheral. Vision, for instance, remains synonymous with distance and therefore objectification, especially when associated to touch. But taste, the sense of contact par excellence, was still considered as too personal, often presented as the sense of childhood.