The Anatomy of Melancholy

Milk and everything made from it—butter, cheese, curds and so on—increase melancholy. Only whey is excepted, as particularly wholesome; some also except asses’ milk. The rest is nourishing and good for healthy people, especially young children, but because it quickly turns corrupt, it is bad for those whose stomachs contain foul matter, who are prone to headaches or who have fresh wounds, urinary stones and the like.

Of all cheeses, I consider the kind we call Banbury cheese the best. “Of the old cheeses, the worst”: the older, stronger and harder a cheese is, the worse it is, as Langius discusses in his letter to Melanchthon, cited by Mizaldus; see also Isaac, part 5, and Galen, book 3, On Foods of Good Juice, and others.

Among birds, peacocks and pigeons are forbidden, as are all marsh birds: ducks, geese, swans, herons, cranes, coots, little grebes and moorhens, together with all the teal, curs, shelducks and speckled birds that come here in winter from Scandinavia, Muscovy, Greenland and Friesland, lands entirely covered with snow and frozen over for half the year.

Although their feathers are beautiful, their taste pleasant and their outward appearance attractive—like hypocrites, white-plumed and soft—their flesh is tough, dark, unwholesome, dangerous food that produces melancholy. “They burden the stomach and cause putrefaction in it,” says Isaac, part 5, on birds. Their young are more tolerable, but he rejects young pigeons altogether.

Rhazes and Magninus advise against all fish, saying that they produce viscous matter and slimy nourishment, giving little sustenance but many humours. Savonarola adds that they are cold, moist and phlegmatic; so does Isaac. They are therefore unwholesome for all cold and melancholic temperaments.

Others distinguish between them, rejecting only these freshwater kinds: eel, tench, lamprey, crayfish—which Bright approves in chapter 6—and fish bred in muddy, stagnant water that taste of mud, as François Boussuet puts it in verse in his book On Aquatic Creatures:

For all the fish that dwell in pools and lakes Always contain more juice of poorer quality.

All fish that live in stagnant pools and lakes Always yield bad juices and nourishment.

Paolo Giovio, in chapter 34 of On River Fish, highly praises lampreys, and says that no one speaks against them except “fools and over-scrupulous people”—some excessively fussy persons. But in chapter 33 he loathes eels: everywhere, at all times, all physicians detest them, especially around the solstice.

Gomesius, in On Salt, book 1, chapter 22, praises sea fish beyond measure, while others disparage it just as much, especially dried, pickled and hardened fish: ling, smoked fish, red herrings, sprats, stockfish, salt cod, dried hake, and all shellfish. Timothy Bright makes an exception for lobster and crab. Messarius recommends salmon, but Bruyérin contradicts him in book 22, chapter 17. Magninus rejects conger eel, sturgeon, turbot, mackerel and skate.

Carp is a fish about which I do not know what to decide. Franciscus Bonsoetus considers it a muddy fish. Hippolytus Salvianus, in his book On the Nature and Preparation of Fish, printed in folio at Rome in 1554 with exceptionally fine illustrations, regards carp as no better than slimy, watery food.

Paolo Giovio, on the other hand, rejects tench but approves of carp; so does Dubravius in his books on fishponds. Frietagius praises it as an excellent, wholesome food and ranks it among the best fish. So do most of our country gentlemen, who stock their ponds with scarcely any other species.