Cookery: Skill, Art, or Science?

The language used in medieval cookery texts (mostly manuscripts) is consonant with the skill view. Yet there is also a touch of what would now be called ‘science’ in some of them, because they assume that the choice of foods and combinations of foods is a branch of medicine, or at least a close ally thereof; see galen and four humours.

Next, the art view. This, necessarily has to be combined with the skill view. If cookery is an art, then according to the normal usage of the terms ‘art’ and ‘artist’, it is only done well and properly by a limited number of people—corresponding in practice to the great chefs of the time. They are the artists, who stand out like mountaintops among the foothills. Lower down come the vast majority of practitioners, who go through similar but less complicated and subtle motions in their kitchens, and who are no more than artisans.