Fish were among the most important food items in me- dieval and Renaissance house- holds, both poor and wealthy, primarily because of the restric- tions on meat and animal prod- ucts during Lent and on various fasting days throughout the cal- endar. Except for people who lived near the sea or near freshwater lakes, fresh fish, because of the demand, were generally too expensive for anyone but the rich. It is also clear that certain species were preferred on elegant tables, sturgeon above all, but also eels and a variety of light-textured and white-fleshed fish, such as flounder and carp. In most households, and es- pecially those inland, they would have eaten dried or salted cod, pickled herrings, or sardines.
Fish was normally cooked, whether boiled or roasted, with ingredients thought to dry its excessively moist and therefore unhealthy flesh. Acidic ingredients were also thought to help cut through the “gluey humors” and thus make them more digestible. Using lemon juice on fish may origi- nate in this medicinal logic. Otherwise, cooking fish was quite different from today, and rather than accentuate the flavor with sauces based on fish stock, the idea was to add sharp-tasting ingredients that would con- trast with the flavor of the fish. Dairy products were rarely used with fish, for the very reason that they are both cold and moist and this was thought to create a dangerous combination, likely to upset a person’s humoral balance.
Vegetables
Vegetables were nearly as important as fish for fast days, and of course the poorer the household the greater proportion of the average meal would be made up of vegetables such as cabbage and turnips as well as various legumes. They do not figure prominently in some cookbooks, except when baked in pies. Presumably cooks only needed directions for complicated procedures, but not for simple preparations. The exception to this is in Italy and Spain, where vegetables of all kinds were highly esteemed. Nonetheless, many veg- etables do not appear in cookbooks because they were served as salads or were prepared simply. This is the case with artichokes and asparagus, which were among the most highly prized vegetables. In Italy they were also served separate from the main courses in their own course as “fruits.” The recipes for vegetables that do exist, in any case, show that they were not regarded as lowly food and were eaten everywhere in Europe, even in places where meat took center stage in a meal.
Starches
Although bread provided the bulk of starchy calories for most Europeans, there were also other dishes commonly made of wheat, barley, and other grains. In England the pudding was standard. This was not a sweet creamy dessert, but a starch or in fact any ingredient, cooked in an intestine or stomach. Pasta featured prominently in Italian cooking throughout these centuries and everywhere boiled whole or crushed grains were a staple. Rice was something relatively new, usually cooked with sugar, but eaten as a side dish nonetheless.
Eggs
Eggs were possibly the most ubiquitous food in European cuisine of the past and were eaten by people of every social class at any meal. Eggs were never considered common or pedestrian, but rather one of the most healthy and convenient foods available. They were often given to sick people as a restorative as well. Furthermore, as a seemingly exhaustible resource, hens in a coop must have been an extremely common sight, far more com- mon than a chicken on the table. Eggs feature prominently in cooking, as a thickener for sauces and as the preferred binding agent for stuffing and fill- ings, and egg yolks were sometimes added just to make a dish golden and richer. They are also included in many pies and tarts—relatives of what we
would call custards and quiches. Some cookbooks include eggs in practically every dish. The repertoire of egg recipes was no less extensive than our own, perhaps even more so. Old food reference books even distinguish between subtle differences in the texture of cooked eggs, from “drinkable,” to soft- boiled or “trembling,” to hard-boiled, not to men- tion poached, fried, scrambled, coddled, stirred into soups, roasted and even threaded onto a spit and cooked before a fire. Even more amazing is a recipe that instructs how to make one egg as big as twenty that involves cooking the yolks in a bladder and then placing that in the center of the whites in a larger vessel to cook.
Along with eggs, dairy products were an important staple in Europe- an cooking. This was particularly the case in regions where cattle were raised. Dairy products were featured more prominently in cookbooks in the sixteenth century and thereafter, probably because cattle rearing be- came especially profitable as the population grew, demand increased, and it became more cost-effective to leave land for pasture than to rent it to tenants. Cheese is found in recipes throughout the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, and some cheeses were already known by name, parmigiano being the most famous, but there were many others as well. Another rea- son why dairy products became more prevalent, according to some histo- rians, is because cooks paid less attention to physicians who warned that hard cheese can be difficult to digest and that milk mixed with meats or seafood can corrupt inside the body, causing stomachaches and various other ailments. Whatever the cause, the use of cream in cooking was un- usual until the very end of the period covered here.
Sauces
Sauces were an integral and essential part of the art of cookery in the past. Sometimes they were poured over a dish before service but often were presented in several little bowls scattered around the table that din- ers could choose from to suit their taste. Unlike today, sauces were rarely based on butter or cream. More often they were sour vinegar– or verjuice- based, thickened with bread crumbs and intended to contrast in flavor with the main dish. They were almost always heavily spiced as well, or laden with garlic and herbs. Rarely were they made from the same ingredi- ent as the food being sauced, and the stock-based sauce thickened with a combination of flour and butter or a roux is an invention of the latter sev-
kitchens. Thick, fat-based sauces like mayonnaise and hollandaise were also missing. Sometimes a sauce would be based on drippings, often from a roasting fowl or joint of meat, or broth would be included, but to these were often added spices and sour ingredients along with sugar. So these sauces were very different from what we think of as gravy today. Fortu- nately, most sauces were very simple to make and required a last-minute combination of a few staple ingredients. Some, however, were closer to what we think of as jellies and jams, sweetened and fruit-based and of- ten more like an Indian chutney than a European sauce. Cranberry sauce with turkey is perhaps a remnant of an archaic type of sauce, for which American ingredients have been substituted. One might say, though, that Americans eat this more as a side dish than a sauce. Mint sauce with lamb is also a descendant of these sauces, as is an Italian pesto.
The change from medieval to modern sauces was not abrupt, though. Butter increasingly made its way into European cookery in the sixteenth century. Spices slowly went out of favor thereafter and sugar gradually re- placed many of the more sour sauces. But it does seem that when compar- ing medieval sauces with modern ones, they are startlingly different. For example, we rarely add coloring to our sauces, sweet spices like cinnamon and cloves we prefer in desserts, and a sweetened sauce on fish leaves us perplexed. These flavors will seem very foreign to us, but they are certainly worth trying, especially since you can make several and avoid those you might not like.
Fruit
Recipes for fruit appear much less frequently in old cookbooks than those for meat, fowl, and other ingredients. This is partly because most fruits were usually consumed fresh and needed no recipe. In Italy in particular there was an entire course dedicated just to fruit, although this was broadly defined to include items such as olives and artichokes. When recipes are offered they are usually for fruit pies, which could be eaten anywhere in a meal, or for conserves and candied fruit, which normally came at the very end of the meal. Fruit was also often cooked with other foods, raisins or prunes along with meats, grapes with fowl, and in many other surprising and interesting combinations.
Wealthy diners definitely did eat and appreciate a wide variety of fruits, even though physicians often warned against the dangers of eating too many fruits, or taking them in the wrong part of a meal. In fact, a long-standing argument among physicians concerned when to eat such corruptible fruits as melons and peaches. Some contended that at the beginning of a meal the fruit
would be forced into the liver and veins by other food before it was fully digested, causing clogs in the body and fevers. Others insisted that fruits eat- en at the end of the meal would float on top of other foods, corrupting and sending noxious fumes up to the head. This is why they generally recommended drinking wine or other alcoholic beverages with fruit, to act as a preservative in the stomach.
Despite these warnings, it is clear that people ate fruits whenever they pleased, both at the be- ginning and toward the end of the meal, just before sweets. They also consumed an extremely wide va- riety of fruits, many of which are relatively unfa- miliar today. Small sour and wild varieties such as azaroles, medlars, and various berries were cooked or made into jelly. Dried fruits such as dates, rai- sins, and figs, along with citrus, at least in the north, were usually imported and were considered among the most valuable and elegant of foods.
Sweets
Sweet foods that we would normally eat only at the end of a meal or as a snack were customarily eaten throughout the meal in the Middle Ages and Renaissance—as well as at the end. This explains why sweet dishes are scattered throughout this book. Not only was sugar added to foods that we would probably not consider edible sweetened, but sugar was one the most valuable and desired products in elite cookery and by the sixteenth century was practically ubiquitous. A good proportion of recipes in most cookbooks were sweetened regardless of the main ingredient. There were nonetheless many sweet foods served at the end of a meal that filled exactly the same function as desserts do today. Comfits, or small candies such as sugar-coated spices or preserved fruits, were very fashionable to close a banquet. Confus- ingly, many of these fruit conserves we would expect to find at the breakfast table.
Drinks
References to drinks are rare in cookbooks of the Middle Ages and Re- naissance. This makes sense as the most common beverages required no cooking and were totally outside the responsibilities of the cook. A separate
mixed with water. Wine was the beverage of choice for elite households everywhere, especially sweet imported wines from the Mediterranean, such as malmsey or malvasia and sack—what we today call sherry. Many of these wines are still made today, Madeira being a good example of a wine made much the same way as it was in the past. There were also local wines of ev- ery color, made on estates and monasteries throughout Europe, and in fact there were far more wineries in Northern Europe than there are today. Most of the major wine regions of Europe were exactly the same as those still producing wines. For example, Bordeaux already had a brisk export trade in wine. Some vineyards in Italy, Spain, and France had been producing wine since antiquity.
Water was not typically drunk by those who could afford to do otherwise. There is a very good reason for this: most water was polluted and could carry a whole array of pathogens. There were no efficient purification sys- tems, and most people got water directly from a well or running stream. Alcoholic beverages were much safer to drink as the antiseptic property of alcohol kills many germs. This may be why wine was usually mixed with water—not to make the wine weaker, but to make the water safer. People certainly understood the dangers of drinking water, and even though they knew nothing about germs, physicians recommended that water be boiled.
Ale and, by the fifteenth century, beer flavored with hops were also com- mon in Northern Europe. So too was cider in various pockets throughout Europe—in the west of England, in Normandy, and in places in Spain. Cider, made from small hard and astringent apples, had a relatively low alcohol- ic content and was mostly consumed by common folk rather than nobles. Mead or various flavored versions of honey wine also came in and out of fashion throughout the period covered here, and recipes do sometimes ap- pear in guides to household management and other culinary literature.
Far more frequently, though, there are recipes for what we might call flavored wines. Contrary to today when the idea of adding anything to wine (especially water) seems abhorrent, in the past, spices and herbs enhanced the value of wine. Mulled wine is the sole surviving descendant of literally dozens of flavored aromatic wines of the Middle Ages.
The late Middle Ages also witnessed the introduction of distillation, and a whole separate subgenre of how to make and flavor alcohol flourished, espe- cially after the advent of printing. The ancestors of many of the liqueurs and spirits found on shelves today were already made by the sixteenth century. Alcohol flavored with juniper berries, a rudimentary gin, grain-based vod- ka in Eastern Europe, and not long after the discovery of the New World, rum, were all eventually common drinks. Aqua Vitae—or the water of life (in Gaelic usque beatha or whiskey) was the first distilled spirit, made from wine, and was used primarily as medicine, but eventually recreationally as well. In Dutch it was called brantwijn—from which we get the word
brandy. In culinary literature, however, more typical are sweetened aperitifs and cordials, flavored with herbs, flowers, fruit, and even exotic spices.
The recipes for drinks in each section can be made with de-alcoholized wine if one likes, or with juice. As it is illegal to distill alcohol at home, recipes for spirits have not been included, only those that require adding flavorings or cooking wine. Also included are a few recipes for correcting faults in wine, apparently something that happened frequently enough to warrant comment.