Chris Woolgar On Medieval Food | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"One of the interesting things about food in the Middle Ages is that there is a common pattern of cuisine, at least at an elite level across Western Europe. And it's a cuisine that favors highly spiced food and often thin acidic sauces based on wine, vinegar, or verjuice. The sauces are really important in this and with pretty much everything, there is a sauce of some kind.
We can see this quite nicely in a couple of quotes that we have here. Two sayings, Henry the Fifth at the Siege of Meaux says, Guerre sans feu ne valoit rien non plus qu'andouilles sans moutarde - war without fighting is worth nothing, like sausages without mustard. And then a proverb from about 100 years before - *something*. Wolf meat, dog sauce. And I think the interpretation of that is: there's something a little disappointing.
Well, what about the diet of everybody else? Certainly people emulate the elite. One of the Germ, one of the striking features is really the consistency in general of patterns of medieval diet. There are differences certainly, but they are differences on the whole in terms of quantity and quality, rather than the elite eating wholly different foods from the lower classes. There are some exceptions to this. Most people, most of the time before the Black Death in the middle of the 14th century have a diet that is based on cereals. Even if there are occasions such as harvest or Christmas feasts, where they will shape their meals in a way that is similar to the elite.
And that brings me on to one of the big questions from the Middle Ages, the food supply. The great problem for medieval people is firstly, getting enough food and is then preserving foodstuffs to ensure there is a supply all year round until the next harvest. Storing corn in bonds [sp?] is certainly a preferred strategy. It's a large scale investment and some of the most distinctive survivals we have from the medieval countryside in England are great bonds...
Gluttony to medieval men was not only about overconsumption. But it was also about inappropriate consumption at times other than set meal times, defined in one text as overlate suppers. It was also for medieval people about the overstimulation of the senses. When Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster confessed around 1354 to gluttony, in his book, The Holy medicines he had in mind, not just rich meats, but ones that were made as delicious as man could with good spices and the most piquante sauces.
Lust was closely linked to carnality. The Latin for meat, caro, carnis is the origin of the word carnality. It's the stimulation of flesh with flesh. Well, in England between 1100 and 1500, we find the avoidance of meat on three days of the week, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, not just the Fridays that we think about eating fish today, but Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Beyond that the whole of the season of Lent, and sometimes of Advent as well, and sometimes in the run up to the Ascension, the eves of the feasts of the apostles, the great Marian festivals, and sometimes the feasts of individual saints, dictated perhaps by personal choice. In other parts of Europe, the pattern of abstinent was different, and medieval England is pretty much at the extreme end of the scale and what this translates to in elite households, is abstinence that is expected on about 180 days of the year. That's half the year. Some pursue a more rigorous diet, especially the clergy who are more observant. Generally, they have a longer period of Lent, not just 40 days, but 60 and longer. Advent as well. And together these perhaps add another 40 to 60 days to the period of abstinence.
And the more rigorous diet is also followed by individuals, and may be followed out of penance. So, for example, a murder valence [sp?], one of the great, great barons in March 1300. We find him eating bread that is made substantially with ash. On days of abstinence when meat was not eaten, in elite household, in religious households, monastic and secular and in many others, it was the usual practice to eat fish. Fish is described in a sermon of around 1400 as closer than meat to the food that men will eat in paradise. Fish was commonly consumed in an urban environment in the period 1100 to 1350. But perhaps less so thereafter...
There are other connections in food that are connected to status. So roast foods in particular are linked to high status, profligate in terms of food. So roast meat rather than boiled meat. And if we look at the household ordinances of Edward the Second in 1318, we find it is only the upper tiers - the king’s servants, his gentle servants that have roasted food. The lower ranks have boiled meats. And the same is true of fried foods as well. One of the links that I would make to status, and it may be surprising, is color. Highly colored food was an impressive feature of the greatest feasts, and was copied for special occasions well down the social scale. It needs particular spices for color. So saffron for yellow, for example, or sanders and sandalwood for red.
There is a notion that people have to recognize their means, and medieval cookbooks explain something that's called petty curry or little curry. Little cookery. So this is for a man who cannot afford spices, showing how he might use herbs and other garden products in ways which allowed him to imitate elite consumption.
What meals are eaten by whom and when. There were three principal meals, breakfast, lunch and supper. Breakfast, *something* was largely confined to the elite, to travelers and to some manual workers. In terms of timing, it was not to be eaten until the first mass of the day had been completed. It was also not eaten on Fridays...
‘You talked quite a lot about spices and spicy foods and and spices coming from the Orient, about particularly the Crusades. Was there any sense that there were foods that were foreign that you know, you frowned upon, you know, today we have you know, there's the or at least used to be in, in, in cuisine maybe a few decades ago, like foreign foods that people were, turn their noses up a bit. Was there any sense of that in medieval times?’
‘Different sense of it, if you like. There are people, particularly looking at this from a moralistic point of view, who are concerned that cooks are changing nature and changing the nature of a substance for example, by coloring is not only deceitful, it's changing its, its natural characteristics and that is a bad thing. So color is really quite interesting because we think of it, color, it's red. But we don't think of that as telling us something about the nature of the food, the intrinsic quality of it. So if something is red, it means something beyond the color as it as it were. And we can see there are texts that tell us about the ripening of food. So an apple will go from green to red as it absorbs heat. So it's telling us something, what's, about what's there. But if you then turn it into a different color, that, that's misleading us in, in many ways.
But equally, other people see it differently and they use these opportunities to create almost false foods if you like. So during Lent, at times when meat can't be eaten, people make meatballs out of other constituents as it were, other ingredients and and color them to look like meat. So you're almost pretending though you're, you're eating it. So, there are various ways of of looking at this but there is certainly, the number of instances which link food to places by names so Leach Lombard or, or things from Gascony or indeed Saracen things, but they tend, they tend to be conveying a notion of the exotic and they're not necessarily rejected for their foreignness, but they're rejected, I think for their great expense. And inappropriate as it were in natural terms’
‘Okay, another one about snacking. So snacking in, in, in our modern eating habits is deemed to be our great downfall, the cause of obesity and things like that. Did people snack at all in the Middle Ages?’
‘I'm sure they did. Otherwise it wouldn't have been part of the sin of gluttony to eat at inappropriate times. So yes, and one of the big worries of the medieval great household was keeping control of food and where it might be eaten. So one of the reasons why you eat in hall is that you concentrate your expenditure and your effort on consumption at a particular time. The particular place where everybody can see it going on. You don't have it going on in chambers in a, in a private place, privately because people could eat anything there and some of the key message goes on and I think just the control that's there in terms of how food is issued is clearly, clearly designed to stop this inappropriate consumption and keeping control of the grooms. I mean, if you've had teenage boys, you know how they will hoover up anything. So keeping your food locked up is critical. Snacking will go on if there's a chance.’...
'[Lampreys are] really high status foods and Bishop Thomas Cantaloupe who was Bishop of Hereford died in 1282, was very partial to them, but he had a, he didn't really like the idea of sensory stimulation. So he used to tempt himself by having dishes of lampreys from the severn, served to him as delicious as they might be. And he used to send them away. Completely sort of inverted sense of conspicuous consumption, that temptation and resisting it...
[At a medieval banquet] you would be struck by the sheer variety of things there and there will be a lot of things that would be unfamiliar. Certainly, the range of birds, the range of fish is really quite unusual. If you were in an elite household, you would probably be struck by the absence or near absence of vegetables. I think it's a completely different sort of taste. It has almost no sweetness to it and the way that we have diets that are overloaded with sugar, you only need a spoonful of sugar in them for a medieval man to know that the sugar is there. So it's very, very different.
I think, conceptually, I think as humans, we suffer from what's called the Omnivore's Dilemma. Which means we could eat almost anything but in practice, we don't. We concentrate on a few things and we concentrate on things that are familiar to us or can be made familiar to us. This is the reason that lies behind, this is the thinking behind tomato ketchup, I think and getting people to eat. Eat their, their, their fish or whatever, whatever it is, that I think we’d be struck certainly by the, by the variety at an elite level. And we might find some of that, particularly the exotics quite unpalatable. I think in a peasant diet, we might find that there is less variety. We've got a diet that is substantially based on cereals. And that's quite unlike our present diets. Admittedly, we will have our Weetabix or our toast or whatever, but it's, it's nowhere near the same. We're not getting something like 80% of our calories from cereals, which they would have been'"
