Sauces

Posted on April 26, 2013 by Ruth

Sauces formed their own part of a town’s food commerce. Medieval cooks would be shocked at seeing how we think it’s okay to serve a roast turkey or roast beef plain, with a mere broth-sauce on the side. Meat and many other dishes came with sauce. While castle cooks made their own sauces, the profession of “Saucer” was viable in large cities.

One standard sauce was called Cameline Sauce. Medieval Cookery.com suggests modern measurements to give you an idea of what this sauce was like:

3 slices white bread
3/4 cup red wine
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ginger
1/8 tsp. cloves
1 Tbsp. sugar
pinch saffron
1/4 tsp. salt

The bread was soaked thoroughly, then strained out. It served as the thickening agent when the sauce was boiled. Cameline sauce was one of the most typical flavors poured over meat, or served with meat floating in it. It could also be poured over rissoles (gingery/cinnamony meatballs that might even contain chopped fruit).

Some standard sauces were known by their colors. Here’s Medieval Cookery.com’s idea of “Verte Sauce.” You can see where the green color came from:

4 slices bread
1/2 cup fresh mint
1 cup fresh parsley
1/4 cup vinegar
1 cup white wine
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. ginger
1/4 tsp. pepper
pinch saffron

Ginger and saffron are both yellow, while mint and parsley are green. White wine and vinegar kept red hues out of the sauce.

Yellow sauce was another standard one, clearly flavored mostly with ginger and saffron. Another way to thicken sauces was to stir in crushed hard-boiled egg yolks; it’s likely that yellow sauce used egg yolks either this way or mixed in raw then boiled to thicken.

It’s strange for modern eyes to realize that spices were associated with meat, not dessert. Here’s a third sauce, turned up and adapted by Medieval Cookery.com, for a sauce intended to serve with pre-cooked wild duck:

2/3 cup verjuice
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 tsp. cinnamon (cassia)
1/2 tsp. ginger
1/4 tsp. cloves
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. mace
1/8 tsp. pepper
1 tsp. ginger

Spicy sauces were so strongly associated with meat that during the Lenten fast, cooks could fool their diners’ palates by serving fish with sauces that normally meant “venison.” I suppose it is like our strong association between sage and turkey, due to the usual seasoning of Thanksgiving stuffing. If cameline sauce normally covered venison, then diners felt a roast fish covered in cameline sauce tasted something like venison.

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Medieval cookbooks

Posted on April 25, 2013 by Ruth

Books with food instructions were produced for and by professional cooks who used ingredients that peasants and townsfolk had never seen.

Training and skill were assumed, just as the old Betty Crocker books assumed you knew how to separate an egg or melt chocolate. In fact, most of the information was “assumed.” Early cookbooks were just notes made by one professional for another. Everyone knew how to make a meat pie or soup; the book’s instructions just suggested a few spices or ingredients that the cook might not have thought about.

Standard weights and measures were extremely important in the marketplace, but they had not been developed for the kitchen. Most spoons were a certain size, but the “teaspoon” and “tablespoon” distinction was not formal. Many recipes just didn’t indicate amounts, on the assumption that a trained cook understood how much ginger was needed. I’m put in mind of a long-ago anecdote about a teenage girl trying to make a pie, and misreading the recipe such that she put in one cup of nutmeg, not one teaspoon. No medieval cook could make this error!

Although measurements were not always provided, some early cookbooks tried to suggest measurements of time. We sometimes teach young children to estimate seconds by the amount of time it takes to say “Mississippi.” Medieval cooks used similar tactics based on common prayers; time could be suggested in units of “Pater Nosters.” Longer amounts of time, beyond ten or twenty Pater Nosters, might be suggested as “the time it takes to walk a mile,” as modern city-dwellers might say “I won’t be long, go once around the block and I’ll be done.”

Medieval cookbooks had many references to spices, but very few to vegetables. This might be because professional cooks considered vegetables too easy, like giving directions around town by commenting “first, read the stop sign.” It might be that vegetables varied by season, and cooks used their own judgment and supplies to throw in parsnips or cabbage if they had it on hand. It might also be that professional cooks didn’t serve very many vegetables. Most recipes are about ways to cook and serve meat, the food of the upper class. Medieval kitchens prided themselves on having a large carbon footprint, as we’d call it. Consuming meat puts the diner at the top of a food chain, and consuming a lot of exotic, hard to raise/hunt meat puts the eater at the very top. That’s where professional cooks and their notebooks operated.

After 1150, book production increased. It was driven by the growth of universities at first, which meant no cookbooks. In the next two centuries, paper began to displace parchment. There were more and more books, and by the 14th century, scribes were copying out practical topics, not just academic ones. By 1400, you could buy a book on farm management, advice for women, veterinary diseases, chess, hunting, or one of the new scientific inventions like the astrolabe and place-value number systems. There were more cook books, too. Eventually, these included books aimed at the middle class.

Le Menagier de Paris, as we know it now, was written by an elderly husband for his teenage wife (perhaps on the assumption that she would well outlive him). The book is highly instructional and detailed, leaving little to the imagination. We can see, then, that this much instruction about cooking was considered generous:

“GRAMOUSSE is made from the cold meat of the hare left over from dinner and the stock of this meat also left over, in the following manner: first, beat four or six eggs, that is both white and yolk, and beat and beat until they flow like water, for otherwise they will curdle; and add as much verjuice as the eggs, and boil with the stock; and elsewhere cut the meat into strips, and put two pieces per bowl, and the broth over them.”

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Daily bread and daily spices

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Ruth

We round out the daily diet of medieval townsfolk with commercial bread and the spices that they had for their brewet, frumenty, porridge and soup.

In larger towns and cities, commercial bakers took their craft seriously. Of course, the finest art always headed for castles and palaces, but the cities had enough merchants’ and goldsmiths’ wives to make good baking worthwhile.

Bread was graded first on the quality of wheat: to what degree was the wheat pure, without rye or barley mixed in? Maslin, the mixed flour of the poor, was baked only to make trenchers. At the time, eating utensils included spoons, bowls, cups and knives, but plates did not become part of daily life until the Renaissance. Dinner was eaten on a day-old piece of very thick, very coarse low-quality bread, the trencher. In families where ordinary bread was used for trenchers, no doubt they were eaten as part of the meal, but in wealthier families, a greater distinction was made between real bread and trencher bread. Real bread was made of good quality wheat, and it was eaten fresh. Trencher bread made of maslin was collected at a feast’s end, to be fed to hunting dogs or the beggars lining up at the almoner’s gate.

Table-quality bread went into many different forms. Loaves could be long and thin, round and flat, small or large. They could be braided or shaped into rings; the top could be glossy from egg yolk and decorated with pine nuts or almonds. Small breads could be rolled in spices or salt. Bread could also be colored. Medieval cooks loved food coloring: saffron turned foods yellow, parley turned them green, and sandalwood or beet juice turned them red.

Pretzels were invented during the Middle Ages, whether by monks wanting to show hands clasped in prayer, or for more mundane reasons. They were sold on the street, less as a late-night snack and more as just another bread option for hungry apprentices.

While top chefs in castles used imported spices, the common people (including their bakers) had to make do with Europe’s offerings. Saffron was, technically, local, and some could afford it. But mostly they used herbs: mustard, dill, parsley, thyme and garlic. In fact, “spice” referred to any sort of flavoring, including honey, concentrated grape juice, and nuts. Salt was a spice, available to all but the very poorest. By the late Middle Ages, pepper importation brought its price down, so it was the first foreign spice to enter the common man’s diet. Cinnamon, ginger, and cloves were used in wealthy (non-aristocratic) kitchens by the 15th century.

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A medieval boiled side dish: frumenty

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Ruth

Thomas Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a man buying frumenty (or furmenty) for his family. They’re at a small fair in the deep rural countryside, but even there, frumenty is already an old-fashioned food. By the end of the novel, we meet the frumenty seller as an old woman, and she complains that now nobody will eat it. Even in the early 19th century, it was an archaic hold-over from the Middle Ages, long out of fashion in cities.

You could make something like frumenty by cooking Cream of Wheat hot cereal in almond milk with a pinch of salt. Add a beaten egg yolk, then season it with sugar and a spice like cinnamon or saffron. Medieval cooks probably added honey if they were going for sweet frumenty, since cane sugar was equal in value to pure silver.

But they also made it unsweetened, for example seasoned with chicken broth. Frumenty wasn’t for breakfast or dessert. It was a side dish, like having a square of cornbread next to your fried chicken. It often accompanied venison.

By Thomas Hardy’s time, furmenty (Hardy’s spelling) was always sweetened, perhaps with raisins added. In the novel, the furmenty seller is spiking it with a little rum—or, for a higher fee, more than a little rum.

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Meat pies

Posted on April 19, 2013 by Ruth

From the working man to the knight, everyone ate meat pies.

On the street, vendors sold hot meat pies made of the cheapest possible ingredients. The pastry was coarse, thick and tough; the meat it enclosed was guaranteed only to have come from a real animal. Street pie bakers generally got the ingredients from the butcher’s bargain bin: guts, blood, stringy stuff, organs of low dietary value.

Moving up on the social scale, a middle-class meat pie had real meat and better pastry. The meat could be of any kind: pork, mutton, chicken, duck, hare, fish, eel, or even beef (worn-out oxen). Unlike our Swanson Turkey Pot Pies, they did not include vegetables. Baking a pie required use of an oven, unless a “dutch oven” buried in coals would do. Many pies were sent to the commercial bakery to be finished, and so gradually pies became a mostly-commercial product. Pie baking became its own branch of commercial cooking.

Upscale castle pies were less likely to contain mutton or fish (except in Lent). They were more likely to be made from wild game, since aristocrats owned the forests and jealously guarded all hunting rights. Venison and eel pies show up in cook books, for example. These pies included spices like pepper, cinnamon and ginger. Their pastry was made only from wheat, and it was often decorated. Cooks cut scraps of pastry into leaves and flowers, just like Martha Stewart. They brushed the pies with beaten egg before baking, so that they came out glossy.

At the top of the pie hierarchy were the feast pies. These were works of showmanship as much as (or more than) they were table food. Very large pastry dishes were used to bake unusually big pie shells, but they had nothing in them. A hole was cut into the bottom so that the empty shell could be accessed without cracking the top. One popular trick was to bake a normal high-class pie and place it carefully inside, so that food really was being served: but live birds were also inserted, their feet untied just before going in. With the foundation hole covered, the birds were trapped inside until the cooks sliced into the pie in front of the banquet crowd. The birds flew into the rafters, and then they could serve the real pie.

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Porridge and brewet

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Ruth

The two staple foods of peasants and townsfolk were porridge and brewet. Brewet was a meat dish, by definition, but both kinds of food could have just about anything in them. (Sort of like the modern word “casserole”)

Porridge began with any kind of seed that could be coarsely ground or crushed. It could use grains like wheat, rye, barley, millet or buckwheat (which is technically a grass seed). It could also use nuts, such as chestnuts (and probably any other kind of nut, like acorns if the pigs hadn’t eaten them all); it could also use dried peas. Porridge was just boiled until soft and thick. Where possible, it was seasoned with salt. Also where possible, it was boiled with milk, not just water.

Peasants expected to eat twice a day, and porridge was always the main dish of one meal, often both. Making bread entailed either owning a lidded baking pot and enough fuel to create hot coals, or having enough grain to spare that it was all right for the village baker to pinch off 1/5 of the dough you brought in. Also, even the worst bread required enough grainy matter to make a loaf. Porridge, on the other hand, could be made with just about anything, in just about any kind of pot.

Townsfolk ate porridge too, but they could expect their second meal to include some meat. Brewet was meat stew in a cream sauce. The meat could be any sort: pork, hare, chicken, or mutton. To be brewet, it had to be in a seasoned cream sauce. Town people could afford salt and local herbs like chives or leeks. By the late Middle Ages, they could afford pepper.

Our recipes for brewet are all from professional cooks who had a variety of materials unknown to others, from almonds to roast boar. Brewet on castle tables used colored, spiced sauces. It never included vegetables. That doesn’t mean that ordinary people in town didn’t put beets, onions or carrots into their brewet. It seems likely that they ate what they could get, and that professional cooks left vegetables out partly because they didn’t see any reason to provide instructions for them and partly because vegetables were the food of the poor. This leads us back to the likelihood that an ordinary citizen’s supper brewet had cabbage and beets.

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Medieval cooking methods

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Ruth

How you cook food depends on what kind of fuel and utensils are available. Medieval Europe generally had metal pots and wood fires, so most cooking methods had to do with boiling something.

Our classic image of medieval cooking is of a boar roasting on a spit, in a huge fireplace over a generous bed of coals and logs. This did happen, but it was restricted to the castle kitchens. Most people had little meat, and meat was much more often boiled. All households had at least one pot of copper or iron, and better-off kitchens had pots of various sizes and shapes. They ranged from frying pans with legs to hanging cauldrons to small saucepans. (On the other hand, ceramic pots were cheaper and might work just as well, see below.)

In the Mediterranean region, the metal-working industry depleted forests faster than in Northern Europe, so at an earlier stage, cooks had to make do with less fuel. They could make quick, hot fires with a small amount of charcoal, just enough to boil water for a little while. This is probably why pasta caught on as a main food. Flour and water were shaped into thin, fast-cooking strips, dried, and then cooked within five minutes once the water was boiling.

A margin illustration in a 13th century Bible provides us with an interesting view of how fire could be maximized in a time of scarce fuel. Instead of cooking stew or soup in one large pot over one large fire, the cook in this image is standing near a central fire in which five or six tall, narrow clay vases stand among the flames. Of course they weren’t vases, but we have no modern parallel among cooking utensils. Pottery was less expensive than metal, so it was used where possible. Making the “pots” tall and thin was more efficient than sticking with a single, squat pot; it allowed one fire to heat many pots quickly.

Pottery could also be lidded and placed into the coals and ashes of an older fire. It was the medieval crock-pot method, but it was also how to do home baking. Baking is distinguished from other cooking methods by keeping the food surrounded by uniform heat. A lidded pot buried in coals served to bake small breads fairly fast. Towns had professional bakers; people could bring sourdough loaves to be added to the communal oven or buy bread directly.

But the basic food of Europe always began by boiling something…

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Medieval gardening methods

Posted on April 13, 2013 by Ruth

There was plenty of ignorance in medieval times, but in case you were wondering, farmers and gardeners *did* know the value of manure. In fact, it’s good to view the period as a time in which nearly every kind of material or thing was scarce and had value: rags, candle ends, meat scraps and broken glass all had market value. Fecal waste from animals and humans was no exception.

Rights to animal dung were guarded as closely as the rights to anything else. Fields lying fallow could have animals grazing there, enriching the soil during its time off. Barn waste was used or sold. People in town sometimes kept chickens or doves, and this waste was used in their herb gardens or sold. Houses in town typically had latrine sheds out back, along the alley, often shared by several families. Every few years, these had to be dug out, and the digger sold the contents at a profit. Aged and dried, it was as good as any manure.

In contrast to farm fields, gardens used separate, often raised, beds with sand or gravel paths between the growing areas. Some gardens were near enough to streams that the gardener could maintain channels and furrows with miniature dam walls so that the beds could be irrigated. Other gardeners had to use an earthenware pot with holes in the bottom. They walked along the rows, swinging the pot, and then plugged the filling hole with a thumb, tipping it upside-down, to stop watering.

As today, gardeners then fought with nuisance insects. They dumped sawdust on nearby anthills, killed caterpillars with ashes, and edged the garden with herbs thought to repel other insects.

Grafting fruit trees and pruning vines were skilled crafts. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, large cities had full-time nurserymen who sold seedlings and saplings. They were already working to develop better hybrids, especially with fruit trees and grapes.

Garden tools were simple forms of the ones we know today: hoes, rakes, spades. Most of each tool was made of wood, with only edges covered with iron. The price of iron came down all through the medieval period, but at no time was it plentiful enough to waste on simple tasks like digging and weeding.

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Muslim food comes to Europe

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Ruth

The Middle Ages can be said to begin as Mohammed’s successors began to conquer weary, disease-struck regions of the Eastern Roman Empire, and to end as the Muslim-convert Turks finally brought down the walls of Eastern Rome itself: Constantinople. Contact with Muslims and other peoples who lived under Muslim rule gave medieval Europe much of its cultural flavor, even when that contact was hostile. (Charlemagne’s grandfather, for example, won prominence over the titular king by defeating invading Arabs; not to mention the Crusades!)

The full Muslim Empire influence on food wasn’t felt at first in the heart of Europe, but it was a steady influence that grew with each century. It consisted of importation of Asian foods and, more profoundly, the transplantation of Asian crops to parts of Europe where they could survive.

The spice trade was the first obvious influence. Spices from the far east (India and its islands; Malaysia and Indonesia; China) had been carried on the Silk Road and by ship since Roman times. But after the Caliphs conquered most of Alexander the Great’s old empire, trade sped up, at least within the empire. It wasn’t always easy to get these goods outside the empire; the Mediterranean at times was a Muslim lake, hostile to Western ships entering its trading ports. But the transfer of spices and other exotic products between India and Syria sped up and became routine. When the First Crusade established a European zone in Middle Eastern ports, the spice trade with northern Europe really took off.

At the height of Outremer, the Crusader kingdom, exotic eastern spices were not only common but extremely plentiful in royal, aristocratic and wealthy monastic kitchens. The #1 spice: black pepper. (By the Renaissance, its price had dropped to where wealthy craftsmen could afford it, so it lost its social cachet among the elite.) Closely following: cinnamon, ginger, cloves, mace and cardamom.

Sugar cane was an Asian import, too. Arabs established the first European refinery on the island of Crete; refined sugar, in Arabic, was “qandi.” The 14th-century Crusader kingdom on Cyprus also refined sugar. Venice shipped sugar to the rest of Europe at exorbitant prices, and eventually sugar plantations in the Canary Islands began the practice of African slavery.

Arabs invented caramel and nougat, the first real candies (caramel was also used for hair removal). One of their basic culinary rules was to copy whatever Mohammed had personally liked to eat, and Mohammed apparently had a real sweet tooth. The earliest forms of what we recognize as dessert foods developed in Muslim cooking zones. (No wonder we all love baklava.)

Asian plants came to Europe first by way of Spain, the Arab outpost. The Syrian dynasty who first ruled in Andalusia transplanted date palms, sugar cane, citrus trees (oranges and lemons) and pistachio nuts. Watermelon, eggplant and asparagus seem also to be Asian transplants around this time.

Last but not least, rice was a new grain crop imported from Asia. It caught on in Italy, but remained an exotic food for the wealthy until the close of the medieval period.

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Kitchen gardens

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Ruth

Most medieval houses made it a priority to use even a small bit of exposed earth to make a garden. Deep in cities, people who lived in rooms and flats didn’t even have this much; but country people certainly did, and every city dweller with even a small patch of land out the back door planted a garden.

They didn’t carefully distinguish between vegetables, herbs and flowers. After all, some vegetables (which are really fruits) have beautiful flowers, and some flowers have edible roots. It hadn’t been so many centuries before that Europeans had been domesticating wild plants, which after all grow root, stem, flower and fruit for their own purposes and how man uses them is just a matter of preference and toxicity.

The most commonly grown plants were garlic, onion, and parsley. A modern distinction calls onions vegetables, suggesting that size alone makes the difference. The plant mallow was considered a vegetable, not an herb.

Roses were flowers, but rose hips were edible, and both roses and violets boiled with sugar to create flavored syrup. Violets and some other flowers went straight into salads and desserts. Crocus pollen was known as the herb saffron; native to Europe, it was still very valuable, since it came in such tiny amounts per flower. Chives, then as now, were used for strong, sharp flavor, but the purple flowers were also beautiful enough for cut flowers.

The vegetables we recognize were mostly of three types. Cabbages tended to be loose-leaf; lettuce, kale and cabbage looked much the same, before hybrids created differentiated shapes and sizes. Root crops, too, were less differentiated. Carrots weren’t orange; they were more like (white) parsnips or (purple) beets. Legumes were invariably dried for winter, not eaten with pods the way we eat green beans or sugar snap peas.

There’s some evidence for vine plants that grew bulbous fruits like cucumber, eggplant and zucchini, but these may have been restricted to the Mediterranean zone. Of course, they did not have New World plants like potatoes, maize and tomatoes. “Corn” meant seed and referred to wheat or rye.

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