Food for healing: Convalescent cookery in the early modern era

Despite major theoretical shifts in early modern nutritional theory, from humoralism to chemical and mechanical systems, the form and structure of convalescent cookery remained remarkably constant throughout the era and to a large extent even down to the present. In medical texts, cookbooks and in the popular imagination convalescent food generally mirrored food for infants, being soft and bland, based on dairy and grains, as well as foods considered highly nutritious yet easy to digest like concentrated broths. This article traces the development of ideas about convalescent food and how little they change over time.