The Great Mortality

Posted on May 11, 2013 by Ruth

Although historians count the Middle Ages as running through 1450, when Constantinople fell to the Turks, there’s a compelling argument for ending the era a century sooner, in 1350. By that year, Europe as it had been for the last 500 years was mostly dead. The shape of European culture struggled into new life over the next 50 years, and during that time, nearly everything I’ve written about medieval European diet ceased to be relevant.

Of course I’m referring to the pandemic plague known as the Black Death. At the time, it was called the Great Mortality or just the plague. Although the plague has been identified as Bubonic Plague, it was not fully the same as Bubonic Plague today. It was a new sickness at the time; it probably jumped from an animal species, the Central Asian marmot, around 1345. Traffic on the Silk Road was a big part of initial transmission, but we don’t know if they caught it directly from the marmots and their fleas. There’s strong evidence that it was airborne, both pneumonic and septic, during the early pandemics. The bacteria we know today as the cause of the Bubonic Plague is only spread through blood contact, by flea bites, and it does not mean certain death. Either we’ve developed immunities or the bacteria’s original form was more toxic.

The plague came to Europe in a particularly gory, gross way. 1347: Genoa had a trading colony, Caffa, on the Crimean Peninsula. Tatars and Mongols ruled in Russia and were besieging Caffa. As the plague spread to the Tatars across the central plains, the besiegers grew too sick to fight, so they catapulted dead bodies into Caffa. Terror-stricken plague survivors ran to their ships and put out for Genoa. In the days it took them to leave the Black Sea and cross the Mediterranean, most of them got sick and many died. The ships tried to stop at closer ports to get help, but the residents in each city realized the ships were contagious and drove them off. Even Genoa, which heard of their coming before they arrived, drove off the ships with flaming arrows.

But it was too late. Perhaps at their first stops, ports had permitted them some brief contact before sending them away in panic, and the plague immediately began to spread at those ports. It was like a bonfire lit in six different places; the plague spread outward from these port cities until all the coasts were infected by the end of 1347. In 1348, it spread inland to Florence, and then from port cities like Marseille into Spain. Paris had its first cases in June 1348. By fall, it was in London. In 1349, the Swedish were sick. The plague also spread north from Italy into Austria; Germany got it from both directions in summer 1349. It reached Poland in the fall and hit Scotland in 1350. Moscow, capital of the Tatars who had started it all, sickened via European routes in 1352.

In each place, the plague lasted about a year and then began to abate. At peak, people died too fast for gravediggers to keep up. Notaries who signed a dying man’s will found the executor and beneficiaries dead the next day, then died, themselves. In some places, the mortality rate may have reached 50%. Historians can only estimate based on indirect measures and contemporary claims, but a general average of 30% seems about right.

At first, manor farms still got in their harvests even as peasant workers were dropping dead. There seem to have been a lot of unemployed serfs in that time. Ten years later, the plague came back again, and in addition to taking out some who had survived in 1350, the disease hit children very hard. By the time the plague came back a decade later, it settled into an average 10% death rate. By this time, farms were short on plowmen and harvesters…on the other hand, there were not as many people to feed. When the food could be harvested and brought to market, its value dropped dramatically. The farm economy began to tumble, but survivors could buy food they’d only imagined before.

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Ale and beer

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Ruth

In the early Middle Ages, ale and beer didn’t refer to separate drinks; they were more or less interchangeable. The brew indicated was made from sprouted wheat (dried and ground) brewed in water and then left to ferment. They added herbs according to taste and availability: pine needles, ivy, mint, caraway, acorns, bog myrtle, sage, sycamore sap, and others. Ale/beer in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and England tasted very different, but each batch differed by town, village and brewer as well. Herb blends were called “gruit,” and eventually a trade in gruit itself developed. Buying foreign gruit was the closest to buying foreign beer, since the drink itself was not traded internationally.

Ale kept for about five days before souring. It couldn’t be stockpiled against sudden future demand, nor could it be shipped beyond the next town. Most of it was brewed and drunk on the same street. Local ale brewers kept taverns supplied as well as selling to their neighbors; it was a home craft for the most part.

All this changed when German brewers discovered that a local gruit component, hops, changed the drink so that it didn’t spoil for up to six months. Beer that kept so long could be shipped and stockpiled. Taverns could keep a few barrels of hopped beer while meeting daily demand with local brews. Hopped beers could go on sea voyages, as water supply.

The Hanseatic League, a shipping monopoly in the Baltic sea, began to ship beer from Bremen, Hamburg and Wismar to the ports of the Netherlands. There, customers soon adjusted to the bitter tang of hopped beer and began to enjoy it. Hops flowers were exported, then hops growing expanded, and by the Renaissance, most beer was hopped. England was the lone conservative, as most drinkers there still preferred their traditional cider and ale. From this time, “beer” meant “with hops.”

Beer was always considered an inferior drink to wine, but it was much cheaper. Real wine-growing regions never fully switched to beer as daily drink. And by the close of the medieval period, home brewing persisted only in rural places. Regulation and taxes in town had driven small brewers out of business. The towns’ chief concern was that brewing needed large fires that might get out of control. Large breweries needed full-scale buildings that could have better fire safety than small, crowded town kitchens. Eventually, brewing was a guild craft.

Beer drinking had another huge boost after 1400, as the diet of Europe changed. Grain was suddenly plentiful in a new way; they could afford to make much of it into ale and beer. That’s what we’ll talk about next.

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Wine improvements

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Ruth

During the Middle Ages, Europe’s winemaking went from super primitive to setting the world’s standards. How did this happen? One way to answer is, well, that was Europe’s genius. Something about the close-set rivers and mountains kept the land broken into locally-governed, competitive regions and fostered the spirit of self-improvement among the people. Another answer lies in the way vast tracts of land were donated to monastic orders. While the choir monks prayed and sang, lay brothers found themselves part of national and multi-national farming and mining corporations, without family and profit-earning distractions. The orderly spirit of monasticism applied itself to farming and iron-working, resulting in the first attempts at basic scientific method in agriculture.

First place goes to the Cistercian monasteries of France and Germany. In central France, the Cistercians became owners of many stony hillsides at the edge of more valuable farmland. They set out to put this wilderness to use. Particularly in the area known as the Côte d’Or, along the Saône River, they used the rocky hillside’s small arable shelf plots as vineyards. As they kept records of wine output, they began to see that some elevations worked better for grapes than others. Small fields on hillsides led to a new method, the creation of enclosed fields in which grape varieties could be controlled. Each “clos” had only one kind of grapevine.

The Cistercian lay brothers all through central France used the Clos system to test and learn about all the factors that went into better viticulture. They could control the product, so that the wine of Clos St. Jean or Clos de Bèze always tasted the same. The Cistercian method spread among the monasteries of their order, through Burgundy and into Germany. The Cistercian monastery at Eberbach, Germany was the largest wine producer of its time. Cistercian abbeys in the Beaune region of France shipped casks of their product, made with dark-red grapes, to the Popes at Avignon. Bordeaux, a French region under English control until the late Middle Ages, supplied most of England’s wine. There, the vineyards developed a method halfway between white and red wine; the wine was fermented with the colored skins for one day, then the skins removed to complete fermentation of this light red, clear wine that became known as Claret.

Wine in the Mediterranean region took a different turn. Under the hot sun, grapes could be left on the vine as long as possible, then partially dried before going into the fermentation process. They had a much higher sugar concentration; the wine was both higher in alcohol and sweeter. It became very popular in England, known as Malmsey. Traders from Venice, whose galley ships took over much northern trade from the flagging Hanse monopoly, carried many butts of Malmsey northward. By 1478, there was enough Malmsey among the aristocracy for a legend that the Duke of Clarence had drowned in it.

The last real improvement of the period came about in Germany, where someone discovered that smoking the inside of a barrel with burning sulfur disinfected it. Wine lasted much longer before souring this way. Germany’s wines were sweeter than France’s, so it was an important international market improvement to make them keep longer, too.

By the end of the Middle Ages, the famous wine names of Europe were all in place. While more improvements would come, particularly with glass storage possibilities, the basic product was not much different from the way it is now.

As a side note, because it seems to go with the wine, cheese was going through the same improvement process in these years. Bleu cheese dates back to the time of Charlemagne, when an Abbot served him cheese streaked with mold and he liked it. By the close of the Middle Ages, every region of Europe had its distinctive cheeses, often made in such large sizes that many dairy farmers had to pool their milk supplies.

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Wine’s beginnings in Europe

Posted on May 5, 2013 by Ruth

The Romans planted vineyards in southern France and in the Rhine valley; viticulture spread with both majority Christian and minority Jewish settlement, since both religions required wine in their services and rituals. During the Medieval Warm Period, grapes could grow in northern England and in Denmark, but after the climate began to cool (1300s), England had difficulty producing wine. Germany and France were huge wine producers. It turns out that the best wine comes from grapes that grow in the marginal climate zones, those right on the edge of being too cold.

But wine drinkers today would not fancy medieval wine. Early wine-making was primitive, and not just what you’re thinking. Yes, they did expect to walk in the grapes to press them, although Charlemagne’s rules outlawed it on his manors. There were not many other good ways to press the grapes, and it turns out that early mechanical presses produced worse wine. So for the most part, grapes were foot-pressed in stone vats in the Mediterranean, and oak barrel vats in Northern Europe; a hole at the bottom let the juice run out.

Medieval vineyards were also primitive in that they mixed different strains of grapes in the same field. Each year, one variety might fail, so growing a mix meant getting something rather than nothing. The wine tasted different every year and in every field. Vines grew in every direction; they didn’t keep them in neat rows of posts and wires, as we do. They knew how to prune vines, but used hatchets for the work, stepping in and around the tangle of vines.

White wine was not fermented with the skins included; it took a shorter time to make, and could be used right away. For that reason, white wine was much more common than red. Stored in oak barrels, wine lasted up to a year before souring. (Of course, sour wine became vinegar, also much used.) Six months was the peak of its storage life, and four years was the outside limit.

Most medieval wine had a lot of sediment and was only 5% alcohol. Still, it had one key advantage: the water in it came straight from the grapes and had never been tainted with potentially contaminated water. Winemaking didn’t require large fires, either; it was a fuel-conserving, guaranteed safe beverage. It just didn’t taste very good. Dessert wine after feasts was called Hippocras; it was sweetened with honey and heavily spiced with cinnamon and ginger. Just the idea that drinkers would welcome a disguised flavor tells you something.

Next: why wine became much better by the end of the period.

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Would you like water with your meal, sir?

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Ruth

The highly spiced, meaty dishes at a feast made diners thirsty. What did they drink? First, what didn’t they drink?

Water.

Water was universally shunned as a beverage, for a number of reasons. First, cold water was considered unhealthy by medical food rules: it put out the fire in the stomach. Second, it was bland and plain, which was unfashionable. Third, it was often contaminated.

Europe’s water supply came from thousands of springs and streams, which were presumably clean in the days of the Celts, Romans and early Franks. By the High Middle Ages, most people’s water supply had been compromised. In the country, most water came from dug wells, into which dirt and rain fell (and sometimes bodies fell in). Country water also came directly from rivers and streams. There was no way of knowing whether someone upstream had used that same creek or river to wash out chamber pots, or worse. Country people put human waste directly into rivers and creeks without a second thought.

Cities were usually built around rivers that had tributary streams. As the cities grew, many of these streams were built into tunnels under the streets. Other streams were left exposed, but the businesses that located along them were water-using businesses. Many used the water to wash out butchering blood or the scraped waste from tanning. Cities also typically provided public lavatories by building stalls along the river bank. By the late Middle Ages, the rivers in major cities smelled terribly of raw sewage, especially on a hot summer day. They began dredging and cleaning them, but it was long past too late for drinking water quality. Water might be piped in from outside springs, and water-sellers brought it in casks on carts, but in major cities, clean water was always in short supply.

Monasteries were the most likely to have clean water, and monks were among the few who drank plain water with their meals. Monastic compounds were usually located near towns but in the country; the monks put a lot of thought and work into planning their facilities. A really well-done monastery piped in water, with hollow logs and metal pipe sections, from some spring a mile off. The water came into the compound and went to fountains and then into kitchens. Down the line, as slops were added, it went only for laundry and industrial use. Along the way, the channeled water ran straight through the outhouses, flushing the waste out. At the end, the waste water had to go somewhere: the ideal place was the fish pond, where some natural sewage-treatment happened. Non-ideal places included the public river or a neighbor’s field.

Cooking always meant boiling the water, so cooking with contaminated water didn’t concern them. Ale, too, required boiling the original source water. It seems likely that they had learned in a pragmatic way that boiled water is safer, but without microbe theory, they never actually did much with the idea. Coffee and tea hadn’t been imported from the east yet, so boiled water couldn’t be flavored in interesting ways. Water came to the feast table, but only to pour over hands: never to drink, at any temperature.

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Medieval desserts

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Ruth

Medieval sweets weren’t much by our standards. Fruit was the dessert of non-aristocrats; later medieval letters record a father sending his son a box of pears from home to his boarding school in town. Although pies were generally meat dishes, they made fruit tarts. They also stewed fruit and added it to other dishes.

There were two basic problems in the evolution of dessert. One was the sweetening agent, the other was how to find a rising agent to make wheat-based sweets soft enough to eat without effort.

Sugar didn’t become available outside of palaces until African slavery was well established in the Renaissance. (Anti-slavery campaigners in later centuries would boycott sugar in protest.) Until then, a loaf of refined sugar had the same market value as the same size brick of silver, so very few medieval people ever saw or tasted it. Honey was available to those who could afford it, and growing wealth in the middle class allowed them to have sweets at holidays.

Without effective leavening, the steamed/boiled pudding was their go-to dessert. At Christmas, they added imported dried plums and figs from Spain; of course this was also the genesis of holiday fruitcake. The pudding was thickened with eggs, put into a bag, and steamed until it cooked solid and could be sliced.

The first recognizable cookie was literally bis-cuit, in French “cooked twice.” It was a heavily spiced gingerbread that began as ginger porridge, its first cooking. When it was very thick and dry, they poured it into molds and baked it in a bread oven, the second cooking. The final product was still not very sweet, and it was tooth-breaking hard. Since spices were still an upper-class marker, gingerbread caught on among the rich. It had to be dipped and soaked in hot broth to make it edible.

Bakers made sweetened breads at holiday times, of course. Until the late Middle Ages, when some bakers began borrowing brewers’ yeast, all breads were sourdough. When they began producing honey-sweetened yeast bread with imported Spanish raisins, they began to have a food worthy of being called a dessert.

The last option was to boil something in honey solution until it became candied. Whole spices, nuts and roots like horseradish could be candied this way.

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Medieval meatless soups

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Ruth

Three medieval meatless soups,
drawn from “Fabulous Feasts,” by Madeleine Cosman

Ms. Cosman’s book has recipe measurements and additional instructions, here edited out for brevity.

1. Sorrelye: sorrel soup with figs and dates
Simmer 1 lb of chopped sorrel with dates and figs in salt water. Beat 2 eggs, add gradually to soup to thicken; add sugar. Saute thin-sliced turnips in white wine, use turnip strips to garnish soup at table.

The next two soups I’m including because they don’t overtly have meat, but they do ask for meat broth. For pure fasting, they would need to be made only in vegetable broth, water, or almond milk (which medieval cooks used as milk substitute).

2. Cobages: almond and cabbage soup
In beef broth, simmer shredded cabbage and chopped almonds with honey, salt and fresh basil. Add 2 cups of fresh peas in the last ten minutes. Garnish individual portions with grated red candied anise or licorice.

3. Rota: barley fruit soup
In chicken broth, simmer barley, thin-sliced tart apples, minced dried apricots, ginger and salt, with a pinch of pepper. In the last ten minutes of simmering, add a cup of fresh peas. Optional: thicken soup with flour and butter.

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May Day and Robin Hood

Posted on May 1, 2013 by Ruth

May 1 is mostly behind us, but still worth covering from the Middle Ages. May Day was a true folk holiday celebrating spring. It had nothing to do with the church, which generally opposed May Day games on prudential “they’ll just get into drunken fights or get some girl knocked up” grounds. Which was basically true.

The village chose a “King of Summer,” and later, a Queen as well. They set up a May pole, crowned with flowers or a ram’s horns. By the High Middle Ages, it was the May Pole as we know it, with ribbons for girls to hold as they dance a carol around it. Young people went into the woods, as couples, to fetch garlands of flowering branches to decorate the May Pole and their homes.

May Day was also a time for outdoor drama. The death/resurrection story of the Mummers often played out again, but in England they had a new, growing tradition: Robin Hood.

Robin Hood seems to have been an amalgamation of various folk robbers, probably chosen because his name scanned and rhymed better than some others. His stories grew out of cheap storybooks in the 1200s, and we can trace the influence of each age. Early Robin Hood stories have him chiefly engaged in robbing dishonest priests and the Sheriff, who was the appointed official in charge of punishing those who broke the Forest Laws. (Outlaws, of course, broke the Forest Laws constantly.) Early Robin is middle-class and single; his devotion is all given to the Virgin Mary. Invoking Mary was one way to get some mercy from him, though dishonest, cheating landlord abbots still didn’t have much chance.

But as Robin’s stories became fodder for May plays, they got gussied up. Robin slowly turned into a dispossessed nobleman, perhaps to keep up with the village’s crowning a Summer King. Because May Day was all about girls and flowers, he needed a girlfriend. Maid Marian seems to have been a character created just for May Day plays. Eventually, the Adventures of Robin Hood could be assembled, as if telling a real history, from collected legends and May Day dramas. By the time Disney got their hands on it—well, say no more.

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Tromp L’oeil cuisine

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Ruth

Artifice was art in a high-class medieval kitchen. Tromp l’oeil, if not la palate. Aristocratic feasts, such as for Christmas, a wedding, or a knighting, were the peak time for all such tricks.

Feasts served food in courses, but the fashion for making each course a different type of food had not yet arrived (it made its way from Spain in the 15th and 16th centuries). Each course included a variety of stews, roasts and showpieces, but cooking in waves allowed the kitchen to create sufficient volume. Between each course, waiters cleared the bones and serving dishes, and they may have brought around the hand-washing ewers and towels. When the next course arrived, it included at least one eye-catching showpiece to carry around before serving.

The trick was to make some foods look like something else. Food coloring was a big part of this; meat jelly could be turned blue, red, yellow, or green. Eggs and fish also lent themselves to coloring tricks. The chef might assemble a chessboard made of alternating colored blocks of baked or jelled food.

We grind raw beef, mix it with breads and egg, and mold it like a loaf. They ground pork, mutton, beef, venison and fish, mixed it with bread, egg, spices, and coloring, and baked or jelled it in molds. I’m not sure we know how these molds worked or what they were made of. Interest in the remote Crusader-kingdom East made the “Turk’s Head,” a figure with a turban, a popular shape for molded foods. A tinsmith’s or woodcarver’s skill and the cook’s imagination could come up with innovative ideas for new molded foods in each feast.

One standard favorite was the giant hard-boiled egg, which could be styled as the egg of some mythological creature. The cook separated dozens of eggs and mixed yolks and whites; the yolks went into a smaller animal bladder, which went into a larger one filled with the whites. When I try to imagine this process producing anything but a weird lump, I realize how much training went into guild-level cooking. We’re told that they produced credible giant eggs that could be showily sliced at the banquet table; I’ll take their word for it.

Another tromp l’oeil favorite was the baked swan or peacock. Since these birds were actually very game-y, sometimes the meat was really a roast goose. When the fowler killed a swan or peacock for the feast, though, he did it very carefully so that the skin and, feathers, wings and head were left in good artistic condition. While the cooks were preparing the roast bird, someone was cleaning and mounting this as a temporary taxidermy piece. The waiters carried it into the hall with a flourish; the swan’s wings were spread as if to take off, or the peacock’s tail was fanned. The roast poultry was tucked inside.

I’ve already mentioned the giant pie with live birds, memorialized in our nursery rhyme. Pies were also highly decorated; medieval cooks went way past Martha Stewart in molding and glossing pastry scraps.

Here’s a modern chef’s take on medieval cooking disguise. He makes meat into a fruit bowl.

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Medieval balanced diet

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Ruth

Forget the food groups or pyramid. Balanced diet, in those times, meant using food to balance the body’s proportion of hot, cold, wet and dry. The stomach was viewed as a cooking pot. In order to process what’s put into it, it needs heat. Putting in cold, wet foods will make the stomach unable to bring things to a boil. This, in turn, will make the body imbalanced, which is the root cause of illness.

Every food was considered to have a sort of valance measure for where it fit on the hot/cold, wet/dry spectrum. Some judgments were obvious, for example, a raw apple is obviously wet and cold. Other judgments were philosophically fanciful. Fire goes up into the air, birds fly, so poultry meat must be warm and dry. By contrast, pork was cool and wet, while beef was cool and dry. Lamb was warm and wet. Fish, especially eels, were cold and wet.

Cooks served meat with condiments to balance them. Serving mint jelly with lamb may come from an original need to “cool” its “warm” tendency. Pork and beef were served in spiced sauces in order to heat them up; pork needed to be heated and dried, so it called for the greatest spicing attention. Note that these qualities were not about literal temperature, though they believed it was better to eat warm food, for example, heated wine. Hot pork pie still needed cinnamon and pepper to warm and dry it; the food was equally balanced when served cold the next day. So each spice had a certain valence on the hot/cold, wet/dry scale. Pepper was hot and dry, as was cinnamon. Eel stew and lamprey pie had to be steeped in pepper and cinnamon. Ginger was considered hot and wet, making it the perfect seasoning for beef.

People were not all the same in constitution, either. Aristocrats kept personal physicians, university-trained, who could observe their skin, hair, personality, and urine in order to determine whether they need to be balanced away from one of these elements. The hot tempered needed to stay away from poultry and pepper, while sardonic, melancholy men had to avoid beef and fish. Young men were considered generally too hot, while old men were prescribed cinnamon and ginger to overcome the cooling effect of age.

Since all fruit was cold and wet, it had to be served cooked and spiced. Spiced apple rings, baked pears, pumpkin pie and cinnamon-flavored applesauce may be lingering holdovers from medieval fruit desserts. In order to keep the stomach at a nice boil, aristocrats ended their meals with spiced hot wine and candied whole spices.

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