There was a time when most of us didn’t know what arugula was. Now, according to Dame Edna Everage, it is the name of choice for the newborn female offspring of the young upwardly mobile. We have all become “foodies” to a greater or lesser degree, and the discussion of food and its preparation is a large part of our lives.

But the culture of food changes from nation to nation, from region to region, and has changed from age to age. In his new book “Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns” (University of Chicago Press, 376 pages, $32.50), Robert Appelbaum has unveiled for us the way our forbears during the Renaissance thought about food. Mr. Appelbaum is an American who is the senior lecturer in Renaissance studies in the Department of Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. In spite of its clever title, it is a serious book, and though I confess that I chuckled at the title, the chuckles were few and far between in the book itself.

The title is taken from an exchange between the two comic characters in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” Sir Andrew Aguecheek says, “I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does great harm to my wit.” When Sir Toby Belch responds with “No question,” Sir Andrew does an immediate about face and says, “An I thought that, I’d forswear it.” When shortly told that there is a “gentleman” at the gate, Sir Toby says, “‘Tis a gentleman here.” After which he says “A plague o’ these pickled herring!” Shakespeare scholarship has it that what prompted this last interjection is some kind of noise of indigestion, a belch, a hiccup, or a fart. Mr. Appelbaum opts for a hiccup.

Mr. Appelbaum discourses at great length about a number of things relative to eating and digestion and the thoughts of writers from Shakespeare to Rousseau, as well as less well-known writers like Kenelm Digby and Thomas Lupton. We learn about the doctrine of the four humors: blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile. And the four elements: air, fire, water, and earth. The balance between the humors and the elements determined one’s state of health or illness and one’s disposition. It is a type of physiological study that goes back to Hippocrates. Along with this he discusses what he calls “the doctrine of intake and discharge,” which is relatively self-explanatory. Less self-explanatory is the “doctrine of sensory affect — perhaps the most difficult part of the science to understand, since it requires us to imagine not only a theory but a regime of sensation that we no longer experience.”

In Mr. Appelbaum’s words (and they are a good example of his prose style) the science of nutrition “organized sensory response by way of its quadrilateral heuristic of things, qualities, and tendencies. It elicited certain kinds of sensory responses, discouraged others, and always framed them by way of a language that was at once in conversation with unmediated gustatory sensations and in conflict with the very idea of unmediated response. It imposed a formal order on matter, though the forms were held to be in matter, governing the matter at all points too.” I’m sure you were wondering about this.

The chapter in which Mr. Appelbaum discusses cookbooks as a literary and social phenomenon proves to be one of the most readable. In fact, the introduction of some of these texts are the most appealing part of “Aguecheek’s Beef.” Take this, for instance, from Hannah Wooley’s “A Guide to Ladies, Gentlewomen and Maids”: “Put not your Knife to your mouth unless it be to eat an Egg, or such like thing, which you cannot eat without it; nor hold your knife in your hand longer than while you are cutting, do not gnaw your bones, nor put both hands at once to your mouth.”

In the chapter headed “The Food of Wishfulness” we read about the fabled Land of Cockaigne, where every desire is satisfied. An alternative to Cockaigne can be found in the writings of the Utopians, Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella (“The City of the Sun”), and Johann Valentin Andreae (“Christianopolis”), in which eating is part of a regulated life. The following chapter considers “The Food of Regret,” the title of which balances nicely with the “Food of Wishfulness,” but it is really a chapter not so much about regret as it is about simplicity of diet.

Mr. Appelbaum has marshaled all of the machineries of scholarship to produce this tome. There are hundreds of notes and an eight-page bibliography of primary texts. The book bears the mark of the midnight oil and the dust of ancient libraries, thousands of hours of reading, sifting, and note taking. It is a work of learning of the kind that I couldn’t produce myself. Nor would I want to.

But in fact all of this has been written about before, as evidenced by a 10 page bibliography of secondary texts. Mr. Appelbaum so often strains to produce “glimpses into the obvious,” as W. H. Mallock said of Benjamin Jowett’s sermons. For example: “As literary artifacts, cookbooks insert themselves into the world of practical life, both as advocates of things to be done and as expressions of ideas to be read and thought.” Sometimes he is just plain silly, as when he says that the early writers “conveyed a system for communicating with and by way of food, a system for establishing a chain of communication between the subject, the foodstuff, the subject’s body, and the social world to which subject, food, and body alike belonged.” One envisions Shakespeare “communicating” with his “foodstuff.”

I wonder if the University of Lancaster has adopted a “publish or perish” policy as have so many American universities. Why else would such a pointless and tedious book be written? Mr. Appelbaum is about to undertake a study of terrorism in literature. Can he make terrorism as boring as he has made food? As Sir Toby puts it, “Thou’rt a scholar; let us therefore eat and drink.”