Unleashed Cuisine: Fine Dining Medieval Style / Part I

What royals and ruffians consumed in the Middle Ages, with recipes to excite contemporary palates and challenge today's cooks around the world

This is the launch of a new feature for Andelman Unleashed exploring the world of food at every level around the globe. On occasion, we will delve far back into history, certainly explore other cultures and civilizations, but always with an eye toward today. Each episode will feature, as well,  recipes for dishes that can be prepared using ingredients and utensils available today. And as always, we invite you to experiment and comment.

In this case, we begin with an extraordinary two-part tour d'horizon of medieval dining across Europe….

Our guest expert today is Yale's Paul Freedman, the Chester D. Tripp Professor of History. Freedman, among the world's premier culinary scholars, specializes in medieval social history, the history of Catalonia, comparative studies of the peasantry, trade in luxury products, and especially the history of cuisine.  His latest books are American Cuisine and How It Got This Way (Liveright/Norton, 2019),  Why Food Matters (Yale University Press, 2021), and a children’s book co-authored with Marc Aronson, Bite by Bite: American History through Feasts, Food and Side Dishes (Simon & Schuster, 2024).

Take it away, Professor Freedman:

I have been especially interested in fine dining in the Middle Ages rather than the realities of ordinary people’s nutrition, but something in at least general terms should be said about basic conditions. Except in times of famine or war, the food of peasants and townsmen was somewhat monotonous but not relentlessly inadequate.  

Our assessments of medieval standards of living are now higher than formerly. The English medievalist named Christopher Dyer wrote an important article with the up-front title "Did the Peasants Really Starve in the Middle Ages?" and his answer is pretty much "No". While not denying the impact of catastrophes such as the Great Famine of 1314-1317, or local climate events, Dyer, on the basis of archaeological as well as documentary evidence, asserts that the socio-economic structure provided enough to eat for the agricultural laborers who made up 90% of the population.  

Dyer is particularly concerned to show that peasants ate meat, if not every day, not just at rare feasts either.  His evidence is based partly on what amount to intergenerational retirement contracts by which an elderly peasant cedes possession of a farm to his or her children or other near relatives in return for maintenance. The reasonable fear of neglect being what it was, the conditions of that maintenance are given in detail, providing an idea of the standard and expected diet—how much bread, meat and variety of other food is to be provided for the decrepit older generation. 

We can reconstruct the nature of peasant food consumption in the Middle Ages. It shows a greater degree of balance, especially between vegetables and meat, than for the nobles with their intensely high-protein diet based on game and other kinds of meat. The fact that peasants had a more healthful diet by reason of the variety of grains and vegetables that the nobility despised is not as relevant as is the way their impoverished lives are presented as natural, according to medieval upper-class observers, to their station or essential being. 

Peasant food, as depicted by satirical literature but also by clerical writing such as sermons on social hierarchy, consists of several recognizable and repeated characteristics.  Peasants eat cereals other than wheat—particularly rye or barley—either as dark bread or in porridges, gruel or stews.  Dairy products (cheese, whey, various forms of curdled milk) are rustic staples as are vegetables. (German peasants are sometimes typecast as "turnip eaters"; the French as "pea-eaters".)

When the poor are badly nourished in the medieval past, as is the case today, it is largely because of unjust distribution of resources or external forces such as drought, floods or war.

But then as well as now, the persistent opinion of the upper classes is that the poor eat the way they do because they don't know any better, their ignorance stemming from innate coarseness or lack of education. It was thought that rustics displayed a propensity to a lowly diet. Clerical and courtly literature often mocks peasants for their affection for pungent root vegetables such as garlic, onions and leeks.

A life of St. Odilo of Cluny says that the holy man rebuked the author when they were traveling to Rome for complaining about the smell of garlic and onions carried by rustic fellow-pilgrims. The point of two well-known fabliaux (coarsely humorous vernacular stories), is in effect that leopards never change their spots—peasants do not like and cannot eat the food of their betters.  A young woman of middling status marries a prosperous peasant, and she cooks for him what she learned to prepare during her privileged upbringing. She finds that her husband complains of indigestion until her mother recommends giving him beans and peas with bread soaked in milk, whereupon the man cheers up and recovers his vitality. A diet of poverty is what suits him.

In another story, a peasant is driving a dung-cart into Montpellier in the heart of the ancient Languedoc region of the south of France. As he winds his way through its famous spice market, he is overcome by the aroma and faints. Efforts to revive him fail until a few pellets of manure are placed under his nose to combat the odor of the spices, restoring him to life.

Turning to fine dining in the Middle Ages, the topic is not just “fun” but historically significant, something that informs us about the culture of the past and the assumptions of the present. All too many movies, even highbrow ones like Becket, depict medieval dining as a crude affair of spit roasted animals torn apart by barbarians with few table manners. In fact, the medieval period offered elegant if alien cuisine and had lots of rules for how to serve and enjoy food. 

Those fortunate enough to have the resources to achieve what would now be called food security—having enough to eat and not having to worry about it—possessed a range of gastronomic choices, with a realm of competing options. While I am persuaded that the history of cuisine is a serious matter, I am now about to undermine that position by describing high-end medieval preferences. Our sources include recipes from some 150 cookbook manuscripts that survive from the 13th through 15th centuries. We also have descriptions of banquets, account books for noble and royal houses, trade and merchant records, denunciations of gluttony, and information from churches especially monastic communities.  The late Middle Ages has a reputation for ponderous ceremonial style and a love of ostentation and complexity, a reputation not completely unmerited.

A cookbook from 1415 by Maitre Chiquart, chef to the Duke of Savoy, features a restorative broth made by boiling chicken with jewels and gold in a special glass container.

Chiquart also offers a recipe for making an edible castle with four towers. In front of one tower is pike cooked three ways and in three colors (the fish remains whole, but the tail is fried, the middle boiled, the head roasted), and each section is served with a different colored sauce. At the base of the other three towers are a glazed piglet; a skinned, cooked and redressed swan; and a boar’s head.  All these animals are breathing fire by means of wicks soaked in camphor and then set alight.  

Another well-known aspect of medieval gastronomy is the passion for spices. Here again there are some well-known excesses. The marriage of George the Rich, Duke of Bavaria-Landshut in 1476 involved a series of banquets requiring the purchase of 286 pounds of ginger, 205 pounds of cinnamon, and 85 pounds of nutmeg.

There is more to medieval taste than vulgarity and excess, however. There were some basic principles of the medieval culinary aesthetic.  Although we should not assume that the extravagant displays of Chiquart or the multiplication of dozens of banquet dishes were typical, medieval cuisine was characterized by a love of artifice rather than an emphasis on natural flavors. It was what the Italian historian Massimo Montanari calls a “synthetic cuisine” as opposed to the dominant modern preference for “analytical” cuisine.

Analytical here means that we favor clear distinction among flavors and like them to be separately identifiable. We prefer not to mix sugar with fish and in general try to keep sweet and savory apart. We want the basic ingredients to be recognizable. Medieval “synthetic” taste, on the other hand, strove for combinations of flavors that might be reproduced in each course, so that spice mixtures would be present in all courses and would tend to disguise what we might think of as the “natural” flavors of a dish.  There was not, as is now the case, a progression from savory to rich to sweet but rather variations on complex themes. Medieval gastronomic taste was innovative, even vulgar. Nevertheless, there were rules for what foods were appropriate and what styles of preparation were fashionable or considered healthful. There was an order to courses, precepts about flavor combinations and fears of certain foods such as melons or eels as unhealthful—they’re just not our rules and fears.

Medieval cooking placed a great emphasis on color (red and gold were highly regarded) and texture. Aspic was admired for its glistening look and ambiguous consistency, and it was also notoriously difficult to make (or at least to make as clear and shimmering) before the invention of artificial gelatin.

Menus for the upper-middle and upper classes obsessively emphasize protein (meat and fish), but within this uniformity there was an immense variety of animal species consumed so that medieval taste was simultaneously limited and omnivorous.  Festive meals seem to involve the same sorts of things in each course; thus, a three-course banquet might include poultry in each service. The courses were distinguished more by methods of preparation than by basic ingredients so that boiled dishes came first, then roasts, and then fried foods. The imposition of days of fasting by the Church made fish extremely important in the diet of those who could afford meat on normal days.

Fasting did not mean abstemiousness but rather avoidance of prohibited foods. A fast day meal served to the English monarch Richard III shortly after his coronation, for example, shows some of the variety of species, in this case, 43 different sea and freshwater creatures.  A first course included salted lampreys, pike soup, plaice, sea crabs, fried guard fish and baked conger eel. Lamprey and eel were considered unhealthful, but delicious, a paradox affecting many foods. So, medieval doctors recommended that the dangers (such as being considered cold and wet) be balanced with hot and dry ingredients such as pepper. These first dishes were followed by tench [the freshwater 'doctor fish'], bass, salmon, sole, perch, shrimp, trout, gurnard again (this time baked with quinces) and porpoise.

The same combination of uniformity and variety occurs in meals served on meat days.  At the enthronement of the bishop of Salisbury in 1414, a banquet began with boiled meats including capon, swan, peacock, pheasant, meatballs in aspic, wheat porridge with scrambled eggs and venison, and “mawmeny” (wine with sugar and spices thickened and mixed with ground pork and chicken).

The second service of roasted meat featured piglets, crane, venison, heron, stuffed poussins and partridges.  Fried meats, small birds and delicacies comprised the third course:  bittern, curlew, pigeon, rabbit, plover, quail, larks, fritters and puff pastries.

Desserts were not so much a course as an aftermath of candied preparations, dragées (sugared almonds), spiced wine and rolled wafers. At a banquet served in 1458 by the French count of Foix to envoys of the king of Hungary, desserts included a series of heraldic animals sculpted in sugar with whole spices embedded. Rampant and couchant animals held the arms of the king of Hungary in their mouths or paws. Red spiced wine was served with this concluding course while white preceded the meal. But although here it looks as if desserts resembled the modern sweet course, typical medieval postscripts of the main meal were often salty delicacies like fried pork meatballs.

We'll end this week's tale here and with some recipes, of course … but do come back without fail next week for the denouement, beginning with large animals and what to do with them at the table.

Meanwhile, here are today's recipes

RECIPES

Bread

Nettle Bread

1 ¼ pints lukewarm water

2 ½ cups  shredded fresh nettle leaves

1-2 tsp salt

2 tsp caraway seeds

1 ¾ oz yeast

1 2/3 cups coarse ground flour

4 ¼ - 5 ½ cups dark wheat flour

Stir salt, yeast, caraway seeds and nettles into lukewarm water.

Add both types of flour and knead thoroughly. Leave the dough to rise until double in size. Knead it again and mold into round laves. Leave the loaves to rise further on a baking sheet and bake for 40–50 minutes in a 350-390 degree oven.

Apart from nourishment, the nettle was also a common medicinal herb.

SOUP

Turnip and Parsnip Soup

2 cups turnips cut into chunks

1 ¼ cups parsnips cut into chunks

2 pints vegetable stock

1 cup coarse-ground almonds

1 pint cream

6 egg yolks

½ tsp salt

juice of ½ lemon

In the Middle Ages turnip soup was considered a first-class cough remedy. Parsnip cultivation had begun in ancient Greece and Rome but did not reach northern Europe until the Middle Ages where it first emerged among the upper classes and was eaten steamed, pureed or made into soups.

MAIN COURSES

Venison Pie

crust

10 ½ ounces butter

10 oz medium coarse wheat flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 cup water

   (1 egg yolk for glazing)

filling

2 lb 3 oz venison (use fallow or red deer)

3 tbsp honey

4 egg yolks

2 slices bacon

1 tsp salt

½ tsp ground black pepper

½ tsp ground ginger

Prepare the piecrust: combine butter, flour and baking powder into crumbly paste and add water. Work dough by hand until even, but do not knead. Divide dough into 2 equal parts, press each into rectangular shape. Place in fridge to cool before rolling it out and folding a few times to obtain a flaky dough.

Cook meat in enough water to just cover. Mince cooked meat in a food processor. Fry bacon, cut into tiny pieces. Combine all ingredients for the filling.

Roll out half the dough into rectangular sheet 11 X 15 inches. Place on baking tray lined with baking parchment. Spread pie filling on top. Roll out the other half of the dough into a matching sheet and cover the filing, folding edges of the bottom layer over the top, closing the pie thoroughly. Pierce top layer with a fork and glaze with egg yolk if desired. Bake on bottom rack of at 390 degree oven for 20 minutes until top has nice color.

This recipe dates to a 15^th century English manuscript.

Orange Omelet for Harlots and Ruffians

6 eggs

2 oranges

1 lemon

2 tbsp sugar

2 tbsp olive oil

Juice the oranges and lemons. Beat the eggs, add the juice, sugar, and salt to taste. Cook the omelet in olive oil.

This recipe is from Johannes Bockenheim, cook to Pope Martin V whose cookbook dates the 1430s. The omelet can be safely consumed without moral turpitude. Medieval oranges were quite bitter, hence the addition of lemon today.

Fried Fish Filets in Sweet and Sour Sauce

fresh fish filets (haddock or similar)

olive oil for frying

sauce

10 fl oz red wine vinegar

3 tbsp sugar

1 onion, chopped

½ tsp ground mace

½ tsp ground cloves

1 tsp ground black pepper

In frying pan combine red wine vinegar, sugar, chopped onion, and spices. Taste and adjust sweetness and spices for good balance of sweet and sour. Boil, then lower heat, simmer til onions are soft. In another pan, fry fish filets on both sides in olive oil til they're pale brown, transfer to serving dish and pour sauce on top.

This is also a 14^th century recipe. There's a more elaborate Italian recipe adding 3 ½ ounces raisins, 20 pitted and chopped prune, 5 fl oz sweet white wine, 3 tbsp vinegar, pinch of ground saffron and 1/3 tsp ground ginger and ½ tsp cardamon.

Sauce

Cameline sauce

1-2 slices white bread

9 fl oz white wine

1-2 tbsp wine vinegar

1 tsp ground cinnamon

½ tsp ground ginger

½ tsp ground cloves

1/8 tsp ground nutmeg

¼ tsp ground black pepper

pinch ground saffron

2 tbsp brown sugar

salt

Toast bread til brown, cut into pieces, soak in wine and vinegar. Press softened mixture through a sieve or mix with hand mixer until smooth. Add spices and brown sugar and salt to taste. Cinnamon flavor should be dominant.

Serve with meat or fish, cold or heated in saucepan.

From a 15^th century French culinary text, Vivendier.

Dessert

Minted Mead

8 ½ cups boiling water

9 oz honey

9 oz brown sugar

1 – 1 ½ lemons

½ tbsp fresh mint

1 ½ tsp yeast

sugar

raisins

Wash lemons, peel a few thin strips of rind into large, deep dish. Then peel lemons completely, removing pits. Slice and add together with mint and brown sugar. Pour boiling water on top. Cool to near room temperature, then add honey and let melt. Crumble in the yeast. Let solution brew at room temperature for 24 hours.

Prepare clean bottles and drop ½ tsp sugar and a few raisins into each. Add liquid. Store in a cool place to brew into mead, which should be ready in four days.  In the Middle Ages, mead was at times seen as a medicinal drink.

These and other recipes may be found in Hannele Klementtilä, The Medieval Kitchen: A Social History with Recipes (Reaktion Books: 2012)….and Odile Redon, Françoise Sabban & Silvano Serventi, The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and England (University of Chicago Press: 1998)

Next week, stay tuned for Part II when we'll look at large animals (and their recipes) and a whole lot more.

At the same time, we will also be arriving in Paris for the debut of the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad. Stay tuned!