Forme Over Function

With a new term and new students, I find myself answering a great deal of questions about What Life Was Like in the Middle Ages. Because the students appear to be sober, thoughtful types, these are usually questions on the practice of religion, the legal status of women, and popular views of history. Aside from the occasional treat – ‘How much of Game of Thrones is real?’, not in itself a bad question – the tone of our classes is rather serious, and thus my leisure time has to be given over to burning cultural inquiries like ‘Were medieval people drunk all the time?’

It’s a matter of great historical import, probably. As any fule kno, alcohol kills bacteria and is therefore safer to drink than pond water, whatever current NHS guidelines might say. Calorie-rich and alcohol-low small beer would have been both nourishing and tolerably hygienic. But would it really get people drunk? In the past, I’ve written about feasts and the blow-out on expensive, imported wines that these entailed. These may have caused some stinking hangovers but are by no means common. Yet medieval depictions of drunkenness abound, from manuscript images of vomiting and bar-brawls, to the chaos of Holofernes’ banquet in the Old English Judith:

                    Ða wearð Holofernus,

goldwine gumena,     on gytesalum,

hloh ond hlydde,     hlynede ond dynede,

þæt mihten fira bearn     feorran gehyran

hu se stiðmoda     styrmde ond gylede,

modig ond medugal,     manode geneahhe

bencsittende     þæt hi gebærdon wel.

Swa se inwidda     ofer ealne dæg

dryhtguman sine     drencte mid wine,

swiðmod sinces brytta,     oðþæt hie on swiman lagon,

oferdrencte his duguðe ealle,     swylce hie wæron deaðe geslegene,

agotene goda gehwylces.

[‘Then Holofernes, the gold-giving friend of his men, became joyous from the drinking. He laughed and grew vociferous, roared and clamoured, so that the children of men could hear from far away how the fierce one stormed and yelled; arrogant and excited by mead, he frequently admonished the guests that they enjoy themselves well. So, for the entire day, the wicked one, the stern dispenser of treasures, drenched his retainers with wine until they lay unconscious; the whole of his troop were as drunk as if they had been struck down in death, drained of every ability.’ Ed. and trans. by Elaine Treharne]

As you may know, Holofernes suffers no hangover because he wakes up dead.

Moral disapproval of drunkenness in the period flows at least in part from its association with the deadly sin of Gula, gluttony. William Langland does not record whether the ensuing bacon sandwich is to be counted as the same sin as the earlier pints, so my investigations have taken on a new urgency since I discovered in The Forme of Cury what can only be described as hangover food of the highest order. Owing to a Europe-wide shortage of potatoes in the Middle Ages, I can but assume that such delights as Malaches of pork filled the social and dietary function of a carton of cheesy chips. So, just in case my students begin to ask more flippant questions, I cooked it.

 

Malaches of pork (The Forme of Cury).

Hewe pork al to pecys and medle it with ayren and chese igrated. Do þerto powdour fort, safroun and pynes with salt. Make a crust in a trap; bake it wel þerinne, and serue it forth.

I bought minced pork, because I’m lazy, but made my own shortcrust pastry, with which I untidily lined a shallow round tin. With 500g of pork, I mixed in 4 medium eggs (beaten) and about 50g of grated cheddar, which in retrospect was not enough. My powdour fort recipe was somewhat vague, and consisted of:

• ½ tsp ground ginger
• ½ tsp ground mace
• ½ tsp ground black pepper
• ½ tsp ground nutmeg

I mixed it into the pork-egg-cheese along with about 50g of pine nuts. Saffron is expensive and it was nobody’s birthday. I then spread the pork mix evenly into the pastry-lined tin, and put it in a 190°C oven for 45 minutes. It was served forth with the old favourite spynoches yfryed (as before).

Ȝum.

Reader, it was delicious. My friend Jen, who took the photograph, heartily agreed, and neither of us was even hungover. It had the attitude of a Chicago deep pan pizza, if Chicago were in the North East of England. I wonder whether more cheese may have given it an oozy, stringing consistency whilst hot, but the leftovers were pleasant enough cold. The spice was warming, not overwhelming, the pine nuts exceeded themselves; even the saffron (which, you will recall, I did not use) was apt. We had it with a Provençal rosé of which Richard II might have approved. My blood vessels have yet to recover.

All of which rather side-tracked me. For how can I answer a serious cultural question about medieval drunkenness with an anecdote about a time I made a really nice tart? How can I teach the literature of Ricardian England when I’m thinking about the unexpected pleasure of a hypothetical royal hangover? Who is Epicurus owene sone, and how can I meet him?

Next week: The peasants threaten to revolt when the bakery moves across the channel.

Pigging Out

‘I wish I could turn out that moral voice inside me that says eating animals is murder, but I guess I’m just not as strong as you are.’
‘That’s because you need protein.’

It’s likely that the default dietary setting in the Middle Ages was vegetarian or near-vegetarian, since unless you lived by the sea meat would have been expensive to buy and probably illegal to hunt. Stringently enforced forest laws in England and Wales, though perhaps not as draconian as Walter Scott would have us believe, made poaching an extremely risky enterprise to peasant labourers. Rivers were often subject to similar prerogative laws, and it is well known that certain animals – swans, sturgeons and whales – were the exclusive preserve of the monarch. Small landholders may have kept food animals such as pigs, but the staple diet of your average English medieval peasant would have mainly consisted of pulse-based stews or pottages and rye or barley bread.

Peasants tended not to keep recipe books, and these therefore emphatically do not reflect what the peasantry would have eaten. Richard II, at whose court The Forme of Cury was written, ate a great deal of meat, and on days when meat was precluded by Church dietary laws, he would eat fish. So when I proposed cooking from The Forme of Cury this week and was alerted to a guest’s longstanding vegetarianism, I considered that we might have a problem. The book contains about 200 recipes. 83 of these contain no meat or optional meat (or lard), although far fewer also contain no dairy or egg. Only 12 of these recipes can be considered main courses: the bulk of the 83 are puddings, sauces and sides, with two recipes for spiced wine, and of course the seventeen sauces themselves were to be served with meat. Many of these tentatively vegetarian recipes still require ‘broth’, which was most likely made from animal bones. An example:

Ryse of flessh

Take ryse and waisshe hem clene, and do hem in an erthen pot with gode broth and lat hem seeþ wel. Aftirward take almaund mylke and do þerto, and colour it wiþ safroun & salt, & messe forth.

To cut a very long story short, this is risotto made with meat stock. Heston Blumenthal does a version of it at his restaurant Dinner with calf tail, but I was consigned to using vegetable stock. A perfectly adequate, if un-Ricardian, side dish, it will come as no surprise that it tastes far better with flessh than without.

Would you like some meat with your meat?

One of the guests was lactose intolerant, so the holistic vegetarian-ness of the evening was scuppered by the fact that, like in Alpine France, there are literally no main recipes in The Forme of Cury that contain neither cheese nor meat. So on the no-dairy side, we had the ominously named tartes of flessh, and on the no-meat side, an adaptation of rauioles, an early pasta dish that I made with eggy bread. We had several vegetable side-dishes made with meatless broth, and (super-anachronistic) fro-yo after a fourteenth-century fruit recipe, which was described as ‘Christmas on a stick’. This may be the greatest compliment I have ever received.

Medieval food is obviously a gimmick (albeit one of academic interest to me), so one can hardly read ones dietary behaviour in what one prepares. Nonetheless, the sheer difficulty of assembling a meal without meat was jarring. I eat meat, although I know there are many ethical and medical reasons not to. What struck me as particularly odd about The Forme of Cury in the context of current social discourse on food is that meat, sugar and salt were formerly undeniable status symbols; we now hear both that meat, sugar and salt are the most problematic excesses in a modern western diet, and that healthy eating has become the preserve of the economic elite.

In general, we eat far too much meat. Much of this no doubt stems from the industrialisation of livestock farming, but it is a curious irony that the diet of a medieval peasant, consisting mainly of lentils and rye, should now be associated with organic-cashmere trustafarians and pushy middle-class parents. The colossally unsustainable production and consumption of meat is a far cry from the careful stocking of fishponds for a tiny ruling class, but is it really much more democratic? From Jamie’s School Dinners to horsemeat lasagne, we are under no illusion that the budget meat we demand from supermarkets may be nothing of the sort, and all the while rare and expensive foods are still sought by those who can afford them, as happened with spices in ancient and medieval Europe, with pineapples in the Early Modern period, and with extravagantly bland river fish in The Count of Monte Cristo.

Just as the Queen doesn’t have a state banquet every night, perhaps Richard took private meals of porridge and leeks. But it seems unlikely. Few cases of vegetarianism are recorded amongst non-ascetics in the medieval West. Aquinas himself argued that humankind’s divine mandate to care for the beasts of the earth doesn’t forbid eating them. In a circular manner, perhaps God’s Annointed, who would later starve to death in prison, thus had the best available argument to pig out, which it seems he certainly did. This is perhaps the most extravagant recipe in The Forme of Cury:

Cokagrys

Take and make [mincemeat], but do þerto pynes and sugur. Take an hold roste cok; pulle hym & hylde hym al togyder saue þe legges. Take a pigg and hilde hym fro þe myddes dounward; fylle him ful of þe [mincemeat], & sowe hym fast togeder. Do hym in a panne & seeþ hym wel, and whan þei ben isode, do hem on a spyt & rost it wele. Colour it with ȝolkes of ayren and safroun. Lay þeron foyles of gold and of siluer, and serue hit forth.

What’s for dinner? Gout.

Spice Up Your Life

Since beginning to explore the joys of medieval cooking last year, I’ve accrued a large variety of spices and as such have been adding them to almost every meal. The origins of these spices are far-flung: nutmeg and mace from India and the Banda Islands of Indonesia; cloves from the Maluku Islands and Sri Lanka; cinnamon from Sri Lanka and Madagascar; ginger from China and everywhere in-between. The excitement I derive from this makes me wonder whether I am an orientalist pig-dog (thanks, The Guardian), or in fact a bottle of Bombay Sapphire.

Nutritious.

As anyone who has ever played Anno 1404 will be able to confirm, the acquisition of spices is a serious business. The impact of European colonisers throughout the tropics tells its own grisly story, from the Dutch in Indonesia and the Portuguese in Goa to the English, Spanish and French in the Greater Antilles. In the High Middle Ages the market desire for these substances was naturally smaller than in later periods, but was sometimes matched by a curiosity towards their origins. The Frenchman Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Acre in the early thirteenth century, writes several breathless chapters into his Historia orientalis, a chronicle of the Crusades, where he describes the plentiful fruits and spices of his new surroundings:

Sunt in eadem terra arbores mirabiles, quas propter earum praecellentiam nominant arbores paradisi, poma oblonga suauissima, et quasi unctuosa, dulcissimum saporem habentia ferentes: in uno autem globo plusquam centum sese contingentia et compressa inuoluuntur. [There are in that land wondrous trees, who because of their excellence are called trees of paradise, bearing very sweet and almost oily oblong apples which have a very sweet taste; and in one sphere are encased more than a hundred of them, touching and packed in tight.]

It sounds like Jacques is describing a pomegranate. We are also reminded that oranges and lemons, now abundant in Mediterranean Europe, were once exclusive to Asia and novel to the European:

Sunt praeterea alie arbores fructus acidos, pontici videlicet saporis, ex se procreantes, quos appellant Limones. Quorum succo in aestate cum carnibus et piscibus libentissime utuntur. […] In parvis autem arboribus quaedam crescunt alia poma citrina minoris quantitatis frigida, et acidi seu pontici saporis, quae poma Orenges ab indigenis nuncupantur. [Furthermore there are other trees bringing forth from themselves sour fruits, which is to say of tart flavour, which they call lemons, whose juice is very freely used in summer with meat and fish. And on certain small trees there grow other citrus apples, cooling and smaller of size, and with an acid or tart flavour, which are called orange-apples by the locals.]

Delicious.

Jacques’s notions of the harvesting of pepper, for example, are amusingly foolhardy and doubtless derive from a European literary tradition that emphasises the weird over the strictly accurate. As he muses upon cardamom, galangal, zedoary, myrrh and terebinth, he doesn’t exhort his reader to set up trade colonies, but to marvel at the richness of the earth as given them by God. There is, of course, a possessive aspect to his treatment of the Holy Land, since he is in a contested kingdom as an early sort of colonial bishop. But the botanical cornucopia he describes is not for the taking, but for dreaming about. He’d have been a sucker for Bombay Sapphire.

Eat, Drink and Be Merry

Lent, the Gawain poet notes,

fraystes flesch wyth þe fysche and fode more symple.

But if fasting was both a religious and economic necessity in that world, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to the nobility. From surviving recipe books, and indeed from the Gawain poet’s line, the main component of a late-medieval aristocratic fast was simply giving up meat. This is a period, of course, before it was possible to give up chocolate, say, or facebook.

The Forme of Cury provides several parallel recipes for flesshe day and fyssh day, each with much the same array of exotic ingredients: powdered almonds, ginger, saffron. The work’s fish recipes are exotic in and of themselves, with items like furmente with porpeys (dolphin porridge) and laumpreys in galyntyne, a blood-sucking eel roasted on a spit and then simmered in wine with raisins, ginger, cinnamon, cloves and galingale. When the inimitable Clarissa Dickson Wright, who died last week, investigated the Forme of Cury and attempted to cook from it, she noted,

Fish it was for more than half the year, so the chefs had to be very creative. The recipes in Richard’s cookbook detail a huge array of ingredients, and it particularly mentions the jewels of his courtly cuisine: exotic spices.

Period-accurate it may all be, but when I suggested to my homegirl Alex yesterday that I cook a Lenten salmon-and-fig pie after a fifteenth-century recipe, her reaction was less ‘a passinge grete nocioun, ifaith’, more ‘weilawei, Helle no’. In the spirit of proving her wrong, here follows the true account of how we, and the delightful Michael, made the world’s weirdest pie for five people.

 

Tart de ffruyte (BL, Harley MS 4016)

Take figges and seth hem in wyne and grinde hem smale. And take hem vppe into a vessell ; And take pouder peper, Canell, Clowes, Maces, pouder ginger, pynes, grete reysouns of couraunce, saffronne, and salte, and cast thereto ; and þenne make faire lowe coffyns and couche þis stuff thereinne and plonte pynes aboue ; and kut dates and fresh salmonne in faire peces, or ells fresh eles, and parboyle hem a litull in wyne, and couche thereon ; And couche the coffyns faire with þe same paste, and endore the coffynne withoute with saffron & almond mylke ; and set hem in þe ouenne and lete bake.

I bought dried dates and figs, about 700g of skinless, boneless salmon, and pre-rolled short crust pastry – partly because there was no recipe for pastry in the actual recipe, partly because I am lazy. I didn’t feel like buying 500g of raisins (the local Sainsbury’s smallest quantity) only to use a handful, so ignored the raisins. After finely chopping the figs, we simmered them in a covering of white wine for about 20 minutes, and then mashed them with a potato masher. If we hadn’t been in a student kitchen, we might have used a hand-processor.

Getting figgy with it.

In the meantime, I chopped the salmon into inch-long chunks and stoned and quartered the dates, then simmered these in a covering of white wine for five minutes, until the salmon was starting to pale. We drank the rest of the white wine.

Mmm, fish wine.

After adding a half-teaspoon each of powdered white pepper, cinnamon, cloves and ginger, and a few pinches of salt, to the fig mixture, Alex and Michael rolled the pastry and lined a rectangular dish. We spread the puree on top of the pastry bottom, sprinkled it with pine nuts and then added the salmon and dates. Oddly, no one fancied drinking the fishwine. We added the pie lid, pricked it with a knife, finished it with a teeny weeny crest, and then put it in the middle drawer of the oven at gas mark 6 (200°c) for 45 minutes.

A teeny weeny crest.

 Frytour of erbes (Forme of Cury)

Take gode erbes ; grynde hem and medle hem with flour and water & a lytel ȝest and salt, and frye hem in oyle.

None of us had ever made a fritter before, so after consulting the internet and realising that milk or egg or bicarb were usually recommended, we opted to follow the medieval recipe anyway. What is a gode erbe? We arbitrarily went for parsley and spring onions, which were very finely chopped. The batter was made with an arbitrary amount of flour and an arbitrary amount of water – again, none of us knew what fritter consistency felt like. We then added a few pinches of salt and the herbs to the mixture, divided it into several farl-sized cakes, and fried them in a small amount of olive oil until golden brown on each side.

Is this a fritter?

Bened yfryed (Forme of Cury)

Take benes and seeþ hem almost til þey bersten. Take and wryng out þe water clene. Do þerto oynouns ysode and ymynced and garlic þerwith ; frye hem in oile oþer in grece & do þerto powdour douce & serue it forth.

Although peas are far nicer than runner beans, I bought about 250g of the latter. We trimmed them, cut them into inch-long chunks and boiled them in salted water. We then vaguely chopped an onion and three cloves of garlic, softened them in olive oil and then added the drained beans, turning the heat up and frying for a few minutes until it felt appropriate to stop. We then added powdour douce. The last time I cooked from the Forme of Cury the recipe I used was:

• ½ part caster sugar
• 1 part ground cinnamon
• ½ part ground ginger
• ¼ part ground nutmeg.

This time I also added ½ part of ground cloves, because the fig/wine mixture had made the kitchen smell like Christmas and it seemed like the right thing to do. After the powder was added, we served it forth.

The offending articles.

Verdict

After some serious negging on the fish-fruit combo in the morning, the first-bite reaction was stunned silence, which slowly but surely turned into noisy approval. One diner remarked ‘This is Christmas fish. Merry Fishmas’, which I’ll take. Another first-time medieval gourmand agreed that it tasted very medieval, but also like something from a tagine. The salmon and the fig are surprisingly complementary, and the pine nuts add interesting texture. Unlike the capouns in councy that we cooked a few months ago, the spices were not too strong, but rather supported the quite robust salmon. We drank a sharpish white wine. Seconds were had by all.

The fritters were problematic, since they had had no rising agent and were therefore pretty dense. The flavours of the parsley and spring onion were pleasant but not especially exotic, and though we ignored a suggestion in the MS to eat with clear honey, according to Michael they were quite nice with mayonnaise.

Despite the delicious combination of garlic and powdour douce, broad beans are and will forever remain super boring. But something green is really needed with this meal, or any semblance of Lenten self-denial is lost. Next time I use this recipe, I will follow my instincts and use peas.

Merry Fishmas.

Considering that I lured at least one friend there under the half-false pretence of cooking ‘fish pie’, the verdict was largely positive, dense fritters aside. On the eccentricity front I may have done myself no favours, but if it’s good enough for Clarissa Dickson Wright, it’s good enough for me.

Next Week: All hell breaks loose in the castle kitchens when Ranulf accidentally uses Gilbert’s custard.

Curyeing Favour

I don’t agree with the Daily Mail that the decline of ‘traditional female skills’ like ironing, sewing and massaging one’s husband’s feet is to blame for the downfall of western civilisation. I am the proud wearer of creased shirts, I don’t even have a husband – and, as far as I know, I’ve not caused any recent societal collapses. But I do often wish that I cooked more. So this week I did just that. With the aid of my homegirl Alex, and the chopping skills of the delightful Michael, I made dinner for five people.

The catch? All of the recipes were taken from the fourteenth-century Forme of Curye.

The Forme of Curye gives beautifully clear, step-by-step instructions. Unfortunately, The Forme of Curye lacks any indication of quantities or cooking times, or indeed ingredients for the various spice mixtures it proscribes. My ordinary cooking style is equally as maverick (reindeer and fennel in a port sauce, anyone?), but when cooking for other people I suppose one cannot be quite as gung-ho with food preparation. More’s the pity. There was an added pressure: even though three of us took part in the preparation, I was the only one who could read Middle English. If anyone contracted some ghastly medieval stomach complaint, it could very well have been my fault.

EETS loves us and wants us to be happy.

The following account records our attempts to cook a two-course meal from a six-hundred-year-old book.

Capouns in councy

Take capons and rost hem right hoot þat þey be not half ynouhȝ and hew hem to gobbettes and cast hem in a pot · Do þerto clene broth, seeþ hem þer þey be tender · Take brede and þe self broth and drawe it up yfere · take strong powdour and safroun and salt and cast þerto · Take ayren and seeþ hem harde · Take out the ȝolkes and hewe the whyte þerinne · Take the pot fro þe fyre and cast the whyte þerinne · Messe the disshe þerwith and lay the ȝolkes hool and flour it with clowes.

For capons, we used four large chicken breasts, which we fried lightly in chunks. We then put them in a large pot with a litre of chicken stock and three leeks, chopped into 2cm-wide chunks. The bread part didn’t make any sense, so we skipped it. This simmered for somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes before we added strong powdour.

Gobbettes.

Now, strong powder, also called poudre forte, appears in many of The Forme of Curye’s savoury recipes. As I wrote a few months ago, spices were extremely important to high-class medieval cuisine; although this meal was prepared in a student kitchen, the book is attributed to Richard II’s head chef. We had a lot to live up to. A recipe I found in a shady recess of the internet suggested:

•           1 part ground black pepper
•           1 part ground cubeb
•           ½ part ground cinnamon
•           ¼ part ground mace
•           1/8 part ground clove

Ours was more like 1 part mixed black and red pepper, ½ part cinnamon, ½ part mace. ¼ part clove. [I like mace. So sue me.]

Pre-spice, the meal was looking quite normal.

We added this and several strands of saffron to the broth, and then simmered it for a further 15 or so minutes. In the meantime, we hard-boiled six eggs, sliced them in half and, just before serving, decorated the top of the stew with the egg-halves.

Spynoches yfryed

Take spynoches · perboile hem in seþyng water · Take hem and presse, dele out of þe water and hewe hem in two · Frye hem in oile clene & do þerto powdour douce & serue forth.

Parboil spinach (we used a Sainsbury’s bag’s worth, apparently 260g) and drain it. Hardly a reenactment of the Battle of Agincourt. We didn’t bother with the chopping in two – it’s parboiled spinach, life’s too short – but we did fry them in olive oil with finely chopped garlic, 1 or 2 cloves, because I hadn’t read ahead and didn’t realise we’d be adding sweet powder. As it happens, garlic and sweet powder go pretty nicely.

Poudre douce, as the name suggests, is sweeter than its strong cousin. The same dark recess of the internet suggested:

•           1 part caster sugar
•           ½ part ground ginger
•           ½ part ground cinnamon
•           ¼ part ground nutmeg

Ours had half the caster sugar and twice the cinnamon. We also used it in our pudding. This was stirred in after the pan had been taken from the heat. The spinach was put straight into bowls on top of the broth. We didn’t make our own bread.

Rosee

Take thyk mylke, seeþ it · Cast þerto suger a gode porcioun, pynes, dates ymynced, canel & powdour gynger and seeþ it and alye it with flours of white rosis and flour of rys, cole it, salt it & messe it forth · If þu wilt in stede of almaunde mylke, take swete creme of kyne.

This was the most time-consuming of the dishes, since it needed to be chilled for a while – though someone did point out that the Middle Ages was probably rather low on fridges, and that we were therefore cheating. I am hardly wracked with guilt.

Chip chop.

Anyway, I used a pint of skimmed milk (probably a mistake), which was simmered with five tablespoons of corn flour until it was basically a white sauce, then we added 500 ml of single cream, three teaspoons of rosewater – the recipe specifies fresh flowers, but it’s January – along with some sweet powder and some extra Demerara sugar. (The almond milk instruction we ignored altogether.)

Whisk optional. Just kidding, you need a whisk.

We simmered this while stirring, then added ten quite large, finely-chopped dates and a handful of finely-chopped pine nuts after taking it off the heat. It was then decanted into bowls which sat in the fridge for an hour or so. These need to be stirred, otherwise a skin forms.

Mmm, slop.

There was significantly too much pudding for five people, and it’s not recommended for diabetics.

 Verdict

The chicken in councy was unsurprisingly spicy, in a robust, wintery sort of way, and a beautiful yellow colour, grâce à the saffron; and it needs a red wine – much of which fortunately we had. It was particularly nice with crusty white bread, and we reconciled ourselves to our lack of baking effort by remembering that the stews and the breads would have been produced in different kitchens anyway. This is historical accuracy in action. The spinach was also mildly spicy but, being both sweet and garlicky, the taste reminded me of nothing more than Chinese crispy seaweed. This is no bad thing.

Tonight we’re going to party like it’s 1399.

The Rosee pudding, though almost obnoxiously sweet, tasted very delicately of rose and had the texture of a Cranachan.

The response, thank goodness, was generally positive. Aside from Alex, who can’t really eat spices, everyone not only finished their fake capouns, but even had seconds. Someone said it was ‘delicious’; someone else said it tasted ‘like you imagine the Middle Ages’, which I thought was something to do with that smell they pipe into The Canterbury Tales experience in Warwick Castle or wherever it is, but was apparently a compliment; and I came out of it seeming no more eccentric than I did already.

Next Week – We try to catch, kill and cook a deer in the King’s forest, and end up hanged for high treason.

Tonight We’re Going To Party Like It’s 1399

‘Book of Armagh very pretty. Still evidently written by a drunkard.’

This is not, to clarify, any kind of slur against the Irish, but rather a note I took at a palaeography workshop in May. My note-taking is often rather scruffy. This workshop inspired the exact following jottings:

I didn’t need to move seats.

Köln, Cathedral Lib. 213 – beautiful capitals.

Is this basically primitive graphology?

Actually, Irish script looks like it’s written by drunk people. That would be an amusing reason for the proliferation of scribal errors. Or maybe how Tolkien conceived of Bilbo’s ‘spidery hand’? Book of Armagh very pretty. Still evidently written by a drunkard. If we know that beer was consumed, can we infer that local alcohol was also consumed? i.e. whiskey. St Toirdhealbhach drank whisky but he was a heretic. Also fictional.

An hour of unadulterated intellectual stimulation from one of Britain’s foremost palaeographers, and what I took away from it was that booze makes your handwriting go funny.

Many people are aware of the (potentially true but still pretty dodgy) fact that it is because East Asians boiled and Caucasians brewed that when I shared roughly half a bottle of wine with my friend Wing Sum in 2008, she quickly nodded off at the table and I got an extra glass and a half of wine. [I suspect relative size also played some part.]

This is perhaps unfair. There was, of course, alcohol consumed in the Far East in the medieval period, and long before. In The Travels of Marco Polo, we read that the Mongols drank fermented horse milk – still consumed today, and actually rather nice. But I know very little about the Yuan Dynasty and rather more about booze. And the medieval Europeans knew how, and when, to drink – and when was always.

Under Edward III, Geoffrey Chaucer had a pension of a gallon of wine per day. Not the value of (and we know this because, when Edward’s grandson Richard acceded in 1377, he swapped the wine for an annual cash pension to the value of), but the wine itself. Of course, this does not suggest that Chaucer drank a gallon of wine to himself every day – but he had a family and a household, and this is a useful reduction of costs on necessary expenditure. History does not record what the wine tasted like.

Brother William: ‘Nobody likes my sshooen.’

But individual consumption of a Friar Tuck standard was not unknown. Legend has it that the series of banquets to celebrate George Neville’s enthronement as Archbishop of York in 1465 provided approximately 2500 guests with 300 tuns of ale and 100 tuns of wine. A tun holds roughly 950 litres. 95000 litres of wine is over 126000 bottles of standard modern size. I would naturally assume that budgeting for over 50 bottles of wine per person (and three times that of beer, though that everyone drank both is unlikely; many of these 2500 would have been servants of some variety), even over a few days, is optimistic at best, downright irresponsible at worst. So unless my maths is far worse than I thought, or the records are inaccurate, or each guest was given a brilliant party bag with two months’ supply of booze, or Neville had an excellent bulk deal at Ye Olde Berry Bros, it seems safe to suggest that lavish parties such as these would have been as heavily-watered as they were over-catered. (They ate peacocks. Peacocks.) A lot must have gone to waste.

There was a large, if weak, vein of humour mined from stories of drunken monks and tipsy troubadours, squiffy cellarers and pissed pilgrims. The Miller’s insistence on telling his tale, and plea that ‘if that I mysspeke or seye, Wite it the ale of Southwerk’, is as recognisable to most students today as is his companions’ failure to shut him up; and just as Chaucer disingenuously apologises for crude things the Miller says/ he writes, so do most of us quite enjoy hearing what people say in their cups.

Saye that vnto min visage!

My homegirl Hildegard von Bingen writes about hops that were used to flavour beer, and as any fule kno, everyone in medieval Northern Europe drank beer. But the defining ingredient of most high-status medieval drinks is spice: cinnamon, ginger, mace, cardamom. And while spices a) are yummy and b) may have masked the taste of sour wine, they were also c) phenomenally expensive, and thus a status symbol extraordinaire. When the Venerable Bede died in 735, he possessed only pepper, handkerchiefs and incense. Big deal, you may think. But incense would have come from the Middle East and pepper from India. To a monk north of the Humber in the 8^th century, this is not unlike possessing chunks of the Moon.

High-status cooking in the later medieval period was spiced to the point of farce. The sauce galantine, which Chaucer so gallantly namechecks in his chubby-chasing lyric To Rosamounde, contained cinnamon and two sorts of ginger. A fifteenth-century French recipe for cameline (good with meat or fish) contained cinnamon, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, pepper and saffron. It’s clear from these ingredients alone that eating and drinking beyond the call of duty was a seriously pricey pastime in the Middle Ages.

All of which leads me to conclude this: the George Nevilles are the hip-hop artists of the late Middle Ages. With expensive booze, everyone from a medieval Archbishop to Jay-Z signifies that they can afford to party, and that partying is something well worth the money. ‘I dyd ydrynke nat that yppocras’ sounds a lot like ‘I got the Roly on my arm and I’m pouring Chandon and I roll the best weed cause I got it going on’.  ‘Make we alle divisioun of thys aquavit’ roughly translates as ‘We ballin, it’s Platinum Patron that be ours’. ‘Heere ys some rhenish on thyn seyntes-dai’ literally means ‘We’re gonna sip Bacardi like it’s your birthday.’

Happy birthday, Battle of Poitiers. I shall now proceed to drink in honour of the Black Prince.

Of Mice and Manuscripts

For the next few weeks I will be working as a library assistant. My main job is to sit and watch and tell people they’re turning the pages wrong, but I also have the pleasure of checking the books once handed back, to make sure nothing is ripped, defaced or in any way mucked up.

Last week, I was checking a large book before reshelving, and was both scandalised and amused by the unmistakeable marks of mouse meal-making. There were several inches’ worth of missing page. What this didn’t tell me was how many mice how many years ago had eaten this and how many other inches of vellum from how many other books, but one thing was clear: there had been a meal of sorts.

I wonder what vellum tastes like. Probably not of much, and even that can’t be very nice – a mixture of faint calcium hydroxide and dust with traces of metal and other people’s grease. The texture’s undoubtedly worse, somewhere between paper and softened toenail. I ate paper as a child, out of curiosity (though it is used as a food substitute by people suffering from eating disorders), and it was as one would expect, tasteless and chewy, without the prospect of ever shaping into something manageable. Codicologists may be glad to hear that I have never tried to eat vellum.

So I wonder what vellum tastes like to a mouse. While it is likely that mice eat things like books from necessity and not from choice, do they have any sense of taste as we might understand it? Or indeed of texture? Is paper easier to chew through than vellum? It may rip more easily, but is also prone to sogginess. Does ink change the taste? After a thousand years, does the flavour of metal and gall wear off? Or with nineteenth-century photo plates: could anything still taste the silver and the sea?

The possibilities reminded me of Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, Sam Savage’s extraordinary novel about a rat that begins to discern tastes in the pages he shreds and thereby learns to read. After his kindly human benefactor dies Firmin returns to the condemned second-hand bookshop of his youth, and to his destructive beginnings, by shredding the pages of Finnegan’s Wake. Also The Tale of Despereaux, a charming, altogether more childish book about a mouse who reads what he is meant to shred and is thus inspired by tales of chivalry. While all this is going on, soup has been banned in the kingdom and it is only through the brave actions of the mouse that it can be eaten again. Nourishment of the body is in both cases rejected for nourishment of the mind, but the main message I take from Despereaux is that soup tastes a great deal better than page.

It is fanciful anthropomorphism of the highest order that makes anyone think that to a hungry mouse, Bible tastes any different from Béroul. At a basic level, Yorrick’s skull looks like anyone else’s. But it’s still quite a nice idea.  So any animal chewing through The Man of Law’s Tale would taste brine and spices; Beowulf would taste of smoke, mead and stagnant water; and any Life of St Catharine of Siena would be avoided like the plague. It could work for humans. It could be like Violet Beauregarde’s Three Meal Gum.

The pages of several books could be blended to bring out the best of their flavours. Try The Proverbs of Alfred, then offset that vinegar with the freshness of Walafrid Strabo’s garden. And then what about the many jovial lyrics that celebrate Christmas ale and the finery of medieval court cookery? While reading, one could indulge in venisun fin, And the hombuls of the dove, or hold back with Gawain’s fysche and fode more symple. Sip a delicate Bluet of almain, romnay and win, or reason

Ye dronke all depe,

And I shulle eke.

Taking care always to avoid the Life of St Catharine of Siena.

So I don’t condemn the mouse. It was undoubtedly very hungry, and can’t have got half as much enjoyment out of gnawing some stretched membrane as I have from imagining what it could have tasted like.