A History of Food in 100 Recipes

Erbolate (#ulink_2a8d9063-a02f-5f47-8262-e70daa4c10db)

(Baked eggs with herbs) (#ulink_2a8d9063-a02f-5f47-8262-e70daa4c10db)

1390

AUTHOR: Master cook of King Richard II, FROM: The Forme of Cury

Take parsel, myntes, sauerey, & sauge, tansey, veruayn, clarry, rewe, ditayn, fenel, southrenwode, hewe hem & grinde hem smale, medle hem up with Ayrenn. do butter in a trape. & do þe fars þerto. & bake it & messe it forth. [Take parsley, mint, savory, sage, tansy, vervain, clary, rue, dittany, fennel, southernwood. Chop them and grind them small. Mix them with eggs. Put butter in a baking dish and put the mixture in it. Bake and serve it in portions.]

Just eleven years after Taillevent published his seminal tome for Charles V of France, English cooks got in on the act. Encouraged by their mentor, Richard II, the master cooks of the royal household brought forth their own volume. No individual takes the glory in this instance; the work is a collaboration of the king’s finest culinary artists.

In the form of a vellum scroll, a copy of it lives in the British Library. Its graceful prose, daintily written in soft red ink, details 196 recipes. The recipe for erbolate – in which eggs are combined with an elaborate combination of herbs, from the unusual to the unheard of – encapsulates the spirit of the book, which was written with the approval and encouragement of the court’s medical gurus and philosophers. As we saw in Recipe 13 (here (#ufc40338a-f13b-5af7-b50b-75c0411c0316)), the culinary arts and medicine were inextricably linked at the time. The herbs in this recipe are there primarily for medicinal purposes, reflecting the belief expressed by a contemporary physician, one Dr Boorde, that ‘a good cook is half a physician’.

Before you leap to the conclusion that this was a book filled with recipes for curry, I should point out the cury is in fact the Middle English word for ‘cookery’. And while the book came from chefs of the royal household, their intention was to assist cooks across the land – or at least those of them who could read. This book, the oldest of European instructive cookery manuscripts in existence – and certainly the most famous – was aimed at helping people, as it sets out in the introduction: ‘commune potages and commune meetis [meats] for howshold as they shold be made craftly and holsomly’.

At last here was a cookbook for cooks, not published as some kind of religious tract or philosophical treatise disguised as a collection of dinner-party ramblings. The king believed that the dishes he enjoyed at court should be made available to his people too. But it’s not all humble fare. Richard II entertained on a big scale – he would feed thousands at one setting and he didn’t just churn out baked eggs with herbs. After the preamble about ‘common’ dishes, the authors then promise ‘curious potages and meetes and sotiltees for alle maner of States bothe hye and lowe’. So you could expect unusually spiced dishes presented in spectacular fashion.

The word sotiltees is Middle English for ‘subtleties’. But there was little subtlety in the elaborate sculptures that would be served up at grand feasts. Models of ships, castles and birds – the grander the better; think great big eagles rather than tiny songbirds – made of jelly or sugar would arrive to gasps of approval and applause. Such dishes would often be brought to the table as ‘warners’, notifying guests that dinner was about to be served and giving a clue as to the level of culinary sophistication they should expect. These days chefs present a dainty amuse-bouche or a scented thimble of soup to tantalise the taste buds at the beginning of a meal. When Richard II was entertaining, by contrast, he made his chefs send out edible monuments of the age. Imagine how impressed you’d be if you went round to dine with the king and instead of some delicate titbit the starter that was sent out was a replica of your castle.

Richard II liked his food and had around 300 chefs in his kitchens. He needed a brigade this size, however, judging by the numbers of people he was in the habit of asking over. The provisions are recorded for a feast given by the king and the Duke of Lancaster on 12 September 1387. One hell of a shopping list, it includes: ‘14 oxen lying in salt … 120 carcas of shepe fresh … 140 pigges … 210 gees … 400 conyngges [large rabbits] … 12 cranes … 11 thousand eggs …’ On and on it goes. It must have been one hell of a catering operation too. Today we can’t know the meaning of grandiose.

The variety of produce at the disposal of the grand chefs of the time was impressive. Hens, partridge, quail, lark, bitton and woodcock hung in the kitchens alongside a vast array of salted meats and fish. Spices, meanwhile, were locked safely in cupboards. They included ginger, black pepper (prized for its supposed digestive qualities) and exotics such as galangal root. These were brought into the country either by Venetian merchants or by knights returning from the various Crusades.

The kitchens themselves were hothouses. A huge fireplace, capable of holding a whole oxen on a spit, would be at one end, while an open hearth in the middle of the room would have been used as a large grill. Enormous pestles would be pounded in vast mortars by staff whose sole job would be to crush spices, while long tables would be used as chopping blocks and assembly areas. Utensils from the time indicate how hot the fires would have been – they have very long handles. There are deep pans for frying – a lot of food was fried in ale batter. Meat, meanwhile, would be first washed of salt – used to preserve meat in the days before refrigeration – before being boiled to tenderise it and then roasted.

Among the elaborate ways of preparing food in The Forme of Cury is a description of how to colour slices of lard – each in a slightly different shade – as well as how to dye food dishes in saffron to make them look golden. The cooks were artists, but the king also wanted a decent supper. Which is where the baked eggs come in. While I prefer mine cracked into a ramekin, with some chopped bacon, salt and pepper, the king liked his stuffed with herbs. Perhaps he saw it as a light dinner before bedtime, so the herbs could work their medicinal magic during the night.

From the recipe one can assume the herbs are fresh, taken straight from the garden, and what a herb garden it must have been. Baked and sliced into portions, the resultant dish is more omelette than soufflé. And what might the king have drunk with it? In those days, before glass bottles came on the scene, wine would soon have turned to vinegar, so would have been drunk shortly after fermentation. Instead ale was the drink of the day – consumed by all, as water was still pretty dodgy; not ideal with a light supper of baked eggs. Perhaps the king then called for a spot of jesting to entertain him as he ate, in view of the lack of telly.

The British Library: © The British Library Board (Add. 5016, back of roll, 3rd membrane)

The recipe for erbolate is depicted here third from bottom on the scroll of Forme of Cury.

16 (#ulink_9d5ba1e1-00b2-5715-88e5-e8533fd6c1d3)

Green porray (#ulink_9d5ba1e1-00b2-5715-88e5-e8533fd6c1d3)

1392

AUTHOR: Unknown,

FROM: Le Ménagier de Paris (The Householder of Paris)

Green porray on a fish day. Let it [a cabbage] have the outer leaves removed and be cut up and then washed in cold water without parboiling it and then cooked with verjuice and a little water, and put some salt therein, and let it be served boiling and very thick, not clear; and put at the bottom of the bowl, underneath the porray, salt butter, or fresh if you will, or cheese, or old verjuice.

Sooner or later we have to turn to pottage. Eaten throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, pottage was a dish that united our ancient nations and is so called because it was cooked in a pot. Hence it could be a simple gruel on the one hand, or a rich and elaborate stew. Pottage was eaten by rich and poor alike and there were many kinds, of which one version was porray.

Where most pottage contained some kind of cereal and some onions, porray had greenery – usually cabbage, as in the above recipe. So we’re talking soup here: it could be thin and not have very much in it, if you were poor; or it could have meat, breadcrumbs, eggs and more, if you were a noble. These were the days when you could tell the class of man by the type of soup he ate. Meat was enjoyed by the better-off nobles and rarely eaten by peasants, and for very practical reasons. Animals were worth much more alive than they were as food.

Cows, sheep and goats could provide a constant supply of milk, not to mention wool in the case of sheep. Chickens, ducks and geese gave you eggs and they would only be eaten when they finally stopped laying, while oxen would pull your plough. And if you needed blood for cooking or making black pudding, you didn’t slaughter your beast, you just made a careful incision on an upper leg and drained some blood.

It’s a habit still practised by the Masai people of Kenya. The idea may make you shudder, as might the method in Colombia of procuring iguana eggs. Hunters will capture a slow-moving, pregnant iguana, slit open her abdomen, gently remove her eggs, rub wood ash into the wound, sew her back up and let her waddle back into the underbrush, dazed and confused, no doubt, but alive. It’s a practice that goes back centuries, like pottage cooking. Of which, think of a big pot, boiling away for much of the day, cooking the hell out of any vegetables that at the time people thought were very dangerous to eat if raw. The Romans put barley in it and different pulses; they added leafy vegetables and fish sauce, throwing in cabbage leaves near the end.

Pottage is the ancestor of steamed puddings, a second-cousin of porridge and a precursor to soup. Confusingly, the word soup comes from ‘sop’. Sop was the piece of bread that you poured the pottage onto. Bread also served as a poor man’s plate, the working man’s eating habits still being a few steps away from fine dining. Then, over time, what was the solid part of the mixture became the name for the liquid part. After all, once bowls and plates had been invented, it made more sense to put the bread into the soup rather than the other way round. Next time you have a bowl of soup with croûtons in it, you can bore your friends with this piece of reverse evolutionary epicurean theorising.

But why, in the history of pottage, stop at 1392? Well, that’s because there is an early recipe for porray in a famous French work called Le Ménagier de Paris. Published that year, it is by turns creepy, sexist and unusually insightful and valuable.

The author is unknown and we can’t be sure whether the narrator is real or fictitious. Although judging by the views and behaviour of men today in Saudi Arabia, he could well have been real. But whatever he was, he was Parisian and elderly. He was a gentleman who had recently procured for himself a young wife – only fifteen years old. And the volume is a manual produced by him for her guidance as she went about her daily life.

Think of it as a sexist bumper version of Cosmo magazine. The title translates as ‘The Householder of Paris’ (or The Goodman of Paris in a translation from 1928) and it offers a spectrum of lifestyle advice. There are recipes, fashion advice and housekeeping tips, as well as prayers and poems. The advice spans the practical to the spiritual.

Here are some highlights:

Protect him [your husband] from holes in the roof and smoky fires, and do not quarrel with him, but be sweet, pleasant and peaceful with him.

Make certain that in winter he has a good fire without smoke and let him slumber, warmly wrapped, cosy between your breasts, and in this way bewitch him.

In summer take care that there are no fleas in your bedroom or bed.

As soon as you arrive home … feed the dogs. Have them put in front of the fire if they are wet or muddy. Let them always be held subject to the whip. If you act this way, they will not pester people at the table or sideboard and they will not get into the beds.

Women, says the author, should also never introduce new fashions, should walk down the street ‘head upright, eyes downcast’. Only the worst wives ‘go with open eyes, head appallingly lifted like a lion, their hair in disarray spilling from their coifs’. And no woman questions her husband’s judgement as ‘it rests on him alone to know all’.

And knowing it all he professes to be when it comes to cooking and preparing for meals. The book offers a truly exhaustive list of instructions for every possible culinary episode. There are menus for all kinds of meals – from three- and four-course dinners to intimate his ’n’ her suppers, plans for massive weddings and endless miscellaneous pieces of advice. Numbers of staff needed and what they will cost are mentioned, such as the security required for a large banquet, for example: ‘item: big strong sergeants to guard the door’. As if she would forget to hire the bouncers.

The meals themselves are highly elaborate. After the starter for one big dinner of ‘grapes and peaches in little pies’, a course of soups, then endless roast dishes – ‘five pigs … twenty starlings’ – there’s a jelly course the ingredients for which include ‘ten young chickens, ten young rabbits, a pig and a crayfish’. Doubtless he was trying to emulate Richard II’s example on a more domestic scale.

Then, for one of the quieter moments, there’s his recipe for porray. The verjuice he mentions was a popular condiment during the Middle Ages – the acidic juice from unripened grapes or crab apples. It’s used as a sharpener for the dish. Perhaps his thick version of pottage was meant as a side dish for some fish – as mentioned in the first part of the recipe. A cabbage broth to go with the fish for which there is tonne of recipes from eel, to bream, turbot and beyond.

Finally, there is also a brief ‘recipe’: ‘To write on paper a letter that no one can see until the paper is heated.’ ‘Dear XXXX, I’m married to an insane and elderly foodie control freak,’ his young wife might have wished to write. But one fears little consolation would have been forthcoming.

(IB.41688, Riii verso)

A cook in the Middle Ages savours the aroma of pottage.

17 (#ulink_ad1a2533-fdfa-5eb5-b6b1-57a1c849c9f6)

Party planning (#ulink_ad1a2533-fdfa-5eb5-b6b1-57a1c849c9f6)

1420

AUTHOR: Chiquart Amiczo, FROM: Du Fait de Cuisine

And in order to do things properly and cleanly, and in order to serve and accomplish it more quickly, there should be provided such a large quantity of vessels of gold, of silver, of pewter, and of wood, that is four thousand or more, that when one has served the first course one should have enough for serving the second and still have some left over, and in the mean time one can wash and clean the vessels used during the said first course.

The history of food sees a lot of talk about feasting. Down through the centuries we come across roll-calls of grandiose banqueting, of decadent dinners on an improbable-sounding scale. There are lists of huge numbers of oxen, fowl, poultry and other birds, each more extravagant than the next.

Each master cook seems determined to outshine his rivals – contemporary or historical – in his bid to go down as the most extravagant party giver. Frenchman Chiquart Amiczo is no exception. Here again we have a master cook who worked his way up through the ranks. He did his scullery time. He scrubbed, chopped, served as an apprentice and gradually edged his way up the gastronomic pole. Finally, he came to the notice of the Duke of Savoy who employed his services and then, after many successful years, nudged him into writing a cookbook.