On Bread and Butter: A Prof's Reflections on the Gustatory Dimensions of Salvation

This blog is adapted from my Substack newsletter, The Curious Eater. Here, I revisit questions of what it means to eat right--both in China and in Europe in the fourteenth century. If you are curious about vegetarianism in China, you might also take a look at this older post of mine, from the pandemic days.

It’s the fourteenth century. A blond noblewoman wrinkles her pale brow as she sprinkles ash into her porridge. Meanwhile, half a world away, her Chinese counterpart smiles as she brings a flaky pastry to her lips, a fitting end to a decadent feast.

Both women are what we today would call vegetarians. They abstain from all forms of flesh and eggs, for their salvation.

But which diet would you prefer?

This is a real question—one I posed to my Honors students earlier this week. It was meant as a lighthearted entry into what became an intense discussion of the medieval Christian diet.

I arrived at the comparison by accident. The week before, we had covered Buddhist vegetarianism, and in a moment of inspiration—or madness—I gave my students a rough translation of twenty vegetarian recipes from The Forest of Affairs, a fourteenth-century Chinese almanac. Now we were turning to European ascetics from the same period. The contrast was immediate—and gave us much food for thought.

The Chinese recipes have no meat, eggs, or seafood. But they are anything but austere. The author presents a rich vegetarian cuisine for laypeople seeking to accrue good karma by taking the killing out of their meals.

There are noodles dressed with sauces of fresh cheeses, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, and scallion oils. Mushrooms simmered in rice wine. (Alliums and alcohol were technically suspect, but lay practice clearly allowed more latitude than monastic codes.) Sheer dumplings brim with walnuts, persimmons, chestnuts, and more cheese, finished with sugar.

Flaky pastries are enriched with melted butter.

Mock meats abound: imitation eel sashimi, fake fish, even ersatz jellyfish made from konjac—“devil’s tongue”—still sold in Taiwanese convenience stores. This cuisine is rich in fats, sugars, and refined starches, designed to delight even the most unrepentant carnivore.

Little here suggests renunciation. If anything, the message seems to be: we’ll work with your meat tooth.

Mock meat in Beijing, Nov 2019

The medieval Christian ascetics could not be more different. In Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1987), Carolyn Bynum describes how saints—especially female mystics—made their food deliberately unpalatable. They did not merely abstain from meat and rich foods or reduce calories. They waged war on the pleasure associated with eating itself.

Francis of Assisi gave up cooked food. Clare Gambacorta of Pisa mixed ash into her meals. Columba of Rieti added dirt. Others subsisted on moldy or black bread, raw herbs, or adulterated grains. Still others even added dried dung. The aim was to extinguish desire for earthly delights and to induce physical suffering, bringing them closer to Jesus.

Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, these strategies increasingly became associated with women. Bynum famously argues that such practices offered them a measure of control in a male-dominated world.

Yet disgust and pain were not the only paths to God. The Eucharist mattered just as much. Mystics did not merely rejoice in taking communion; they described its gustatory qualities in striking detail. Angela of Foligno testified that the host expanded in her mouth and tasted unlike ordinary bread: “it had the savor of meat, but with a completely different taste… it went down with great ease and sweetness.” Others said it slipped down the throat “like fish.” Sweetness recurs, the host being compared to honey.

The divine had a flavor profile.

Faced with these two visions of virtuous eating, my first impulse was obvious: cultural difference. The worldly, food-loving qualities of the Chinese seemed to shine through—even in the pursuit of enlightenment and release from the profane world. No wonder Chinese cuisine is world famous.

Then a student challenged me.

“Are they really that different? Isn’t this all about reaching spiritual goals through diet?”

He was right. At the broadest level, both traditions pursued salvation through eating right.

But the longer I pondered the comparison, the more I suspected something deeper. In both cases, the path to paradise—or nirvana—was experienced through the palate. Not metaphorically. Literally.

For medieval European mystics, disgust was a spiritual tool. As Bynum emphasizes, suffering from food was not a glitch in the system. It was the point. Gagging, retching, and vomiting did not signal a rejection of the physical realm; they intensified the mystic’s engagement with it.

Pain destabilized the body, induced illness, and drew the eater closer to Christ, who suffered on the cross. At the same time, the Eucharist offered a counterpoint: chewing and swallowing sacred flesh as sweetness, ease, and divine nourishment. Salvation could be ingested.

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A Catholic communion. Wood engraving by H. Linton after E.-G. Bocourt. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

What of Chinese Buddhist laity?

The evidence differs in genre and tone, but the pursuit of enlightenment—release from rebirth, the extinguishing of delusion—likewise unfolded within a culinary imagination. Here the dairy-rich quality of the recipes from The Forest of Affairs matters. Clarified butter went into doughs, creamy teas, medicines, and congees. Some monasteries reportedly stocked ghee for visitors.

This was no accident. Dairy—especially clarified butter—permeates Buddhist scripture and imagery in ways that form a sensory language of awakening.

The Nirvana Sutra famously uses butter-making as a metaphor for the path: milk becomes yogurt, then butter, and finally a fragrant, refined essence. For medieval Chinese Buddhists, butter became associated not only with enlightenment but with teaching itself and the taking of vows. Monks were anointed with ghee. The Buddha nourished himself with rich milk porridge just before meditating beneath the bodhi tree. To catch a “whiff” or “taste” of ghee could signal the stirrings of awakening.

Su Che, the younger brother of Su Shi, writes in a poem after a simple meal of wild greens: “In the inner “Flowery Pool” (e.g., the palate), there is naturally the taste of ghee.” Having eaten only vegetables, he experiences the “taste of ghee”—a sensory intimation of a state beyond ordinary awareness.

We often describe medieval Christian asceticism as “denying the flesh” and Buddhist vegetarianism as “transcending the material.” Both formulations miss something. In both traditions, salvation was not only contemplated. It was sniffed, tasted, and swallowed.

My students chose the Buddhists, incidentally.

Butter over ash.

Even if the latter, some claimed, might make bread taste angelic.

Bibliography:

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987).

Chen, Yuanjing 陳元靚 (13th cent). 1330-1333. Xinbian bianzuan zenglei qunshu leiyao

Shilin guangji 新編纂圖增類群書類要事林廣記 (The Extensive forest of affairs,

newly compiled and illustrated with additional book types digested). In Yuwai

Hanji zhenben wenku, zibu 域外漢籍珍本文庫. 第五輯, 子部 (A library of rare

editions of Chinese materials abroad, works of philosophers). Chongqing and

Beijing Xinan shifan daxue chubanshe and Renmin chubanshe.

John Kieschnick, “Buddhist Vegetarianism in China” in Roel Sterckx, Of Tripod and Palate: Food, Politics, and Religion in Traditional China (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2005).186-212

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