Class for the June 2020 session of University of Atlantia.
Some of the bigger restaurant and home cooking trends over the last decade, no matter the cuisine is has been the emphasis on locally sourced, organic, non-GMO, and seasonal ingredients, organic if possible. Outside of the US this has been the standard for hundreds of years. Period cookbooks and household manual address this directly or indirectly when discussing the ingredients. Modernly we have interstate trucking, refrigerators and freezers to give us high quality food year-round.
Two of the trends are easy to compare, organic and non-GMO. They did not have modern chemical fertilizers and pesticides that cause things to become non organic. As for GMO or not the modern usage is for lab created modifications. If you want to count selective breeding as genetic modification you can remove the non-GMO label. But since breeding for traits pre-Mendel in the 19th Century was not a scientific process; I would call period crops and domestic meat sources non-GMO. I tried looking into period breeding practices on sheep and cattle and found in my initial cursory search that not much evidence exists as to breed specifics. It is logical to assume that farmers bred animals that produced more and/or better quality meat, milk and in the case of sheep and goats wool but I haven’t found evidence of that in a systematic way, yet. I would also think that they would prefer breeding animals with better behavioral traits.
In the “Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi” originally published in 1570 Scappi lists the season for meat, poultry, vegetables, and sea food. He does frequently say that even out of season many of the ingredients are available in Rome. For example when discussing cuttlefish: “ Their proper season begins in January and last to the end of march; in Venice and Rome they are found almost anytime.” (pg 316) I went through the book and made a six sheet workbook laying out the ingredients he mentions in the Opera and the months that he says the ingredients are available.
In Cindy Renfrow’s, “Take a Thousand Eggs or More” a translation of 15th Century English manuscripts there are a number of examples. Volume 1, pages 124-5 for Bukenade says, “Take fresh flesh, whatever it is” and on pages 142-3 for Egredouncye it says, “Take pork or beef, whether thee like.” These are just two examples. While not as specific as Scappi as to what season the dishes should be cooked using the info from Scappi you can see the these can be interpreted as seasonal. Scappi says that beef is in season from May through September and pork from November through February. Granted Italy and England have separate climates and the books are a century apart but I think that the idea conveys.
You can use the information in Scappi to help construct harmonious dishes and menus. Since fresh beef is in season from May through September as mentioned above, and Turkish or hard squash is in season from October through April you wouldn’t want to serve them together most of the year. You could stretch from mid-April to mid-May or mid-September through mid-October but the results might not be as tasty. But, unless the weather allowed the seasons to overlap would they have been served together? I suppose it would depend on who was doing the cooking and eating in addition to the exact local area where the seasons might be slightly different. Scappi was cook to a Cardinal and two Popes, for those tables only best would do. For a country household you would not throw away food. A country landowner might need to eat something slightly out of season if that was available. Tossing food just because it wasn’t exactly in season would be wasteful.
Scappi included the months that various foods were in season. Other cook books included seasonal menus that guided the reader then and now as to what foods and meals were appropriate when. Slightly post period, William Rabisha in “The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected” (Prospect Books, 2003) had “bills of fare” for “flesch” and “fast” days for each season. “Flesch” and “fast” days were determined by the Catholic Church. “The French Cook,” by Francois Pierre La Varenne (IDG, 1653, Southover, 2001) has both seasonal, Lenten, recipes and recipes for general fish and flesh days.
Robert May’s, “The Accpmplisht Cook” (Prospect Books, 2000) included menus for specific days, New Year’s and All Saint’s Days as two examples. While some of the proteins and sides were similar there were many differences between the seasons. Many of the sauces and condiments such as mustards were common across the seasons. The recipes in “Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book” by Hilary Spurling takes seasonality even farther by dividing the recipes into the months that they should be prepared.
In my translation of the 1575 edition of “A Proper newe boke of Cookery”, Anonymous I noticed both types of timing. In the introduction there is references to Church seasons. There is a recipe called, “To make a stewed broth for capons, mutton, beef, or for any hot meat, and also a broth for all manner of fresh fish,” and another called, “A Pike sauce for a Pike, Bream, Perch, Roche, Carp, Eels, Flukes and all Manner of Brook Fish.” Both of these recipes are able to be used throughout the year based on what is available, similar to the Egredouynce recipe mentioned above.
Cookbooks aren’t the only sources of information. In “The Boke of Keruynge” Wynken de Worde (Southover Press 2003) took seasonal menus and Church seasons even farther. There are sections titled “Here begins the feast from Pentecost until midsummer,” “from the feats of Saint John the Baptist until Michaelmas,” and “from the Feast of Saint Michael until the feast of Christmas” among others.
Another type of book that we can reference is the household manual. These manuals included, in addition to recipes, instructions on how the medieval or renaissance woman was expected to run her household, generally according to her husband’s preferences. “The Good Wife’s Guide”, Le Menagier de Paris (Cornell, 2009) is a French manual written in several articles/sections to the author’s wife. In section 2.2 Horticulture the author explains not only when to plant different vegetables but also when to eat them. For example: “April: Nota that throughout the months of April and May you plant the green vegetables that are eaten in June and July.” There are also instructions on topping the summer vegetables leaving their roots in the ground so they can put out shoots the next year. The author also mixes calendar months and Church dates, “you need to sow green vegetables from April to St. Mary Magdalene’s Day”. In section 2.4 Menus he not only talks about menus for flesh and fish days he also discusses how to tell the age of different types of meat and how many cuts of meat you can get from different parts of various animals and how much they should cost.
“The English Housewife” by Gervase Markhm (McGill-Queens, 1998, 2003) follows in the pattern of “The Good Wife’s Guide” by dividing the household duties into related sections. Section 2, Of Cookery starts with a discussion of herbs and went to plant them describing things to be planted in the new moon in each month from February through August. In the description of feasts later in the section he states for a more humble feast, “It must hold limitation with his provision and the season of the year; for summer affords what winter wants, and winter is master of that which summer can with but difficulty have”. Which is a direct instruction to cook seasonally. Markham covers more than cooking in his manual, Section 5, “On Wool, Hemp, Flax and Cloth” states that you should break up the ground at the end of February and again at the end of April when you would then sow the hemp and flax. In Section 6, “Of Dairies…” it states that the best time for a cow to calf is the latter end of March into April because the increase in Spring grass will have the greatest increase in the amount of milk. It then discusses what to do with calves born in other parts of the year.
Sir Hugh Plat’s 1609 treatise, “Delights for Ladies) (University Press, Oxford 1948), which is not at true household manual but a book of household recipes, does not specifically mention seasons or timing, but, like “Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books” referenced in Cindy Renfow’s “Take a Thousand Eggs or More” above there are recipes that have different main ingredients mentions such as quinces and damsons (a type of plum). There are also recipes that mention things like mutton broth. Older sheep are harvested in the fall so they don’t have to be fed over winter after their productive years so broth from their bones would be a fall to early winter item. If it was a recipe to be made all year round then a more generic “meat broth” would probably have been specified.
Ann Hagen in “A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Food Processing and Consumption”, (Anglo Saxon Books, 1992) talks about regional and seasonal variations. She distinguishes between coastal districts and those near freshwater rivers and lakes. Also mentioned was the types of grain grown in different regions of the country. She talks about seasonal shortages and diets though she also states that some wild plants may have been eaten though they probably would not have been mentioned in the writings. She talks of mutton being available by Michaelmas and pork, sprats and smelts by Hallowmas. It is mentioned that male slaves got two sheep carcasses and one cow, female slaves got one sheep or three pence for winter food. They were also given a sester of beans for Lent and whey in summer. They also received food at Christmas, Easter and the harvest. They also had a strip of land to grow their own food and the herders had milk from their animals.
In “Cooking and Dining in Tudor and Early Stuart England” (Prospect 2015) Peter Brears discusses the regionality and locality of brewing. He mentions types from Hull, Eastbourne, Holborn and Yorkshire as professionally brewed ales that may be brought in as required, but, “were found to be more expensive and suspect than their home-brewed equivalents”. He states that to avoid these issues and “to provide the ales and beers best suited to their particular tastes, budgets, and needs most households of whatever size and status preferred to brew at home.” I would suspect that brews might only be imported to cater to the tastes of distinguished visitors. Breads were also done regionally. In the chapter on the bakehouse he discusses Jannocks which were a thick unleavened oatcake made in the counties of Northern England from “the Border down to Cheshire, Derbyshire, and Yorkshire”. Of course food availability was partially dependent on class. He states that the gentry having both city houses and country estates ate similar food, both locally grown and imported, at either residence probably because they could send things between the two.
Getting back to production methods that are coming back, or have never gone away, Volker Bach, in “The Kitchen, Food, and Cooking in Reformation Germany” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) discusses production practices in German villages. These villages had communal fields which were farmed in two or three field rotation. In addition to the communal grain fields there was shared pasture land, and households had to contribute to both fieldwork and pastures. They also generally had small garden plots for fruits and vegetables. If there was room for three fields, they were rotated on a three-year plan. One would be left fallow as pasture so it could recover, I would guess the animal droppings helped with this. The next would have a winter grain sown for a summer harvest, such as rye, wheat or spelt. The third would be sown with oats or barley in the spring to be harvested in late summer.
Originally milk cows and oxen used for tilling were slaughtered for meat after their productive years were done. However, Volker states that by 1500 large scale cattle drives from Jutland, Frisia and Hungary were taken place with some butchers maintaining their own herds to let the animals gain weight after the long drive. This is similar to the cattle drives up to Kansas City and St. Louis and the large stockyards their before modern refrigerated transport.
Depending on the location and the wealth of the person grains were grown either on private fields on communal fields. In more rural areas and towns people had their own fruit and vegetable gardens. So, with food coming from village or town fields and household gardens fruits and vegetables were certainly local. For much of the time, except for situations like the examples listed above, meat was also local. Since they didn’t have genetic engineering labs and pesticide plants these local foods were non GMO and organic. Based on the evidence, much of the cooking was seasonal, preparing the food when is was in season at its peak.
Not mentioned at the beginning because I don’t think it is quite as large a trend is food preservation whether it is curing meats and sausages by drying or smoking, extending the life of vegetables by pickling or other fermentation methods or making milk last longer by making butter or cheese. All of these methods have been mentioned in the books mentioned above from Anglo-Saxon times through Tudor and Early Stuart. These preservation methods are very applicable to our life in the SCA. Elizabeth Cook, wife of Duke Cariadoc of the Bow wrote a paper years ago called “Camping Without a Cooler” on how they go the Pennsic without using coolers by making and preserving their own food. http://daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/Articles/Camping%20without%20a%20cooler.html However this is a topic that needs its own class, that will happen at a future University.
Bach, Volker. The Kitchen, Food, and Cooking in Reformation Germany. Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.
Brears, Peter C. D. Cooking and Dining in Tudor and Early Stuart England. Prospect Books, 2015.
Brears, Peter, and Wynkyn de. Worde. The Boke of Keruynge: (The Book of Carving). Southover, 2003.
De La Varenne François Pierre, et al. The French Cook. Southover Press, 2001.
Greco, Gina L., and Christine M. Rose. The Good Wife’s Guide: Le Ménagier De Paris: a Medieval Household Book. Cornell University Press, 2009.
Hagen, Ann. A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Food: Processing and Consumption. Anglo-Saxon Books, 1992.
Markham, Gervase, and Michael R. Best. The English Housewife Containing the Inward and Outward Virtues Which Ought to Be in a Complete Woman .. McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 2003.
May, Robert. The Accomplisht Cook, or, The Art and Mystery of Cookery. Prospect Books, 2000.
PLAT, Hugh, et al. Delights for Ladies. Crosby Lockwood, 1948.
Rabisha, William. The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected (1661). Prospect, 2003.
Renfrow, Cindy. Take a Thousand Eggs or More: a Translation of Medieval Recipes from Harleian MMS. 279 … with over 100 Recipes Adapted for Modern Cookery. Cindy Renfrow, 1998.
Scappi, Bartolomeo, and Terence Scully. The Opera of Bartolomeo Scappi (1570): L’arte Et Prudenza D’un Maestro Cuoco (Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library). University of Toronto Press, 2008.
Spurling, Hilary, and Elinor Fettiplace. Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book: Elizabethan Country House Cooking. Viking Penguin, 1986.
Æduin of Skye 