circa AD 600
Defining Gluttony. Pope Gregory I, known as Gregory the Great, defined five aspects of gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins, citing biblical passages in justification:
1. Eating before mealtimes: Thy father [Saul] straitly charged the people with an oath, saying, Cursed be the man that eateth any food this day. And the people were faint. Then said Jonathan, My father hath troubled the land: see, I pray you, how mine have been enlightened, because I tasted a little honey.
(1 Samuel 14:28–29)
2. Seeking out delicacies and finer foods to gratify the “vile sense of taste”: And the mixt multitude that was among them fell a lusting: and the children of Israel also wept again, and said, Who shall give us flesh to eat? We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick: But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes.
(Numbers 11:4–6)
3. Seeking after sauces and seasoning: The basis of this seems to be that Hophni and Phinehas, the sons of the High Priest Eli, kept all the best bits of meat from the sacrifices for themselves, and were slain for their sins.
(1 Samuel 4:11)
4. Eating too much: Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.
(Ezekiel 16:49)
5. Being over-eager to eat, even if it is plain fare, and one does not eat excessively: The biblical exemplar is Esau, who famously sells his birthright to his brother Jacob for “bread and pottage of lentiles.”
(Genesis 25:29–34)
732
A Bull Against Horse. Pope Gregory III issued a papal bull banning the consumption of horse meat, condemning it as “an unclean and execrable act.” His aim was to support St. Boniface’s mission to evangelize Germany, where the pagan tribes had apparently eaten horse as part of ceremonies associated with the worship of Odin.
The Norse inhabitants of Iceland also had a penchant for horse meat, and for this reason resisted conversion to Christianity until 999, when they gained a special dispensation from the Church to continue the dietary practice.
circa 800
On the Protective Quality of Garlic. Anglo-Saxon herbals advised a mixture of garlic, bitter herbs, leeks, fennel, butter, and mutton fat as a surefire way of protecting oneself against malevolent elves.
An Irish Fighting Feast. The Irish saga Scéla Mucce Meic Dathó (“The Tale of Mac Dathó’s Pig”) describes how at a feast the warriors fall out over who is entitled to the “champion’s portion,” i.e., the best cut of meat:
"Blows fell upon ears until the heap on the floor reached the center of the house and the streams of gore reached the entrances. The hosts broke through the doors, then, and a good drinking bout broke out in the courtyard, with everyone striking his neighbor".
circa 850
Kaldi and the Coffee Beans. According to legend, an Arabian goatherd called Kaldi noticed that his flock became much livelier after they fed on the bright red berries of a certain bush. He tried the berries himself, and the exhilaration he subsequently experienced led him to take the berries to a Muslim holy man. The latter disapproved, however, and threw the berries into the fire—unleashing a wonderful aroma. Anxious to capture this wonder, Kaldi raked the roasted beans from the fire, pounded them into a powder, dissolved them in hot water—and so made the first cup of coffee.
The story of Kaldi did not appear in written form until 1671, however, and the tale is almost certainly apocryphal: the wild coffee plant is native to Ethiopia, and may not have been introduced to Arabia until the fifteenth century. The word itself may derive from the Ethiopian kingdom called Kaffa, which emerged in the late fourteenth century. Arab lexicographers, however, suggest that the Arabic word qahwah (pronounced kahveh by the Turks) originally denoted some kind of wine, and ultimately derived from the verb qahiya, “to have no appetite”—which is certainly one of the effects of a strong influx of caffeine.
857
Polluted Rye. The Annales Xantenses, compiled in Cologne, recorded that in this year “a great plague of swollen blisters consumed the people by a loathsome rot, so that their limbs were loosened and fell off before death.” This is thought to be the first recorded reference to the gangrenous effects of ergotism, also known as St. Anthony’s fire or dancing mania, a condition contracted by eating rye bread (or other cereal products) contaminated with Claviceps purpurea. This fungus produces alkaloids that cause not only gangrene, but also convulsions and hallucinations—one of the alkaloids, ergotamine, has structural similarities with LSD. Outbreaks continued in Europe until the late nineteenth century.
circa 880
Murderous Oxen Banned from Table. A law enacted during the reign of Alfred the Great made it an offense to consume an ox that had gored a person to death. The beast was instead to be executed by stoning.
circa 900
A Riddle. The Anglo-Saxons delighted in the following riddle:
"I am a wonderful creature, bringing joy to women, and useful to those who dwell near me. I harm no citizen except only my destroyer. My site is lofty; I stand in a bed; beneath, somewhere, I am shaggy. Sometimes the very beautiful daughter of a peasant, a courageous woman, ventures to lay hold on me, assaults my red skin, despoils my head, clamps me in a fashion. She who thus confines me, this curly haired woman, soon feels my meeting with her—her eye becomes wet."
The answer is: an onion.
Help for Husbands Bald’s. Leechbook—an Anglo-Saxon herbal—recommends that men troubled by endless female chatter should consume a radish before retiring at night.
1104
The Dunmow Flitch. Lady Juga Bayard established a tradition at Dunmow in Essex, by which any person who knelt down on two sharp stones at the church door and who could swear that for a year and a day he had not been involved in any domestic dispute or wished himself unmarried would be awarded a flitch (side) of bacon. The tradition appears to have persisted for some centuries and is mentioned, for example, in “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales:
The bacon was nat fet for hem, I trowe,
That som men han in Essex at Dunmowe.
The tradition was revived in 1855, since when, in June of every leap year, a flitch of bacon is awarded to any married couple judged by a jury of six local bachelors and six local maidens to have lived in complete content and harmony over the previous year and a day.
* * *
Roast Rat à la Manasollasa
King Somesvara III, who ruled the Western Chalukya empire in southern India from 1126 and 1138, was the author of the Sanskrit classic Manasollasa (“Refresher of the Mind”), a book largely devoted to princely pleasures, especially food. He describes a great range of dishes, from lentil dumplings in spicy yogurt sauce and fatty pork with cardamoms to fried tortoise and roasted rat. Here is his recipe for the latter:
Select a strong black rat, found in the fields and river banks.
Fry it in hot oil holding it by the tail till the hair is removed.
After washing with hot water, cut open the stomach and cook the inner parts with sour mango and salt.
Alternatively, skewer the rat and roast it over red-hot coals.
When the rat is well cooked, sprinkle it with salt, cumin and lentil flour.
* * *
1135
A Surfeit of Lampreys. King Henry I of England died on December 1, at the age of sixty-six or sixty-seven, supposedly of a “surfeit of lampreys” (although it was more likely food poisoning). Henry was in Normandy at the time, and one day, according to the contemporary chronicler Henry of Huntingdon, was so hungry after hunting that he ordered a dish of lampreys. The lamprey, a parasitic jawless fish of unprepossessing appearance, was long regarded as a delicacy. However, according to the doctrine of the humors, it was considered to be dangerously cold and wet (even more so than other fish), so had to be killed by being immersed in wine, and was then roasted with warming herbs and spices. Henry’s own physician had warned him against them, but the king ignored his advice, and at once suffered “a most destructive humor” accompanied by “a sudden and severe convulsion.” He died shortly afterward, and his corpse was sewn into a bull’s hide before being returned to England, where he was buried at Reading Abbey.
Despite this warning tale, lampreys continued to be prized in England until the nineteenth century, and are still eaten in the Loire region of France and (hot and smoked) in Finland. In 1633, the diarist Samuel Pepys celebrated the anniversary of the removal of a kidney stone—a painful operation from which he was lucky to survive—with a dish to which he was particularly partial: lamprey pie.
* * *
Sauce Pour Lamprey
The following recipe for lamprey comes from A Noble Boke of Cokery, a manuscript from the mid-fifteenth century.
Take a quick [living] lamprey, and let him bleed at the navel, and let him bleed in an earthen pot;
And scald him with hay, and wash him clean, and put him [on a spit]; and set the vessel with the blood under the lamprey while he roasteth, and keep the liquor that droppeth out of him;
And then take onions, and myce [dice] them small, And put them in a vessel with wine or water, And let them parboil right well; And then take away the water, and put them in a fair vessel;
And then take powder of canell [cinnamon or cassia] and wine, And draw them through a strainer, and cast [them to] the onions, and set over the fire, and let them boil;
And cast a little vinegar and parsley thereto, and a little pepper; and then take the blood and the dropping of the lamprey, and cast thereto [and] let boil together till it be a little thick, and cast thereto powder ginger, vinegar, salt, and a little saffron;
And when the lamprey is roasted enough, lay him in a fair charger, and cast all the sauce upon him, and so serve him forth.
* * *
circa 1150
An Unfortunate Side Effect. The physicians at the renowned medical school at Salerno in southern Italy realized that garlic was a two-edged sword in the fight against disease. They encapsulated their views in the following couplet:
Since garlic then hath powers to save from death,
Bear with it though it makes unsavory breath.
Seven centuries later, Mrs. Beeton, in The Book of Household Management (1861), dismissed garlic altogether: “The smell of this plant is generally considered offensive, and it is the most acrimonious in its taste of the whole of the alliaceous tribe.”
Peppercorn Rents. During the civil war between Stephen and Matilda, rivals for the throne of England, coinage became so scarce that rents were paid in valuable spices, especially peppercorns, as these could not be debased—unlike silver. By the nineteenth century, the price of pepper had fallen in relative terms and a “peppercorn rent” came to mean a notional rent. The phrase is still sometimes taken literally. For example, in Bermuda, the Masonic Lodge of St. George’s No. 200 has every year since 1816 paid a single peppercorn to the island’s governor, presented on a silver plate, for the rental of the Old State House, which is used as their lodge. Things are a little pricier in England: the Sevenoaks Vine Cricket Club in Kent has to pay two peppercorns every year to the town council for the use of their grounds and pavilion.
1154
Pasta Arrives in Italy. In the Kitab nuzhat al-mushtaq (often translated as “A Diversion for the Man Longing to Travel to Far-Off Places”), the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, who lived in Sicily at the court of King Roger II, made the first mention of pasta on Italian soil. It comes in his description of Trabia, a town east of Palermo:
West of Termini there is a delightful settlement called Trabia. Its ever-flowing streams propel a number of mills. Here there are huge buildings in the countryside where they make vast quantities of itriyya, which is exported everywhere: to Calabria, to Muslim and Christian countries. Very many shiploads are sent.
Itriyya is mentioned some two centuries earlier in an Arabic medical text written by a Jewish doctor in what is now Tunisia, and was the word for long, thin strands of dried dough that were cooked by boiling. If the itriyya made in Sicily in al-Idrisi’s time was so widely exported, it must (like modern dried pasta) have been made from durum wheat—“hard” wheat—to enable it to keep well enough to travel. The word itriyya is not in fact Arabic, but rather an Arabic transliteration of a Greek word for some kind of dough-based food cooked by boiling—but whether this might have resembled pasta cannot at this distance be established with even the remotest degree of certainty.
Incidentally, the commonly told story that it was the medieval Venetian traveler Marco Polo who introduced pasta to Italy, in imitation of the noodles he had eaten in China, is just that—a story. However, it was one that proved hard to kill. In 1929, the Macaroni Journal, the organ of the U.S. National Macaroni Manufacturers Association, carried a short tall story called “A Saga of Cathay,” in which a sailor called Spaghetti, who accompanied Marco Polo on his voyage, visits a Chinese village:
His attention was drawn to a native man and woman working over a crude mixing bowl. The woman appeared to be mixing a dough of some kind, particles of which had overflowed the mixing bowl and extended to the ground. The warm, dry air, characteristic of the country, had in a short time hardened these slender strings of dough, and had made them extremely brittle.
Signor Spaghetti observes that these slender strings are delicious once boiled in salted water.
The Macaroni Journal may have been gently pulling its readers’ legs, but in the lavish 1938 Samuel Goldwyn film The Adventures of Marco Polo, the hero, played by Gary Cooper, is entertained by an elderly Chinese philosopher called Chen Tsu, who—in all seriousness—offers him bowls of what he calls spa get. So impressed is Marco Polo that he takes some dried spa get back to Venice. A cuisine is born.
circa 1180
London’s First Fast-food Outlet?. In William FitzStephen’s Descriptio Nobilissimi Civitatis Londoniae (“Description of the Most Noble City of London”), which forms the preface to his biography of his late martyred master, Thomas Beckett, there is a description of a “public cookshop” on the River Thames:
On a daily basis there, depending on the season, can be found fried or boiled foods and dishes, fish large and small, meat—lower quality for the poor, finer cuts for the wealthy—game and fowl (large and small). If friends arrive unexpectedly at the home of some citizen and they, tired and hungry after their journey, prefer not to wait until food may be got in and cooked, or “till servants bring water for hands and bread,” they can in the meantime pay a quick visit to the riverside, where anything they might desire is immediately available. No matter how great the number of soldiers or travelers coming in or going out of the city, at whatever hour of day or night, so that those arriving do not have to go without a meal for too long or those departing leave on empty stomachs, they can choose to detour there and take whatever refreshment each needs. Those with a fancy for delicacies can obtain for themselves the meat of goose, guinea-hen or woodcock—finding what they are after is no great chore, since all the delicacies are set out in front of them. This is an exemplar of a public cookshop that provides a service to a city and is an asset to city life. Hence, as we read in Plato’s Gorgias, cookery is a flattery and imitation of medicine, the fourth of the arts of civic life.
circa 1188
When Is a Bird a Fish?. Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales), in his Topographia Hibernica, gave the following account of the barnacle goose:
They are produced from fir timber tossed along the sea, and are at first like gum. Afterward they hang down by their beaks as if they were a seaweed attached to the timber, and are surrounded by shells in order to grow more freely. Having thus in process of time been clothed with a strong coat of feathers, they either fall into the water or fly freely away into the air. They derived their food and growth from the sap of the wood or from the sea, by a secret and most wonderful process of alimentation. I have frequently seen, with my own eyes, more than a thousand of these small bodies of birds, hanging down on the seashore from one piece of timber, enclosed in their shells, and already formed. They do not breed and lay eggs like other birds, nor do they ever hatch any eggs, nor do they seem to build nests in any corner of the earth.
The common medieval belief that barnacle geese developed from the marine crustacean after which they are named meant, somewhat conveniently, that these birds counted as fish, and could therefore be eaten on meat-free fast days. (In much the same way, centuries ago in Venezuela, the Catholic Church issued a dispensation allowing the consumption of the capybara—the world’s largest rodent—during Lent, on the grounds that it must be a fish, as it spent most of its life in water.)
The mystery of the origin of barnacle geese was eventually dispelled when in 1597, sailors from William Barents’s expedition found their nests on the remote islands of Novaya Zemlya, deep inside the Arctic Circle.
circa 1200
Belching at the Ceiling. Around this time Daniel of Beccles wrote his Book of the Civilized Man (Urbanus Magnus Danielis Becclesiensis in Latin), which included a number of words of advice on table manners, such as:
When eating at the table of the wealthy, refrain from garrulousness.
Should you desire to belch, remember first to gaze up at the ceiling.
If you need to clear your nose, do not show others what appears in your hand.
Do not omit to thank your host.
Abstain from mounting your horse in the hall.
And (a relief for those visiting the smallest room in the castle):
It is unseemly to fall upon your enemy while he is voiding his bowels.
The author also believed that it was impolite for guests to urinate in the dining hall—but that it was perfectly permissible for the host to do so. Finally, if while dining at one’s lord’s table, the lord’s wife expresses her desire for carnal knowledge, the best thing to do is to pretend to be ill.
Some Medieval Jests. In the Middle Ages, the cooks in the great castles liked to play jokes on the guests. Live birds were indeed hidden in pies (like the “four-and-twenty blackbirds” of the nursery rhyme), so that when the crust was cut open they would fly out. Then there were mock oranges: balls of saffron-colored rice stuffed with minced meat and mozzarella that the Normans called arancina (from Arabic arangio, meaning “bitter orange”). The Arabs themselves may have learned the joke from the Persians. Another dish that was not quite what it seemed was the cockatrice, the mythical beast that was half snake and half bird, which was re-created by sewing the front end of a chicken to the back end of a suckling pig, the whole thing then being covered in pastry and baked. Perhaps the most belly-splitting jape of all involved presenting one’s guests with slabs of beef straight from the fire, sprinkled with tiny slivers of raw heart—which would writhe around on the hot meat just like maggots.
1274
Concentrating the Mind through the Stomach. Pope Gregory X issued Ubi periculum, which laid out some rules for the conclave of cardinals summoned to elect a new pope. This was prompted by the previous election, in which the squabbling cardinals, meeting at Viterbo, had taken thirty-three months to come to a decision, and this only after the citizens of Viterbo, sick of playing host to the princes of the Church, removed the roof of their residence and supplied them with only bread and water. This had the desired effect, and Gregory was elected in 1271 as the compromise candidate. His own rules for the conclave laid down, among other things, that if the cardinals had not agreed who should be the new pope within three days, they would be allowed no more than two meals a day, each consisting of no more than one dish; and if after a further five days no decision had been made, then the cardinals were to be reduced to bread and water.
In 1353, the bull Licet in constitutione allowed for a supplement of salad, fruit, soup, and a little sausage to be added to the two basic meals, and by the conclave of 1549, things had become very slack, as attested by a letter written on December 5 by the representative of the Gonzaga family, the ruling house of Mantua:
The cardinals are now on the one-dish regimen. The dish consists of a couple of capons, a nice piece of veal, some salami, a nice soup, and anything you want as long as it is boiled. That is in the morning. Then in the evening, you can have anything you want as long as it is roasted, as well as some antipasti, a main course, some salad and a dessert. The more small-minded ones are complaining about the hardship...
Sitting in such comfort, the conclave—split between the supporters of France, the Habsburgs, and the late pope—took from November 29, 1549, to February 7 of the following year to elect Cardinal Giovan Maria del Monte as Pope Julius III. As a younger man, del Monte had allegedly fathered over a hundred illegitimate children, but then, on being admonished by his mother, swore he would thenceforward abjure the company of women and stick to boys. He was as good as his word, and on becoming pope presented a cardinal’s red hat to his seventeen-year-old male lover, a monkey trainer by trade.
It was for Pope Julius III, whose health had been sapped by excessive eating, that the celebrated chef Bartolomeo Scappi created his “royal white tart,” made from provatura cheese, fine sugar, rosewater, cream, and egg whites—plain fare for a sickly pontiff.
1284
The Origin of Tapas. Alfonso X “the Wise,” king of Castile, León, and Galicia died on April 4. Tradition has it that when, at some point during his reign, he became ill, his physician advised him to eat snacks between meals to help soak up the wine that he was constantly imbibing. Feeling the benefit of this regime, Alfonso instituted a law that dictated that tavern-keepers could not serve wine to their customers without also providing them with a little something to eat with each glass. Tapa literally means “lid” or “cover,” and it has been suggested that the original tapas were slices of bread, ham, or chorizo that drinkers in Andalusia placed over their glasses to keep the flies off their sherry.
1290
Avoid Scratching One’s Foul Parts at Table Bearing in mind that at medieval feasts, guests would often help themselves with their fingers from common bowls, Bonvesin de la Riva of Milan gave readers of his Fifty Courtesies at Table the following tips on etiquette (the original was in verse):
Thou must not put either thy fingers into thine ears, or thy hands to thy head. The man who is eating must not be cleaning by scraping with his fingers at any foul part.
Bonvesin also advised against sneezing onto one’s plate, failing to wipe one’s mouth before taking a sip of wine, or sheathing one’s knife (everybody had to bring their own to table) before others had finished eating.
The following century a German writer on table manners gave some further advice:
If it happens that you cannot help scratching, then courteously take a portion of your dress and scratch with that. That is more befitting than that your skin should become soiled.
Another medieval authority on etiquette admonished his readers thus:
Let not thy privy members be laid open to be viewed, It is most shameful and abhorred, detestable and rude.
circa 1300
The Water of Life. The Catalan alchemist, astrologer, and physician Arnaldus de Villa Nova recommended eau de vie—a clear fruit brandy—be taken for medicinal purposes: “Eau de vie prolongs good health, dissipates the humors, rejuvenates the heart and preserves youth.” The clue is in the name: eau de vie is French for “water of life,” the same meaning as the Latin aqua vitae (once applied to any concentrated solution of alcohol), the Scandinavian caraway- or dill-flavored spirit akvavit, and the Gaelic usquebaugh, from which comes the word “whisky.” Medieval physicians recommended moderation, however: in France, the suggested dose was one tablespoon of eau de vie a day.
1312
Gaveston’s Fork. A group of barons seized Piers Gaveston, the Gascon favorite of Edward II of England, and put him to death. Gaveston and Edward may or may not have been lovers, but it was taken as a token of the former’s effeteness that a table fork was found among his possessions after his death. By this time, forks had been used in Italy for at least two centuries (essential for eating pasta), but did not come into general use in England and the rest of northern Europe until the later seventeenth century—the century before, Martin Luther had articulated the suspicion that most northerners felt for such decadent innovations when he supposedly declared “God protect me from forks.” The fork was still very much a novelty to the English traveler Thomas Coryate when he visited Italy, as recorded in Coryate’s Crudities hastily gobbled up in Five Months’ Travels in France, Italy, &c. (1611):
The Italian, and also most strangers that are commorant in Italy, do always at their meals use a little fork, when they cut their meat. For while with their knife which they hold in one hand they cut the meat out of the dish, they fasten their fork, which they hold in their other hand, upon the same dish, so that whatsoever he be that sitting in the company of any others at meal, should unadvisedly touch the dish of meat with his fingers, from which all at the table do cut, he will give occasion of offense unto the company, as having transgressed the laws of good manners...
Coryate himself was credited with introducing the fork to England, and was as a consequence nicknamed Furcifer, Latin for “fork-bearer” (and also “rascal”). At first the English fork only had two tines, but the increasing tendency of English cuisine to smaller and daintier morsels led to the necessity of adding a third tine.
1341
The Boar’s Head Feast. The Queen’s College at Oxford was founded by Robert de Eglesfield, chaplain to Philippa of Hainault, queen consort of Edward III. One of the college’s more celebrated traditions is the annual Boar’s Head Gaudy, a feast held at Christmastime and said by William Henry Husk, in his Songs of the Nativity Being Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern (1868), to be:
...a commemoration of an act of valor performed by a student of the college, who, while walking in the neighboring forest of Shotover and reading Aristotle, was suddenly attacked by a wild boar. The furious beast came open-mouthed upon the youth, who, however, very courageously, and with a happy presence of mind, thrust the volume he was reading down the boar’s throat, crying, “Græcum est,” [with the compliments of the Greeks] and fairly choked the savage with the sage.
At the Queen’s College feast, a boar’s head is brought into the hall, with a solo singer and choir singing the Boar’s Head Carol. Many other places hold Boar’s Head Feasts at Christmas, a tradition going back to the pagan Norsemen, who would sacrifice a boar to the goddess Freyja at the winter solstice. This is thought to be the origin of the traditional ham that many families still eat alongside their turkey at Christmas.
1346
From Poor Knights to Eggy Bread. After the Battle of Crécy, many English knights who had been captured by the French were obliged to sell their estates to raise the ransom demanded for their release. Returning home in penury, they were given a pension and living quarters at Windsor Castle by Edward III, who established for them a new chivalric order called the Poor Knights of Windsor. By a process that remains obscure, this name also came to be applied to what the Germans call arme Ritter (“poor knights”) and the English call French toast (known as German toast until the First World War, and then patriotically renamed in honor of Britain’s principal ally in the conflict). The earliest recorded use of the English term “poor knights” for French toast dates from 1659 (see below). The French themselves call this pain perdu (“lost bread”), recognizing that it is the best thing to do with “lost” (i.e., stale) bread; while under the British Raj in India it was called hurry-scurry or Bombay pudding.
* * *
A Recipe for Poor Knights
The following recipe for “poor knights” (what we now call French toast or eggy bread) comes from The Compleat Cook, an anonymous work published in 1659:
To make Poor Knights, cut two penny loaves in round slices.
Dip them in half a pint of cream, or fair water, then lay them abroad in a dish, and beat three eggs and grated nutmegs and sugar, beat them with the cream.
Then melt some butter in a frying-pan, and wet the sides of the toast and lay them on the wet side, then pour in the rest upon them, and so fry them.
Serve them in with rosewater, sugar and butter.
* * *
1348
Salmon from the Grave. The word “gravlax” is first mentioned in a record from this year, in the form of a man from Jämtland in central Sweden called Olafauer Gravlax. He presumably made his living by preparing gravlax, a word derived from the Swedish grav, “grave,” and lax, “salmon.” Traditionally, gravlax was made by burying salted salmon in a hole in the ground (the grav), covering it with birch bark and stones and allowing it to ferment for up to a week, so that the flesh was soft enough to eat raw. Today, gravlax is prepared without burial, the salmon being divided into two fillets; one is placed in a dish skin side down, scattered with dill, salt, sugar, and white peppercorns; then the other fillet is placed on top of the first, skin side up, and topped with a weighted board. Every few hours, the fillets are turned and basted in the expressed juices; the gravlax is ready in three days.
1350
Reheated Pies and Plagues of Flies. In London, a bylaw forbade cookshops from charging more than a penny for a rabbit pasty. Other regulations included bans on buying meat more than a day old, and a prohibition on the reheating of pies—a stipulation ignored by Roger, the eponymous cookshop proprietor of Chaucer’s “Cook’s Tale.” In the Prologue to this unfinished story from the Canterbury Tales, the Host berates Roger for serving up reheated Jack-of-Dover (a kind of pie, or possibly a fish):
Now telle on, Roger; looke that it be good,
For many a pastee hastow laten blood,
And many a Jakke of Dovere hastow soold
That hath been twies hoot and twies coold.
Of many a pilgrym hastow Cristes curs,
For of thy percely yet they fare the wors,
That they han eten with thy stubbel goos,
For in thy shoppe is many a flye loos.
[Now tell on, Roger; look that it be good,
For of many a pastry hast thou drawn out the gravy,
And many a Jack of Dover hast thou sold
That has been twice hot and twice cold.
Of many a pilgrim hast thou Christ’s curse,
For of thy parsley yet they fare the worse,
Which they have eaten with thy stubble-fed goose,
For in thy shop is many a fly loose.]
The Parmesan Mountain. In the collection of tales known as The Decameron, the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio conjured up a particularly Italianate Land of Plenty:
There is a mountain made entirely of grated Parmesan. Standing at the top of it are people who do nothing else but make macaroni and ravioli, cook them in capon broth, and then throw them down the slopes. The more you take the more you get.
Parmesan cheese was first mentioned in the thirteenth century by a monk in Parma called Adamo Salimbene, and by 1568, a Dominican called Bartolomeo Scappi was declaring in his cookbook that Parmesan was the finest cheese in the world. This was a verdict shared by Samuel Pepys, who, during the Great Fire of London in 1666, buried his Parmesan cheese together with his wine and other valuables in order to preserve them from the flames. The cheese’s high reputation continues, and a recent survey showed that chunks of Parmesan are the most frequently shoplifted items in Italian supermarkets.
1357
Pardoned for Fasting. In his Book of Days (1862–4), Robert Chambers gives the following account of a remarkable fast:
In Rymer’s Faedera, there is a rescript of King Edward III, having reference to a woman named Cecilia, the wife of John de Rygeway, who had been put up in Nottingham jail for the murder of her husband, and there had remained mute and abstinent from meat and drink for forty days, as had been represented to the king on fully trustworthy testimony; for which reason, moved by piety, and for the glory of God and the Blessed Virgin, to whom the miracle was owing, his grace was pleased to grant the woman a pardon. The order bears date the 25th of April, in the 31st year of the king’s reign, equivalent to AD 1357.
circa 1390
Swan Served in Its Own Blood. “A fat swan loved he best of any roost.” So wrote Chaucer of his Monk in the Canterbury Tales, indicating that this man of God liked his luxuries—for swan was the most expensive bird to eat in the Middle Ages. The preferred mode of serving swan was with a black sauce made from the bird’s own finely chopped guts cooked in its blood. To reduce the “fishy” taste of the meat, the birds were sometimes fed with oats prior to slaughter.
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A Coq d’Or on a Gilded Pig
The French royal cook Guillaume Tirel (circa 1310–95), known as Taillevent, is credited with compiling a collection of recipes called Le Viandier, the earliest manuscript of which dates from 1395. Presentation and dramatic impact were often as important as taste, as attested by the following “gilded dish,” a “subtlety” intended for a feast day.
Helmeted Cocks
Roast some pigs, and poultry such as cocks and old hens.
When the pig is roasted on the one hand, and the chicken on the other, stuff the chicken (without skinning it, if you wish), and [glaze] it with beaten egg batter.
When it is glazed, set it riding on the pig with a helm of glued paper, and with a lance fixed at the breast of the chicken.
Cover them with gold or silver leaf for the lords, or with white, red or green tin leaf [for those of lower rank].
By Ian Crofton in "A Curious History of Food and Drink", Quercus, New York/London, 2014, excerpts chapter 3. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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