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.

Cherry Red

The English madrigal-writer Thomas Campion wrote about an intense crush on an untouchable woman.

There is a garden in her face
Where roses and white lilies blow;
A heavenly paradise is that place
Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.
There cherries grow that none may buy,
’Til “Cherry-ripe” themselves do cry.

Compulsory floral face aside (‘I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,/ But no such roses see I in her cheeks,’ says a more honest man), the nudge-nudge connotations of the cherry are ample and obvious, and this song, published in 1617, suggests that innuendo changes little over the centuries.

As part of my mission to bring the good news of the past to my present friends, I mentioned this song the other evening, and the collected company did indeed find the tone to be obvious. Such is the patience of my friends in relation to my cooking experiments that I felt they had at least earned a smutty joke.

The goal of the evening was to make the most modern medieval meal possible. The three main components of the Modern British Diet – potatoes, chocolate, and tea – were of course not readily available to a fifteenth-century gourmand. But inspired by the almost-medievalism of Sam Gamgee, I decided to make a variation on fish and chips for six people, using a fifteenth-century recipe, my own imagination, and copious quantities of spice.

The following is a true account of how much easier it was to make summer pudding before the invention of the fridge.

Samon roste in Sauce (London, British Library MS Harley 4016)

Take a Salmond and cut him rounde, chyne and all, and roste the pieces on a gredire • And take wyne and pouder of Canell and drawe hit thorgh a streynour • And take smale myced oynons and caste thereto and let hem boyle • And then take vynegre or vergeous and pouder ginger and caste thereto • and then ley the samon in a dissh and cast the sirip theron al hote and serue it forth.

While one of my lovely assistants finely sliced two onions, I put about 450ml of white wine into a deep frying pan with some cinnamon (I used about a teaspoon, but I do like cinnamon) and gently heated it until that silvery film of bubbles began to grow along the bottom of the pan. We added the onions and stirred continually over the same heat for about 5 minutes, until they softened. Then we added a hefty glug of cider vinegar and a teaspoon-ish of powdered ginger, and kept stirring while the wine reduced.

Mmm, oynons.

In the meantime, in the absence of a gredire, we had put salmon fillets into the oven at 160°C for around 10 minutes. When the cooking was finished, the saucy onion concoction was dolloped onto the salmon. It really wasn’t very difficult.

Genuine Fake Medieval ’Taters and Peas

Frozen peas are extremely easy to prepare and I won’t patronise you like that. For potatoes, we used a swede: first it was peeled and cut into pieces of orange-segment size and shape, then parboiled for around 7 minutes, then put into an oven with some oil, salt and pepper at about 180°C, initially for 20 minutes.

Where we got a bit creative was in the addition of a poudre douce/poudre fort crossover mixture. For this, I mixed the following in a jam jar:

– 1 part cinnamon
– 1 part mace
– 1 part nutmeg
– ½ part ground cloves
– ½ part black pepper
– ¼ part Demerara sugar

After the first 20 minutes in the oven, some of this was mixed into the swede with a touch more oil, and then returned to the oven at a slightly lower heat for 20 more minutes. We also mixed the powder into the cooked and drained peas.

Not entirely ‘Fish and Chips’.

Chyryse (Forme of Cury)

Take almaundes, waisshe hem • grynde hem, drawe hem vp with gode broth • Do þerto thridde parte of chiryse, þe stones take oute and grynde hem smale • Make a layour of gode brede & powdour and salt and do þerto • colour it with saundres • Make it so þat it be stondyng and florrish it with aneys and with chelberyes and strawe þervppon and serue it forth.

I assumed that this was some sort of summer pudding, mostly because the instruction ‘make a layour of gode brede & powdour and salt and do þerto’, although it could be read as ‘make a layer of breadcrumbs’, seemed to be lacking a necessary verb. Ergo ‘make a layer of fresh bread with unspecified powder and salt, and put cherries on top.’ This ‘powdour’ could be squished cherries. Or my old favourite, poudre douce. Or indeed anything. Basically, this recipe is for people who already know what they’re making, and I am not one of those people.

An executive decision was made: summer pudding.

So I halved and stoned about 650g of cherries and added them to about 300ml of white wine [‘gode broth’, chortle chortle], with some star anise, a pinch of powdered ginger and a few teaspoons of sugar, and simmered for about 10 minutes before adding three heaped tablespoons of powdered almonds, like the maverick I am. This then simmered for a further ten minutes.

We had a small loaf of white bread, cut the crusts off and lined a bowl with the slices. The instruction about dyeing with sandalwood was altogether ignored, likewise the salting. Before doing the cherries thereto, I removed the star anise, then did the mixture thereto, folded the topmost slices of bread over to form a sort-of lid, covered it with tinfoil and put it in the fridge for the best part of an hour and a half.

Mmm, gloop.

Verdict

The onions’n’sauce was really quite delicious and, as a bonus, because the onions were softened in the wine rather than being fried, nobody’s hair or clothes smelled like frying afterwards. This concoction would probably also go nicely with trout, or a similarly oily fish. The spiced peas and swede were also popular – one of the first-timers gave the standard ‘Wow, this tastes really medieval’ remark, but then had second helpings of everything. I think this means it was nice. I’m not convinced that peas and poudre douce are natural bedfellows, but they were a damned sight better than runner beans.

The cherry gloop was actually extremely tasty – subtle levels of anise and almond, not too sweet, and still warm enough when we ate it to feel like rather more than your bog-standard summer pudding. My fingernails were stained for several days, but such is the price I pay. With regards to the bread: if this is the correct recipe, the thing should stand longer. There was no time for colour seepage and, in the absence of sandalwood dye, the paleness of the pudding was quite off-putting. Several more hours of sitting would have dealt with both the bready texture and the colour, although the entire thing was polished off very quickly. But since I’m not even sure whether the recipe was right, I won’t worry too much.

Next week: Sir Lucan loses his rag when three guests are on three different exclusion diets.