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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Medieval bees

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Ruth

Beekeeping was well-established by the Middle Ages in the Mediterranean region, of course. Farming bees presented more challenges in colder climates, where Charlemagne had mandated that every royal estate must keep bees.

In the Mediterranean countries, every region had its traditional form of housing for bees, usually made of pottery, wood or cork. They had hinged doors or open backs that could be covered until time to remove honey. In the north, bee skeps had to be padded with layers of straw and bark to keep the bees alive over the winter. They were usually built on a layer of wicker, often in the shape of a cone; clay and other materials insulated the outside. In wilder places like East Germany and Poland, bee swarms were sometimes kept in hollow logs, perhaps the same logs in which they were found in the wild, or in carved wooden boxes. Medieval Polish beekeepers developed a tradition of carving hollow logs into decorative shapes, often as women with big skirts.

Keeping bees over the winter was not a problem in the Mediterranean, but in northern Europe it was a serious hassle. Honey was the bees’ winter food, but the beekeeper planned to harvest it. One solution was to winter over only a select few hives. Beekeepers collected wild swarms in the early summer, and by September, they chose which hives seemed most viable. These lucky bees kept full honeycombs and had their skeps wrapped for winter; they could survive the cold anywhere south of the Arctic Circle. But most of the bee swarms were killed off with thick smoke. By this method, the medieval beekeeper neatly avoided the problem of getting stung while removing honey, since by the time he sliced off the wax and poured out honey, the bees were dead.

Wax and honey were equally valuable. They were used by churches and the aristocracy; both the majority Christians and the minority Jews required candles in their rituals and services. (The trade of bronze-casting also required large amounts of beeswax.) Paraffin was not known until much later, and sugar was as expensive as silver in medieval times. Poor people used animal tallow to burn lights for brief times at night, and were lucky to have fruit-based sugar (or fruit itself). If a poor man found a bee swarm in the wild, its high cash value would prevent him from even considering making himself candles or cakes.

We think that medieval Europe was about castles and knights, but really it was about fees and fines. Nothing was free in medieval Europe, especially if something valuable like wax was in play. Property owners were quite aware that other people’s bees were carrying off nectar from their fields and gardens. Landowners often collected a fee of honey or wax if they could follow the bees home, and towns collected fees for beekeeping rights over wild acreage. Fines were levied against beekeepers who lured away or outright stole other men’s swarms. In the later period, large-scale beekeepers could be fined if their swarms injured or killed a farm animal, especially if they had not fenced off their hives so that animals could stray too close.

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Charlemagne’s vegetables

Posted on April 6, 2013 by Ruth

He wanted his stewards to send him all wolf hides caught and tanned on his estates, feed his hunting dog puppies at their own expense, and use barrels instead of leather bottles. He wanted them to be sure that the workshops turned out watertight carts for the army, shipped to him at Aachen with sacks of flour tucked inside; and he wanted regular shipments of malt. He even specified that stewards make sure the weaving-women should have the three basic colors of yellow, blue and red (woad, madder and vermilion). But let’s look now at the food specifics.

Charlemagne seemed to avoid traveling at Lent, so the manor farms were supposed to collect all Lent-specific food in the weeks before, and send a large portion to Aachen:

“Two thirds of the Lenten food shall be sent each year for our use — that is, of the vegetables, fish, cheese, butter, honey, mustard, vinegar, millet, panic, dry or green herbs, radishes, turnips, and wax or soap and other small items; and as we have said earlier, they are to inform us by letter of what is left over, and shall limier no circumstances omit to do this, as they have done in the past, because it is through those two thirds that we wish to know about the one third that remains.”

It’s interesting to note that cheese and butter make the list; it’s possible that in the 8th and 9th centuries, the church hadn’t yet prohibited dairy products since they were not actually meat. (I don’t understand the word “limier” as used in this translation, but here is the original Latin, in case it helps: “…et quod reliquum fuerit nobis per brevem, sicut supra diximus, innotescant et nullatenus hoc praetermittant, sicut usque nunc fecerunt, quia per illas duas partes volumus cognoscere de illa tertia quae remansit.”)

The last item in the Capitulare tells us the most about European food circa 800. The king provided a list of what must be grown in manor farm gardens:

“It is our wish that they shall have in their gardens all kinds of plants: lily, roses, fenugreek, costmary, sage, rue, southernwood, cucumbers, pumpkins, gourds, kidney-bean, cumin, rosemary, caraway, chick-pea, squill, gladiolus, tarragon, anise, colocynth, chicory, ammi, sesili, lettuces, spider’s foot, rocket salad, garden cress, burdock, penny-royal, hemlock, parsley, celery, lovage, juniper, dill, sweet fennel, endive, dittany, white mustard, summer savory, water mint, garden mint, wild mint, tansy, catnip, centaury, garden poppy, beets, hazelwort, marshmallows, mallows, carrots, parsnip, orach, spinach, kohlrabi, cabbages, onions, chives, leeks, radishes, shallots, cibols, garlic, madder, teazles, broad beans, peas, coriander, chervil, capers, clary. And the gardener shall have house-leeks growing on his house.”

Most of these plants are herbs, in our classification; edible plants tended to be classed together in medieval lists, not carefully differentiated by type. Let’s pull out the modern vegetables: cucumbers, pumpkins, gourds, kidney-beans, chick-peas, lettuce and garden cress, celery, beet, carrot, parsnip, spinach, kohlrabi, cabbage, onion, leek, radish, shallot, broad beans, and peas. Most of these vegetables were closer to wild herbs than to our modern hybrids. Lettuce was small and bitter; cabbage was loose-leaf, not a tight round head. Carrots were purple and not as sweet as modern carrots, more like parsnips. Peas included a variety of legumes that were dried for later use.

Charlemagne’s farms included orchards:

“As for trees, it is our wish that they shall have various kinds of apple, pear, plum, sorb (?), medlar, chestnut and peach; quince, hazel, almond, mulberry, laurel, pine, fig, nut and cherry trees of various kinds. The names of apples are: gozmaringa, geroldinga, crevedella, spirauca; there are sweet ones, bitter ones, those that keep well, those that are to be eaten straightaway, and early ones. Of pears they are to have three or four kinds, those that keep well, sweet ones, cooking pears and the late-ripening ones.”

Notice his care about types of pear and apple: I think his cooks certainly had some input on this list. Fruit was rarely eaten raw in the later Middle Ages, but the king’s list seems to suggest that some apples and pears, and perhaps plums or peaches, could be “eaten straightaway (subito comessura).”

We can assume that most farms of the time were lucky to have even a few of these orchard trees and bushes. The king’s model farms set the standard, and for the next few centuries, estate farms copied them. By the later Middle Ages, prosperous farms attached to castles could be assumed to have most of Charlemagne’s dainties.

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