FOOD AND CULTURE IN EUROPE 1250-1650
. Dieting to achieve balance of “humors”
. Manners: elegant, food eaten with fingers
. Forks become more common in the sixteenth century, though not everywhere
Influence of Religion
Another crucial factor that influenced all medieval cuisine, and even continued to be followed in many Protestant places after the Reformation, is the restriction on meat and animal products (but not fish) during Lent, usually during Advent, and where strictly observed on all Fridays and sometimes another day of the week as well. In Catholic countries these dietary restrictions were suspended by the Vatican II Council some 40 years ago, though many people still continue to eat fish on Fridays. The significance of these rules for ordinary people in the past was that for a stretch of 40 days between Ash Wednesday and Easter, roughly February to March, no meat could be consumed. For the poor this meant surviving on vegetables, starches, ubiquitous beans, and preserved products such as dried cod or pickled herring. For the wealthy, it meant an entire alternate culinary repertoire based entirely on seafood, usually large and fresh species such as sturgeon or salmon, oysters, and delicate, light-textured freshwater fish. It was no deprivation, but in fact, a welcome change of menus that encouraged experimentation. Many Lenten foods were mock versions of regular meat-day meals. At the end of the fifteenth century, these restrictions appear to have loosened because we suddenly find butter among the ingredients allowed, and in fact used in profusion. After the Protestant Reformation, many regions abandoned the rules altogether, but in England they remained for political reasons, allegedly to support the fishing industry.
Influence of Health Concerns
Medieval and Renaissance diners were also, perhaps surprisingly, very concerned about their health and diet. They used a system of medicine inherited from the ancient Greeks to evaluate foods to determine what effect the foods would have on the body. This system is known as the theory of humors, or humoral physiology. It supposes that there are four basic fluids that regulate the human body: blood, phlegm, choler, and black bile. Each of these was described, in order, as being hot and moist, cold and moist, hot and dry, and cold and dry. Foods, too, were categorized with these same qualities, so that a cucumber could be called cold and moist and it was thought that eating cucumbers would cause the body to become cold and moist. Regulating food intake, as well as exercise and other external factors, to maintain a mean body temperature and humidity was the aim of the whole system—to achieve eukrasis or a balance of humors. Each individual thus had to pay attention to his or her own humoral makeup or “complexion” to decide which foods would be best.
To a certain extent, cuisine was influenced by this system. Foods that were considered too extreme in certain qualities would be cooked with or “tempered” by ingredients that would correct them. A cold phlegmatic food would be corrected by adding hot and dry spices. Equally the texture of a food could be corrected. For example a cold and phlegmatic fish, thought difficult to digest and apt to clog the body’s passageways, would be improved with the addition of a sour cutting ingredient such as lemon juice, which would scour the body’s passages. Cooking methods too were believed to be correctives, making tough foods more digestible, moistening dry foods with boiling, and drying moist foods with roasting.
Now to what extent these considerations influenced actual recipes is a matter for debate. It is clear that diners regularly ignored physicians’ warnings on dietary matters, and physicians consistently complained about how aristocratic diners ignored all dietary rules, particularly in the matter of eating too much food and too many different types of food in one sitting. Physicians did not write these recipes or organize banquet menus. Nonetheless, there are many flavor combinations that appear to have their origin in this dietary logic, and the preference for sharply contrasting sweet and sour flavors appears to have at least some connection to humoral theory. Rather than a direct causal relationship, it seems that, just as today, those people who did follow dietary rules gradually influenced what was being served. Even if cooks often confused the original precepts, they at least hoped they could offer health-conscious guests foods they would eat. The same process occurs today as restaurants and food manufacturers rush to offer Atkins-friendly choices. In a few years there will be another bandwagon to jump on. Then as today, cuisine is influenced by, though rarely originates in, dietary rules. In the end, it is always taste that matters most.
Manners and Tableware
The topic of manners must be addressed when reconstructing meals of the past. It is true that medieval diners used their fingers to eat, much as people still do throughout the Middle East and Africa. It would be a terrible mistake, though, to assume that they were outright slobs spattered in grease and tossing food around. All evidence suggests that, at least at aristocratic tables, diners were very much concerned with cleanliness and propriety. Napkins were an essential part of the dining experience, though sometimes the tablecloth served the same function. It is perfectly possible to eat daintily with your fingers; in fact it is easier to do so than with cutlery, which distances the person, perhaps unnecessarily, from the tactile pleasure of feeling the food and bringing it to the mouth. Medieval diners also had small dishes of sauces into which they customarily dipped pieces of food that were always carved before being presented. That is, one would never rip apart a huge joint of meat with the bare hands. It would be elegantly placed before the diner, not on a plate but rather on a thin slice of bread with the crust removed, or on a trencher.
There was some cutlery, though—spoons for soups and stews and knives that were often brought to the table by the individual diner and were his personal possession. Sometimes rectangular metal plates were used for service or ceramic plates and bowls. Cups, either metal, ceramic, or increasingly toward the end of the period, glass, were also standard. Normally, however, a glass would be presented, its contents drunk, and then it would be taken away to be cleaned. Increasingly, through the Early Modern period, tableware and serving utensils became opulent objects for display. In fact a large part of a family’s vested earnings could be tied up in set of silver. Even down the social scale, such tableware became an important and treasured possession, and increasingly made of pewter or a more durable material rather than wood.
The issue of forks is somewhat more contentious. There are examples of forks stretching through the Middle Ages. These are usually two-pronged utensils, shorter versions of carving forks, that were definitely used to skewer tidbits such as candied fruits in syrup and other foods which one would not want to touch. They were not, however, used as a regular eating utensil until the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Italy, and thereafter in the rest of Europe. Naturally, the advent of the fork meant that foods could more often be sauced before presentation, or could be presented in ways that were unusual in the Middle Ages. The influence of the fork on the cuisine of Europe is generally underestimated, but it does seem crucial to understanding how cuisine ultimately shifts entirely after the late seventeenth century.
Table manners themselves are also debated among food historians. A sharp contrast between the filthy and disgusting medieval diner and the cultured, elegant Renaissance courtier who would no longer pick his nose or pull half-chewed food from his mouth at the table can no longer be justly made. Merely because manners and etiquette books proliferated in the age of printing does not mean that there were no manners before and that people had absolutely no threshold for revulsion. We can say confidently, however, that more and more people were interested in learning how to behave properly at the table, and that this became a concern for a wider range of people, not merely the wealthiest. What exactly this means and why it happened is still widely debated, but is it is nonetheless clear that eating became a far more regulated and indeed civilized affair in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than it was in those preceding. Elegant manners, like clothes, speech, and general deportment, became the mark of a refined and cultured upbringing. Without these, there was no entrance into elite society.
Basic Ingredients and Recipe Types
European elites ate a wide variety of foods from countless species of plants and animals. Cookbooks tend to focus on meat because it was the most expensive and prestigious of foods, and the most complicated to cook, but there are many recipes for vegetables and lowly starches as well. These, of course, made up the bulk of ordinary people’s diet, but aristocrats and wealthy townspeople, the readers of cookbooks, were not above eating them. Every meal at every level of society included bread and wine, or beer in the north—even in the morning.
The ingredients that were available and commonly eaten in Europe changed very little between 1300 and 1600. This might seem surprising given that many new foods were discovered in the Americas after 1492. Most of these were grown only as botanical specimens and it is not until the very end of the seventeenth century that recipes appear that include items like tomatoes and peppers. Even those foods that were adopted in certain regions, such as corn and new species of beans and squash, made no appearance in cookbooks and we can only guess how they were cooked. Corn was probably ground and boiled like other grains as a porridge or polenta. New World beans were cooked exactly like favas and black-eyed peas. Potatoes appear very rarely, mostly in the British Isles, and even then it is probably sweet potatoes rather than white potatoes from Peru that they were using. Turkeys, on the other hand were accepted almost immediately, but it is not always clear if authors are referring to the American species or the African guinea fowl, which often went by the same name.
The recipes in each section beginning with the next chapter are organized either by major food type or by type of dish. That is, soups are gathered together, as are desserts, dishes based on fowl, vegetables, and so on. It is important to remember, though, that courses were not organized as in modern meals. Cold foods tended to start a meal and sweets came near the end, but otherwise there is little in common with the way we eat today.
Cold Foods
Meals did often begin with cold foods, but these rarely appear in medieval and Renaissance cookbooks. This is either because they were purchased or perhaps more importantly, they were not included among the responsibilities of the cook and kitchen, which provided hot prepared dishes. That is, foods that required no cooking were often supplied by a separate officer, the credenziero in Italy, the butler, pantler, or various other officials elsewhere. Most important among these is bread. Everywhere, throughout the centuries covered by this book, bread would have been present at the table. The wealthiest people ate thin crustless slices of white bread, which were presented ceremoniously on a long flat blade and served as a plate onto which other foods could be placed, eaten daintily with the fingers, of course. By the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, plates began to replace the bread trencher, but bread was still always present. Nobles ate fine soft white bread or manchet as it was called in England, while ordinary people ate darker coarser bread, the amount of bran increasing among poorer families. In the north rye bread was common, or sometimes a combination of wheat and rye—called maslin.
Along with bread there was also, in Italy, an entire course or several courses devoted only to cold foods, what we would call appetizers and palate cleansers. They usually came at the start of a meal, but often between courses as well, though in France an entremet, as it was called, was often a hot savory dish between other courses. The only thing these foods had in common was that they were cold; they could be made of meat, fowl, fish, pastry, and even sweets. For example, a typical first cold course might consist of prosciutto, a cold chicken pie, pickled fish, salads, sugar sculptures, and so on. This was not the pattern everywhere, and in fact in England, the custom was to start with roasts and heavier foods and move toward lighter ones at the end of the meal. In any case, there were many cold foods in medieval and Renaissance cuisine and not surprisingly, the recipes for them are comparatively scarce.
Soups
Soups were without doubt one of the major mainstays of the popular diet throughout Europe for the entire period covered in this book, and certainly long after as well. The poorer the family, the greater their dependence on soup — in which could be put any type of vegetable, grain, or meat. In fact, it was often customary to just keep a soup pot over the hearth, continually adding ingredients at hand, indefinitely. Beans could be added, cabbage and leafy greens, practically anything. Soups were also eaten any time of day, in the morning in the rustic farmhouse, or as an evening’s supper, made of left over ingredients. Soups also varied according to thickness, and recipes usually distinguish between thin bouillons and broths and thicker pottages— or what in Italian were called minestre, as in the modern word minestrone. Also, many of these recipes are what was called “sops” — the ancestor of our word soup and the meal soupper or supper. The sop is a slice of bread at the bottom of the bowl that soaks up the liquid, making it a more substantial dish, appropriate for a late evening meal or a large first course. The recipes that have survived are naturally intended for wealthier households and were made for a single meal, but were usually based on a bouillon which would be on hand as a kitchen staple. It is best, naturally, to make a broth or stock yourself at home—and it is fairly easy to do, though time-consuming. Essentially a chicken or beef with bones is boiled slowly with aromatic vegetables such as onions, celery, and carrots for several hours and is then strained. There were also vegetable-based broths, even one based on dried peas. These were used as bases for soups and other dishes. We can never know, however, exactly what went into these bases, and cookbook authors merely assume they will be available in every good kitchen. For modern cooks canned broth is a quick alternative. Bouillon cubes are usually too salty and hide the flavor of almost any ingredient.
Meat
Throughout the entire period covered by this book, meat was invariably the centerpiece of any formal meal, with the exception of fast days. Recipes in cookbooks, designed for wealthy readers, always focused on meat. This is because meat was usually the most complicated food to prepare and the one on which cooks lavished their greatest attention. It does not follow, though that medieval and Renaissance diners only ate meat and nothing else. Nonetheless, it is still hard to deny that meat is what interested people most. Counter to our impression that noble diners preferred large whole animals roasted on a spit, and preferably huge hunted beasts like boar or venison, most recipes call for meat to be cut up during the cooking process, if not pounded into a smooth puree. It may also be that simple roasts required no recipe and therefore it is the more complicated creations that appear in cookbooks.
Among the meats, wild animals were favored for their intense gamey flavor, which matched well with spices and piquant sauces. But domestic meats were also very common, pork and beef, but also lamb and mutton (from mature sheep), as well as kid, or baby goat. There were regional differences, as well as changes in preference over time. In general, beef was more common in Northern Europe, while southern Europeans tended to depend more heavily on younger animals such as lamb and veal. These are not hard and-fast rules, though, and most cookbooks offer at least a few recipes for every meat available.
Some historians have also stressed that the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were the heyday of meat eating in Europe for all social classes. Interestingly, in the Late Middle Ages, a period of relatively low population following the first outbreak of bubonic plague in 1348, meat was relatively inexpensive. That is, due to general economic prosperity among those fortunate to survive, a greater proportion of the average household budget could be spent on meat. This situation changed gradually in the sixteenth century as the population grew and more money had to be spent on basic and inexpensive staples such as grains, legumes, and vegetables. In wealthy households, meat remained a central feature, though, and even a symbol of status. Increasingly it was only the rich who could afford to serve meat at every meal, except in Catholic countries when it was forbidden during Lent and other fast days.
Fowl
Chickens, wild fowl, and even waterfowl such as ducks, heron, swan, and crane were considered among the most elegant of all foods that appeared in medieval and Renaissance banquets. Even tiny little birds such as thrushes and fig peckers were perennial favorites. In the case of wild birds, these were captured by falcons, one of the favorite pastimes of European nobles. The white flesh of domestic fowl was also highly appreciated and was thought to be easily digested. Capons, or castrated male roosters, were considered the lightest of fowl, and along with pheasant, perfectly apt for delicate palates. Peacock, especially served resewn into its feathers, was a standard presentation dish as well. Practically every bird was eaten in some form — roasted, pounded, and placed into pies or sautéed with other ingredients. By the sixteenth century, turkeys also appeared and took their place alongside other domestic fowl.
Fish and Seafood
Fish were among the most important food items in medieval and Renaissance households, both poor and wealthy, primarily because of the restrictions on meat and animal products during Lent and on various fasting days throughout the calendar. Except for people who lived near the sea or near freshwater lakes, fresh fish, because of the demand, were generally too expensive for anyone but the rich. It is also clear that certain species were preferred on elegant tables, sturgeon above all, but also eels and a variety of light-textured and white-fleshed fish, such as flounder and carp. In most households, and especially those inland, they would have eaten dried or salted cod, pickled herrings, or sardines.
Fish was normally cooked, whether boiled or roasted, with ingredients thought to dry its excessively moist and therefore unhealthy flesh. Acidic ingredients were also thought to help cut through the “gluey humors” and thus make them more digestible. Using lemon juice on fish may originate in this medicinal logic. Otherwise, cooking fish was quite different from today, and rather than accentuate the flavor with sauces based on fish stock, the idea was to add sharp-tasting ingredients that would contrast with the flavor of the fish. Dairy products were rarely used with fish, for the very reason that they are both cold and moist and this was thought to create a dangerous combination, likely to upset a person’s humoral balance.
Vegetables
Vegetables were nearly as important as fish for fast days, and of course the poorer the household the greater proportion of the average meal would be made up of vegetables such as cabbage and turnips as well as various legumes. They do not figure prominently in some cookbooks, except when baked in pies. Presumably cooks only needed directions for complicated procedures, but not for simple preparations. The exception to this is in Italy and Spain, where vegetables of all kinds were highly esteemed. Nonetheless, many vegetables do not appear in cookbooks because they were served as salads or were prepared simply. This is the case with artichokes and asparagus, which were among the most highly prized vegetables. In Italy they were also served separate from the main courses in their own course as “fruits.” The recipes for vegetables that do exist, in any case, show that they were not regarded as lowly food and were eaten everywhere in Europe, even in places where meat took center stage in a meal.
Starches
Although bread provided the bulk of starchy calories for most Europeans, there were also other dishes commonly made of wheat, barley, and other grains. In England the pudding was standard. This was not a sweet creamy dessert, but a starch or in fact any ingredient, cooked in an intestine or stomach. Pasta featured prominently in Italian cooking throughout these centuries and everywhere boiled whole or crushed grains were a staple. Rice was something relatively new, usually cooked with sugar, but eaten as a side dish nonetheless.
Eggs
Eggs were possibly the most ubiquitous food in European cuisine of the past and were eaten by people of every social class at any meal. Eggs were never considered common or pedestrian, but rather one of the most healthy and convenient foods available. They were often given to sick people as a restorative as well. Furthermore, as a seemingly exhaustible resource, hens in a coop must have been an extremely common sight, far more common than a chicken on the table. Eggs feature prominently in cooking, as a thickener for sauces and as the preferred binding agent for stuffing and fillings, and egg yolks were sometimes added just to make a dish golden and richer. They are also included in many pies and tarts — relatives of what we would call custards and quiches. Some cookbooks include eggs in practically every dish. The repertoire of egg recipes was no less extensive than our own, perhaps even more so. Old food reference books even distinguish between subtle differences in the texture of cooked eggs, from “drinkable,” to softboiled or “trembling,” to hard-boiled, not to mention poached, fried, scrambled, coddled, stirred into soups, roasted and even threaded onto a spit and cooked before a fire. Even more amazing is a recipe that instructs how to make one egg as big as twenty that involves cooking the yolks in a bladder and then placing that in the center of the whites in a larger vessel to cook.
Along with eggs, dairy products were an important staple in European cooking. This was particularly the case in regions where cattle were raised. Dairy products were featured more prominently in cookbooks in the sixteenth century and thereafter, probably because cattle rearing became especially profitable as the population grew, demand increased, and it became more cost-effective to leave land for pasture than to rent it to tenants. Cheese is found in recipes throughout the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, and some cheeses were already known by name, parmigiano being the most famous, but there were many others as well. Another reason why dairy products became more prevalent, according to some historians, is because cooks paid less attention to physicians who warned that hard cheese can be difficult to digest and that milk mixed with meats or seafood can corrupt inside the body, causing stomachaches and various other ailments. Whatever the cause, the use of cream in cooking was unusual until the very end of the period covered here.
Sauces
Sauces were an integral and essential part of the art of cookery in the past. Sometimes they were poured over a dish before service but often were presented in several little bowls scattered around the table that diners could choose from to suit their taste. Unlike today, sauces were rarely based on butter or cream. More often they were sour vinegar– or verjuice based, thickened with bread crumbs and intended to contrast in flavor with the main dish. They were almost always heavily spiced as well, or laden with garlic and herbs. Rarely were they made from the same ingredient as the food being sauced, and the stock-based sauce thickened with a combination of flour and butter or a roux is an invention of the latter seventeenth century and is nowhere to be found in medieval or Renaissance kitchens. Thick, fat-based sauces like mayonnaise and hollandaise were also missing. Sometimes a sauce would be based on drippings, often from a roasting fowl or joint of meat, or broth would be included, but to these were often added spices and sour ingredients along with sugar. So these sauces were very different from what we think of as gravy today. Fortunately, most sauces were very simple to make and required a last-minute combination of a few staple ingredients. Some, however, were closer to what we think of as jellies and jams, sweetened and fruit-based and often more like an Indian chutney than a European sauce. Cranberry sauce with turkey is perhaps a remnant of an archaic type of sauce, for which American ingredients have been substituted. One might say, though, that Americans eat this more as a side dish than a sauce. Mint sauce with lamb is also a descendant of these sauces, as is an Italian pesto.
The change from medieval to modern sauces was not abrupt, though. Butter increasingly made its way into European cookery in the sixteenth century. Spices slowly went out of favor thereafter and sugar gradually replaced many of the more sour sauces. But it does seem that when comparing medieval sauces with modern ones, they are startlingly different. For example, we rarely add coloring to our sauces, sweet spices like cinnamon and cloves we prefer in desserts, and a sweetened sauce on fish leaves us perplexed. These flavors will seem very foreign to us, but they are certainly worth trying, especially since you can make several and avoid those you might not like.
Fruit
Recipes for fruit appear much less frequently in old cookbooks than those for meat, fowl, and other ingredients. This is partly because most fruits were usually consumed fresh and needed no recipe. In Italy in particular there was an entire course dedicated just to fruit, although this was broadly defined to include items such as olives and artichokes. When recipes are offered they are usually for fruit pies, which could be eaten anywhere in a meal, or for conserves and candied fruit, which normally came at the very end of the meal. Fruit was also often cooked with other foods, raisins or prunes along with meats, grapes with fowl, and in many other surprising and interesting combinations.
Wealthy diners definitely did eat and appreciate a wide variety of fruits, even though physicians often warned against the dangers of eating too many fruits, or taking them in the wrong part of a meal. In fact, a long-standing argument among physicians concerned when to eat such corruptible fruits as melons and peaches. Some contended that at the beginning of a meal the fruit would be forced into the liver and veins by other food before it was fully digested, causing clogs in the body and fevers. Others insisted that fruits eaten at the end of the meal would float on top of other foods, corrupting and sending noxious fumes up to the head. This is why they generally recommended drinking wine or other alcoholic beverages with fruit, to act as a preservative in the stomach.
Despite these warnings, it is clear that people ate fruits whenever they pleased, both at the beginning and toward the end of the meal, just before sweets. They also consumed an extremely wide variety of fruits, many of which are relatively unfamiliar today. Small sour and wild varieties such as azaroles, medlars, and various berries were cooked or made into jelly. Dried fruits such as dates, raisins, and figs, along with citrus, at least in the north, were usually imported and were considered among the most valuable and elegant of foods.
Sweets
Sweet foods that we would normally eat only at the end of a meal or as a snack were customarily eaten throughout the meal in the Middle Ages and Renaissance—as well as at the end. This explains why sweet dishes are scattered throughout this book. Not only was sugar added to foods that we would probably not consider edible sweetened, but sugar was one the most valuable and desired products in elite cookery and by the sixteenth century was practically ubiquitous. A good proportion of recipes in most cookbooks were sweetened regardless of the main ingredient. There were nonetheless many sweet foods served at the end of a meal that filled exactly the same function as desserts do today. Comfits, or small candies such as sugar-coated spices or preserved fruits, were very fashionable to close a banquet. Confusingly, many of these fruit conserves we would expect to find at the breakfast table.
Drinks
References to drinks are rare in cookbooks of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This makes sense as the most common beverages required no cooking and were totally outside the responsibilities of the cook. A separate wine steward normally took charge of wines and oversaw how they were mixed with water. Wine was the beverage of choice for elite households everywhere, especially sweet imported wines from the Mediterranean, such as malmsey or malvasia and sack—what we today call sherry. Many of these wines are still made today, Madeira being a good example of a wine made much the same way as it was in the past. There were also local wines of every color, made on estates and monasteries throughout Europe, and in fact there were far more wineries in Northern Europe than there are today. Most of the major wine regions of Europe were exactly the same as those still producing wines. For example, Bordeaux already had a brisk export trade in wine. Some vineyards in Italy, Spain, and France had been producing wine since antiquity.
Water was not typically drunk by those who could afford to do otherwise. There is a very good reason for this: most water was polluted and could carry a whole array of pathogens. There were no efficient purification systems, and most people got water directly from a well or running stream. Alcoholic beverages were much safer to drink as the antiseptic property of alcohol kills many germs. This may be why wine was usually mixed with water — not to make the wine weaker, but to make the water safer. People certainly understood the dangers of drinking water, and even though they knew nothing about germs, physicians recommended that water be boiled.
Ale and, by the fifteenth century, beer flavored with hops were also common in Northern Europe. So too was cider in various pockets throughout Europe — in the west of England, in Normandy, and in places in Spain. Cider, made from small hard and astringent apples, had a relatively low alcoholic content and was mostly consumed by common folk rather than nobles. Mead or various flavored versions of honey wine also came in and out of fashion throughout the period covered here, and recipes do sometimes appear in guides to household management and other culinary literature.
Far more frequently, though, there are recipes for what we might call flavored wines. Contrary to today when the idea of adding anything to wine (especially water) seems abhorrent, in the past, spices and herbs enhanced the value of wine. Mulled wine is the sole surviving descendant of literally dozens of flavored aromatic wines of the Middle Ages.
The late Middle Ages also witnessed the introduction of distillation, and a whole separate subgenre of how to make and flavor alcohol flourished, especially after the advent of printing. The ancestors of many of the liqueurs and spirits found on shelves today were already made by the sixteenth century. Alcohol flavored with juniper berries, a rudimentary gin, grain-based vodka in Eastern Europe, and not long after the discovery of the New World, rum, were all eventually common drinks. Aqua Vitae—or the water of life (in Gaelic usque beatha or whiskey) was the first distilled spirit, made from wine, and was used primarily as medicine, but eventually recreationally as well. In Dutch it was called brantwijn—from which we get the word brandy. In culinary literature, however, more typical are sweetened aperitifs and cordials, flavored with herbs, flowers, fruit, and even exotic spices.
The recipes for drinks in each section can be made with de-alcoholized wine if one likes, or with juice. As it is illegal to distill alcohol at home, recipes for spirits have not been included, only those that require adding flavorings or cooking wine. Also included are a few recipes for correcting faults in wine, apparently something that happened frequently enough to warrant comment.
Meal Structure
The recipes in each section are arranged chronologically in subsections based on the prime ingredient, rather than their place in the meal. This is because, unlike today, the meal structure was not based on a progression of different kinds of recipes from appetizers to soup to fish to meat to desserts and coffee. One would often find savory and sweet dishes in every course. Or an entire course would be composed of roasted dishes, whether made of meat, fowl, or fish. Pies could be found in any and every course. Fruits and vegetables were often served just before the end in a fruit course. In some places, particularly in Italy, hot and cold courses would alternate, or there would be a table or credenza set with cold foods, what are today called antipasti, such as cold cuts, cheeses, pastries, and olives. The meal structure actually underwent a very subtle and complicated development over time and differed greatly from place to place. It is probably best today to serve everything at once, or with a larger group to divide into two courses with boiled and sauced food in the first and roast food in the second course, but keeping in mind that there should be several different types of food in every course so that diners have a choice. Although there were no desserts per se since sweet dishes appeared throughout the meal, it was customary, after the fruit course, to serve comfits or candies, preserves, and spices. These were thought to improve the digestion and breath, and of course they tasted good.
To reconstruct a typical medieval or Renaissance meal it is most important to remember that food was served in what we would call family style, on platters placed on the table and never arranged on individual plates in the kitchen. There should be one or several individuals whose job it is just to carve and serve the food. In Renaissance Italy, everything would have been carved. Even small fruits and tiny fowl were carved in mid air perched on a fork. Everywhere the carver was an important position. There should also be separate pages to fill drinks or offer the basin to wash hands ceremoniously. A scalco, or what we would call head waiter or maitre d’, who was certainly not a menial servant but rather an aristocratic member of the household who organized the entire banquet, would place the food on the plates of individual diners. Toward the sixteenth century, these officers of the mouth proliferated and the ceremonies of eating became increasingly complex, but never would an aristocratic diner be expected to serve him- or herself. Noble equals were honored by being given the privilege of doing so.
The time for a grand meal will also strike us as rather odd. The largest meal of the day, dinner, was eaten around 11 a.m. or noon. It gradually shifted later and later in the day until finally, long after the period studied here, it was eaten at night. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, however, the evening meal is supper and is generally a smaller affair and with fewer courses than dinner. Banquets, on the other hand, were special occasions and they could really take place any time of day, but people were generally accustomed to eat their larger meal early in the day. Laborers might eat a very small meal in the morning, but breakfast was not common. Lunch was unheard of. In some places smaller snacks — forming a meal called merenda, taken late in the afternoon, might hold people until the evening.
Assuming the meal is not during Lent or on a fast day, each course, anywhere from two or three to twelve or more, should contain both flesh and fish, pies and pastries, and always bread—either in thin slices with the crust removed, or rolls. A typical menu from the sixteenth century looked liked this. There is a certain logical progression, but certainly very unlike modern service. In creating your own banquet, of course, recipes can be taken from any of the chapters that follow. As in most banquets, there is a set scene made out of food arranged before diners arrive. In the menu that follows, it is figures of Hercules made out of sugar, fighting the mythical hydra made out of pheasant with seven heads attached, and a bull made from a baby goat with silver horns. Also, there were eight separate plates of every dish described. That probably meant a plate for each table of about six or eight people, so this was a grand meal for maybe as many as sixty people. Even if one prepared such a meal for one table, it is obvious that incredibly vast amounts of food are required.
By Ken Albala in "Cooking in Europe 1250-1650", Greenwood Press, USA/UK, 2006, excerpts pp. 5-19. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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