Introduction
There are a lot of popular stereotypes of the Middle Ages. Chastity belts. An abiding belief in a flat earth. Knights in shining armour. The Merriness of England. And the dirtiness of it all.
It is just as well that most people realise how very wrong these stereotypes can be.
Medieval food has just as many false assumptions concerning it as the Middle Ages in general. But for a whole bunch of reasons, most people have not bothered to correct their views. You still read about rotten food being disguised by spices, whole counties of England permanently tipsy and about really sickening ingredients. You read of peasants starving on gruel, while nobles refused to touch vegetables.
The reality, is, thank goodness, much more fun. And Medieval food is much more edible than popular rumour suggests.
The flavours of food in Medieval Europe varied according to region. The rice dishes of Southern France were quite different from the meat pie you bought in a cookshop in London Bridge, for instance. Likewise, they were quite different from much food today. The spicing was seldom the same as ours, for example. While a few flavour combinations are better forgotten, many are worthy of wide revival. As are some of the more unusual ingredients. Once you cook with sour pomegranate syrup or clove buds, you may never look back, and when you are used to dipping your meat into delectable sauces, plain roast may start to look a tad bare and dull.
Medieval Europe has several great cuisines, and we can’t study them all deeply in one short course. My aim here is to give you an overview how everything fits together. Plus a good cookbook and suggestions on how to develop your own feast menus.
The course will answer some of the basic questions about what food was eaten by whom, what ingredients were available and where. It will also raise questions about how much work there still is to do in understanding what food people ate everyday, and how we recreate recipes for our own use. It wasn’t until the likes of Mrs. Beeton in the nineteenth century that recipes were measured and described in such detail that every reader could reproduce exactly a dish from what was written on a page.
So what was described on the Medieval page? And what pages were they described on?
Since printing was not invented in Europe until late in the fifteenth century, Medieval recipes come down to us handwritten. Careful copies (and some not-so-careful) of the work of great cooks such as Taillevent, for the most part. Most of the manuscripts come from towards the end of the Middle Ages. We have very few Medieval recipes older than the thirteenth century. Alas, in a short course we haven’t time to look too closely at the manuscript tradition – we can also only really cover an overview of what dishes were enjoyed at what time of year, how they were seasoned and who was most likely to eat them. It is important to know, though, that the recipes we have do not reflect the whole Middle Ages.
Since a short course can’t teach everything, what can it teach you?
Mostly, it will equip you with ideas and the basic books and with an understanding of how things fit together so you can go forth and cook and eat, and learn. You will be able to devise a banquet menu, and to locate key ingredients. You will understand some of the cultural background to food, including the effects of religion and travel and the development of cities.
In the class discussion, if students are interested, we will look at specific dishes e.g. pastries and fast food, vegetable dishes, ways of preparing meat, and how to make subtleties.
This course may also start you off on a whole new way of understanding the past. History is not just made up of great deeds and noble minds. In fact, great deeds and noble minds are sadly few and far between. The real stuff of humans' past is food, drink, clothes, jewelry, table manners, folkstories, common gossip, daily life and its rituals. The work of people’s hands and the thoughts of their minds while they work.
Humans have a very rich past. All of us. Culinary history – the history of our food and how we cook it and serve it and eat it – is part of this past. It is crucial to helping us understand who we are and how we got here.
And if you have ever had any desire to step back into the Middle Ages, then it is much more fun to cook than to plough, much less dangerous to eat than to joust, and cubebs smell a great deal nicer than leather being tanned.
Lessons
Click here to see course syllabus
