How to Milk an Almond Stuff an Egg And Armor a Turnip A ...

135
Additional Material on Period Cooking
Cooking from Primary Sources: Some General Comments
One definition of what the Society is about is “studying the past by selective recreation.”
Period cooking is one of the few activities that really lets us do this, in a sense of “study” that
goes substantially beyond merely learning things that other people already know. There are
thousands of pages of period source material available, and I would guess that most of the dishes
have not been made by anyone in the past three hundred years. As with many things, the best way
to learn is to do it; the following comments are intended to make the process a little easier.
When working with early English recipes, remember that the spelling has changed much more
than the language and is often wildly inconsistent; one fifteenth century recipe contains the word
“Chickens” four times with four different spellings, of which the first is “Schyconys.” It often
helps to try sounding out strange words, in the hope that they will be more familiar to the ear than
to the eye.
Recipes rarely include quantities, temperatures, or times. Working out a recipe consists mostly
of discovering that information by trial and error. You may find a modern cookbook useful in
doing so. The idea is not to adapt a modern recipe but to use the modern recipe for information on
how long a chicken has to be boiled before it is done or how much salt is added to a given volume
of stew. That gives you a first guess, to be used the first time you try the dish and modified
accordingly.
It is sometimes asserted that real medieval food would be too highly flavored for modern
palates. Thomas Austin, the 19 th -century editor of Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books,
mentions a Cinnamon Soup as evidence that medieval people preferred strongly seasoned food.
But since his reference is not to a recipe but only an item in a menu, the fact that he took it as
evidence may tell us more about 19 th c. English cooking than medieval English cooking.
Our experience with recipes that do contain information on quantities suggests that the
assertion is not true. For many years we made Hippocras from the recipe in Le Menagier de Paris
(p. 64), using about half the ratio of sugar and spices to wine specified in the original, because
otherwise it came out too sweet for our tastes. Eventually Jeremy de Merstone (George J.
Perkins) pointed out to us that, while the pound and ounce used in Paris in 1391 were
approximately the same as the modern pound and ounce, the quart was equal to almost two
modern U.S. quarts–which implied that, by modifying the recipe to taste, we had gotten back to
almost exactly the proportions of the original. The same conclusion–that medieval food, although
hardly bland, was not extraordinarily spicy–is suggested by our experience with other recipes.
One exception is a collection of dishes from 16th century India for which we have ingredient lists
with quantities but without instructions; many of them turn out too salty for modern tastes. I am
told that the same is true of modern Indian cooking in India.
Along with the idea that medieval food was overspiced one finds the claim that the reason it
was overspiced was to hide the taste of rotten meat, due to the lack of modern refrigeration. We
have found no evidence to support that claim and quite a lot to oppose it. Chiquart's description of
how to put on a large feast, for example, makes it clear that he expects to slaughter animals on
site. Other sources show medieval cooks concerned with the risk of spoiled meat and taking
reasonable precautions to deal with it. Finally, there is the observation that hiding the taste of
spoiled meat does not prevent the effects; a cook who routinely poisoned his employer and his
guests would be unlikely to keep his position for long.