Humanitas (May 2019)
Food and Paremiology in Modern Portugal: “The guest and the fish at three days stink”
Abstract
The present paper aims to answer the question, how fish was understood and represented, in its literal and figurative senses, in the Portuguese proverbs corpus of the Modern Age, namely in the compilations of Antonio Delicado (1651) and Rafael Bluteau (1712-1728). The foods presents several nutritional qualities and also symbolic values, in such a way that there was always a hierarchy of consumptions related directly to the rarity and the price of the foods, making clear that certain expenditures were socially prestigious. For this purpose, all the proverbs contained in the mentioned sources were collected, analyzed, taking into account the Portuguese context of the Modern Age. Some comparisons considered pertinent were done. The result of the research was an innovative approach to proverbs as a historical source, demonstrating that the choice and use of fish, like any other food, evidences available natural resources, economic power and identity practices of the Portuguese society of the Modern Age. In this sense, fish was associated with eating habits that were part of a cultural system plenty of symbols and meanings capable of determining what, when and how a product was made or not eatable.
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