MEDIEVAL, RENAISSANCE, AND ELIZABETHAN CUISINE
Overview
. Arab and Persian origins of Medieval cuisine
. New ingredients: eggplant, spinach, artichokes, rice, lemons
. Sweet and sour dishes with dried fruits and vinegar
. Heavy use of spices and sugar
. Condiments: almond milk, verjuice, rosewater
. Pounded sauces based on bread or nuts
. Perfumed and colored foods
To a certain extent, the cookery of the High Middle Ages and Renaissance up to the seventeenth century can be considered one unified cuisine. There were of course changes, shifts in taste preference and techniques and many geographical variations. Some ingredients came into fashion or slowly lost favor through this period. But it is nonetheless safe to say that someone eating in the fourteenth century would enjoy much the same basic repertoire of dishes as someone 300 years later. Culinary historians sometimes draw a sharp distinction between medieval and Early Modern food, but there is really no reason to separate the two. The dramatic changes come in the latter seventeenth century, when new techniques and many new foods and drinks—coffee, tea, and chocolate among them—completely revolutionize European foodways. Medieval cuisine, or more properly cuisine of the Late Middle Ages, as we are really discussing only the last few centuries of the medieval era, was somewhat different from Early Modern cuisine, described in cookbooks published (and printed) after 1500. But there are just as many similarities and continuities connecting the former to the latter. The most significant change is not a different culinary style, but the expanded readership that came with increasing literacy and affordable printed books. In many cases these new readers demanded different kinds of recipes. They could not afford whole porpoises or venison and they wanted recipes for fewer guests and less expensive ingredients. This accounts for many of the changes in European cookery. So too do purely economic factors such as the profitability of dairy cattle and the increasing prevalence of milk products in cuisine after 1500. Purely accidental factors, such as the Portuguese control of the direct spice trade with Asia and their unwillingness to have inferior spices compete with their supply of pepper, meant that some ingredients like chili peppers remained rare in Europe and others, like grains of paradise, gradually disappeared.
There were many changes, as hopefully will become apparent in the recipes themselves in each section. But the discussion that follows can still be taken as relevant to a basic cooking style that prevailed in Europe from the thirteenth century or so all the way through the mid-seventeenth century.
To a great extent this cuisine was inherited from or was an adaptation of Middle Eastern and Persian cuisine. Just as spices, sugar, and dried fruits were bought from Muslim merchants in the eastern Mediterranean, so too were cooking techniques and flavor preferences. This was a cuisine that used many spices together in dense clusters of flavor. Sugar and sour ingredients were often used in combination, along with nuts. Food was often pounded into fine smooth textures. Interestingly, it was this cuisine that was carried with Muslim expansion into India with the Moghuls where it remains today. It was also carried into Spain and flourished under the Abbasid Caliphate of Cordoba after the eighth century. The Muslim settlers brought with them many new ingredients, too; for example, eggplants, spinach, artichokes, rice, lemons, and sugar. In Spanish all these words are descended from Arabic. Even after the Moors, as they are often called, were driven from Spain, their cuisine persisted and was in many ways carried over to the New World. We rarely consider that a molé poblano from Mexico is a distant cousin of the Northern Indian Curry, but the pounded nuts, fruits, and spices are clear rudiments of their common origins. In any case, medieval and Renaissance cuisine were still part of this greater Mediterranean food culture.
Spices
The use of spices, which ultimately came from either India and Ceylon in the case of pepper and cinnamon or the Moluccas in what is today Indonesia in the case of cloves and nutmeg, definitely derives from Middle Eastern cookery. It has often been said that it was crusaders in their brief sojourn in the Holy Land as rulers who brought back the taste for spices, dried fruits, and nuts. This is an oversimplification, and in fact there had been contact and trade between Europe and the Middle East prior to the crusades. It was wealth and luxuries of the East that enticed the crusaders in the first place and led them to conquer what is today Israel, Lebanon, and much of the surrounding area as well. Still, it is true that trade increased dramatically after the Crusades and continued despite the collapse of the crusader kingdoms. Venice, with some competition from the Genoese and Pisans, for the most part carried the spices and luxury goods from eastern ports, and of course brought fabulous wealth to Italian merchants.
The spice repertoire of the average medieval cook was far more extensive than any used today in the West. Along with those mentioned were cassia, which is a relative of cinnamon and is actually what is sold today in the United States labeled cinnamon, cassia buds, as well as grains of paradise or meleguetta pepper from the West Coast of Africa, long pepper and what was called tailed pepper or cubebs. Cubebs have a tiny pointy spike, but otherwise look like black pepper. All these have very subtly distinctive flavors and aromas. Ginger, always in dried form and ground, was also a major spice as well as its cousin galangal, which is spicier; some modern cookbook authors describe it as mustard-like and pungent. Galangal can be bought in any Southeast Asian grocery store. There was also spikenard, sandalwood (in powder to make foods red), alkanet (a purplish red food dye), and rosewater, which was used in both sweet and savory dishes. These can still be found in Indian or Middle Eastern grocery stores. Sugar of course, then rare and precious, has since become ubiquitous. Like today, it came in many different shades, the whitest being considered the finest.
Unfamiliar Flavors and Practices
A few now-unfamiliar ingredients were also staples in the medieval and Renaissance kitchen. Verjuice is the juice of unripe grapes or sometimes other fruits like crab apples in Northern Europe. It is tart and astringent and a tiny amount goes a long way in livening up almost any dish. If you are not lucky enough to own grape vines or live near vineyards, sour table grapes are similar, but it is preferable to buy verjuice from a manufacturer. Sometimes recipes call for whole unripe grapes as well. Another staple ingredient, sapa, or as it is called today saba in Italy, is cooked-down grape must, which is freshly pressed grapes. It is thick syrup, like molasses, that adds a remarkable depth of flavor. It can easily be made by reducing grape juice, preferably freshly squeezed. In consistency it is like good balsamic vinegar, which incidentally is made from a sapa base. Reduced wine, boiled down by one half or more, is another ingredient that is worth making at home and keeping on hand. Good vinegar is indispensable to this cuisine, white wine vinegar is best, although there were also flavored vinegars such as rose and cinnamon, which can be made at home by merely steeping the ingredients in vinegar. Be sure roses have not been treated or sprayed if you intend to consume them.
Although almonds themselves were first imported from the East and later grown throughout the Mediterranean, the use of almond milk appears to have been a European invention. It is essentially blanched and ground almonds soaked in hot water overnight and then strained. It has much the same consistency as coconut milk and is basically made the same way. It was used as a substitute for regular milk during Lent and other fast days, when dairy products were prohibited. It can also be made from pine nuts, which need not be strained, but merely pounded with water added until thick and smooth.
Medieval and Renaissance cooks also enjoyed perfumed food, particularly toward the end of the period covered here. They achieved this with flower waters distilled from rose, orange, and jasmine, but even with actual perfumes such as ambergris and musk. Ambergris is a secretion of whales’ intestines washed up on beaches; musk is taken from the scent glands of deer in central Asia. These two substances were used in perfumery into modern times but are almost completely unobtainable today. In cuisine they were generally replaced with vanilla, which some people compared with amber. By the time vanilla was widely available in Europe, such scents had been relegated to sweet foods only, though.
Coloring food was also a favorite practice, especially in the Middle Ages. This could be done with simple ingredients like parsley or beet greens; egg yolks and saffron for yellow; or such extravagant items as silver and gold leaf. These are completely edible but have no flavor. Edible silver leaf can be bought in Indian specialty shops and is called vark. The same goes for ground pearls, which were obviously eaten only for dramatic effect and cost. Vegetable dyes were also used in food, powdered sandalwood for red and later cochineal, made from tiny insects, from the New World.
Fantastic presentation dishes, or “subtleties,” as they were called in England, were also favorites at medieval feasts. One could have birds re-sewn into their feathers spewing flames. This trick was done by soaking a wad of cloth in alcohol or camphor, lighting it, and putting it in the bird’s beak. The rhyme “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie” also has a real culinary origin. An empty shell was baked, the top removed and live birds or even rabbits were put inside, only to escape when the pie was opened and served. These marvels, and especially sugar sculptures depicting classical heroes or battle scenes by the sixteenth century, formed the centerpiece of any great banquet.
By Ken Albala in "Cooking in Europe 1250-1650", Greenwood Press, USA/UK, 2006, excerpts pp. 1-5. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
. Arab and Persian origins of Medieval cuisine
. New ingredients: eggplant, spinach, artichokes, rice, lemons
. Sweet and sour dishes with dried fruits and vinegar
. Heavy use of spices and sugar
. Condiments: almond milk, verjuice, rosewater
. Pounded sauces based on bread or nuts
. Perfumed and colored foods
To a certain extent, the cookery of the High Middle Ages and Renaissance up to the seventeenth century can be considered one unified cuisine. There were of course changes, shifts in taste preference and techniques and many geographical variations. Some ingredients came into fashion or slowly lost favor through this period. But it is nonetheless safe to say that someone eating in the fourteenth century would enjoy much the same basic repertoire of dishes as someone 300 years later. Culinary historians sometimes draw a sharp distinction between medieval and Early Modern food, but there is really no reason to separate the two. The dramatic changes come in the latter seventeenth century, when new techniques and many new foods and drinks—coffee, tea, and chocolate among them—completely revolutionize European foodways. Medieval cuisine, or more properly cuisine of the Late Middle Ages, as we are really discussing only the last few centuries of the medieval era, was somewhat different from Early Modern cuisine, described in cookbooks published (and printed) after 1500. But there are just as many similarities and continuities connecting the former to the latter. The most significant change is not a different culinary style, but the expanded readership that came with increasing literacy and affordable printed books. In many cases these new readers demanded different kinds of recipes. They could not afford whole porpoises or venison and they wanted recipes for fewer guests and less expensive ingredients. This accounts for many of the changes in European cookery. So too do purely economic factors such as the profitability of dairy cattle and the increasing prevalence of milk products in cuisine after 1500. Purely accidental factors, such as the Portuguese control of the direct spice trade with Asia and their unwillingness to have inferior spices compete with their supply of pepper, meant that some ingredients like chili peppers remained rare in Europe and others, like grains of paradise, gradually disappeared.
There were many changes, as hopefully will become apparent in the recipes themselves in each section. But the discussion that follows can still be taken as relevant to a basic cooking style that prevailed in Europe from the thirteenth century or so all the way through the mid-seventeenth century.
To a great extent this cuisine was inherited from or was an adaptation of Middle Eastern and Persian cuisine. Just as spices, sugar, and dried fruits were bought from Muslim merchants in the eastern Mediterranean, so too were cooking techniques and flavor preferences. This was a cuisine that used many spices together in dense clusters of flavor. Sugar and sour ingredients were often used in combination, along with nuts. Food was often pounded into fine smooth textures. Interestingly, it was this cuisine that was carried with Muslim expansion into India with the Moghuls where it remains today. It was also carried into Spain and flourished under the Abbasid Caliphate of Cordoba after the eighth century. The Muslim settlers brought with them many new ingredients, too; for example, eggplants, spinach, artichokes, rice, lemons, and sugar. In Spanish all these words are descended from Arabic. Even after the Moors, as they are often called, were driven from Spain, their cuisine persisted and was in many ways carried over to the New World. We rarely consider that a molé poblano from Mexico is a distant cousin of the Northern Indian Curry, but the pounded nuts, fruits, and spices are clear rudiments of their common origins. In any case, medieval and Renaissance cuisine were still part of this greater Mediterranean food culture.
Spices
The use of spices, which ultimately came from either India and Ceylon in the case of pepper and cinnamon or the Moluccas in what is today Indonesia in the case of cloves and nutmeg, definitely derives from Middle Eastern cookery. It has often been said that it was crusaders in their brief sojourn in the Holy Land as rulers who brought back the taste for spices, dried fruits, and nuts. This is an oversimplification, and in fact there had been contact and trade between Europe and the Middle East prior to the crusades. It was wealth and luxuries of the East that enticed the crusaders in the first place and led them to conquer what is today Israel, Lebanon, and much of the surrounding area as well. Still, it is true that trade increased dramatically after the Crusades and continued despite the collapse of the crusader kingdoms. Venice, with some competition from the Genoese and Pisans, for the most part carried the spices and luxury goods from eastern ports, and of course brought fabulous wealth to Italian merchants.
The spice repertoire of the average medieval cook was far more extensive than any used today in the West. Along with those mentioned were cassia, which is a relative of cinnamon and is actually what is sold today in the United States labeled cinnamon, cassia buds, as well as grains of paradise or meleguetta pepper from the West Coast of Africa, long pepper and what was called tailed pepper or cubebs. Cubebs have a tiny pointy spike, but otherwise look like black pepper. All these have very subtly distinctive flavors and aromas. Ginger, always in dried form and ground, was also a major spice as well as its cousin galangal, which is spicier; some modern cookbook authors describe it as mustard-like and pungent. Galangal can be bought in any Southeast Asian grocery store. There was also spikenard, sandalwood (in powder to make foods red), alkanet (a purplish red food dye), and rosewater, which was used in both sweet and savory dishes. These can still be found in Indian or Middle Eastern grocery stores. Sugar of course, then rare and precious, has since become ubiquitous. Like today, it came in many different shades, the whitest being considered the finest.
Unfamiliar Flavors and Practices
A few now-unfamiliar ingredients were also staples in the medieval and Renaissance kitchen. Verjuice is the juice of unripe grapes or sometimes other fruits like crab apples in Northern Europe. It is tart and astringent and a tiny amount goes a long way in livening up almost any dish. If you are not lucky enough to own grape vines or live near vineyards, sour table grapes are similar, but it is preferable to buy verjuice from a manufacturer. Sometimes recipes call for whole unripe grapes as well. Another staple ingredient, sapa, or as it is called today saba in Italy, is cooked-down grape must, which is freshly pressed grapes. It is thick syrup, like molasses, that adds a remarkable depth of flavor. It can easily be made by reducing grape juice, preferably freshly squeezed. In consistency it is like good balsamic vinegar, which incidentally is made from a sapa base. Reduced wine, boiled down by one half or more, is another ingredient that is worth making at home and keeping on hand. Good vinegar is indispensable to this cuisine, white wine vinegar is best, although there were also flavored vinegars such as rose and cinnamon, which can be made at home by merely steeping the ingredients in vinegar. Be sure roses have not been treated or sprayed if you intend to consume them.
Although almonds themselves were first imported from the East and later grown throughout the Mediterranean, the use of almond milk appears to have been a European invention. It is essentially blanched and ground almonds soaked in hot water overnight and then strained. It has much the same consistency as coconut milk and is basically made the same way. It was used as a substitute for regular milk during Lent and other fast days, when dairy products were prohibited. It can also be made from pine nuts, which need not be strained, but merely pounded with water added until thick and smooth.
Medieval and Renaissance cooks also enjoyed perfumed food, particularly toward the end of the period covered here. They achieved this with flower waters distilled from rose, orange, and jasmine, but even with actual perfumes such as ambergris and musk. Ambergris is a secretion of whales’ intestines washed up on beaches; musk is taken from the scent glands of deer in central Asia. These two substances were used in perfumery into modern times but are almost completely unobtainable today. In cuisine they were generally replaced with vanilla, which some people compared with amber. By the time vanilla was widely available in Europe, such scents had been relegated to sweet foods only, though.
Coloring food was also a favorite practice, especially in the Middle Ages. This could be done with simple ingredients like parsley or beet greens; egg yolks and saffron for yellow; or such extravagant items as silver and gold leaf. These are completely edible but have no flavor. Edible silver leaf can be bought in Indian specialty shops and is called vark. The same goes for ground pearls, which were obviously eaten only for dramatic effect and cost. Vegetable dyes were also used in food, powdered sandalwood for red and later cochineal, made from tiny insects, from the New World.
Fantastic presentation dishes, or “subtleties,” as they were called in England, were also favorites at medieval feasts. One could have birds re-sewn into their feathers spewing flames. This trick was done by soaking a wad of cloth in alcohol or camphor, lighting it, and putting it in the bird’s beak. The rhyme “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie” also has a real culinary origin. An empty shell was baked, the top removed and live birds or even rabbits were put inside, only to escape when the pie was opened and served. These marvels, and especially sugar sculptures depicting classical heroes or battle scenes by the sixteenth century, formed the centerpiece of any great banquet.
By Ken Albala in "Cooking in Europe 1250-1650", Greenwood Press, USA/UK, 2006, excerpts pp. 1-5. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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