“MEDIEVAL” COOKING has become fashionable today. But how can one presume to reconstruct the culinary taste of six, seven, or even ten centuries ago? The question, and consequently the answer, is, in fact, based on two different dimensions of taste. The first is that of taste as flavor—a particular sensation of the tongue and palate that is, by definition, a subjective, fleeting, incommunicable experience. In this regard, the historical experience of food is inevitably and irretrievably lost forever.
But taste is also knowledge—the sensory evaluation of what is good or bad, of what pleases or displeases. It is an evaluation that comes from the mind before the tongue, for the brain, not the tongue, is the organ of gastronomic pleasure. Someone had to have taught us how to distinguish and classify flavors: good/bad, pleasing/displeasing, tasty/disgusting. Seen this way, taste is not at all a subjective and incommunicable reality, but rather one that is collective and communicated. It is a cultural experience that is transmitted from birth, linked to all the other variables that contribute to creating the “values” of a society.
A great historian of cooking, Jean-Louis Flandrin, has coined the expression “structures of taste” precisely to underscore the collective and shared character of this kind of experience.1 It is clear that this second dimension, which does not coincide with the first, but determines it in large measure, can be investigated historically by examining the remains, the traces, the “sources” (as they are called by historians) that every society in the past has left behind.
What remains? What traces? What “sources”?
In first place are cookbooks, texts of modest literary value, to which scholars, too busy investigating “high” aspects of history, paid little or no attention for a long time. Only in the last few decades has the history of food and gastronomy been accepted, and not without fierce resistance, into the pantheon of subjects deserving of historical research. A handful of scholars launched, less timidly than before, into an examination of those texts and searched for new ones in the archives and libraries of the world, with surprising results. Innumerable cookbooks are buried in manuscript codices, either in complete form or in fragments. Whether preserved singly or mixed into other texts (for the most part on medicine and dietetics), they reveal, at least for the last centuries of the Middle Ages, the fourteenth and fifteenth, a trove of documentary material whose existence was unsuspected.2 This flowering of cookbooks, both in Italy and in other European countries, constitutes, on the one hand, the culmination of many centuries of experience and, on the other, the starting point for successive developments of so-called Renaissance cooking, the ultimate and more elaborate phase of the medieval tradition.
But we cannot stop at cookbooks. Medieval gastronomic culture emerges from many other texts: treatises on medicine and hygiene devote much space to dietary questions and to the proper use of foods with regard to health (as already mentioned, cookbooks were often inserted into such manuscripts); treatises on agriculture delve into the alimentary use of plants and animals; treatises on etiquette are not lacking in information about the esthetics of food, the table, and convivial service; literary and poetic texts also reveal great attention to the subject of food, central to a society that not only experienced the problem of daily survival, but also, and precisely because of that, attributed to food the function of distinguishing individuals and groups, signaling their status, their rank in terms of wealth and power. All the documents reflect in some way the alimentary needs and choices of the society. To know what, how, and when things are produced or acquired and by whom (verifiable in such documents as acts of sale and purchase, property agreements, inventories, and municipal and rural statutes) is evidently integral to the consumption and customs of food. To this can be added the wealth of material provided by archeology—traces of food, human and animal remains, domestic utensils and containers—and by iconography, often decisive in terms of function and appearance. Systems and techniques of cooking, shapes and dimensions of tools, and types of behavior and table rituals can emerge from an excavation or a miniature with greater clarity and precision than from written accounts.
In short, there is no dearth of information. But what can we deduce from it regarding the modes of consumption and the “tastes of the time”? Are the Middle Ages near or far?
In the field of food and gastronomy, the distance between the Middle Ages and us is marked by two major events. The first is the conquest of the New World by Europeans, a stupendous episode, to say the least, with regard to the history of food products. In the space of a few centuries, the panorama of available resources changed on all the continents because of the rapid and often forced diffusion of New World products that took root in Europe, Africa, and Asia, thereby modifying the eating habits of millions of people. In Europe alone, one need think only of the impact of the tomato on Mediterranean cooking or the potato on the continental diet, not to mention corn, which assumed first place in the diet of the peasantry, or plants like the chili pepper, which were adopted with such conviction in certain regions of Europe (in particular, Hungary and, within Italy, Calabria) as to become in time the distinctive characteristic of the local gastronomic identity.
Let us not, however, focus too much on these new presences (or absences, if we wish to look at them from the vantage point of the Middle Ages; it would be like stressing the absence of television from the medieval home). I would point out, instead, that this revolution of products did not so much influence types of cooking as reinforce them, in the sense that it served to confirm rather than overturn millennial traditions. The potato, with a higher yield, took the place of traditional products such as the turnip and the rutabaga and was added to such traditional dishes as gnocchi, a typical medieval favorite, which had long been made only with water and flour; the potato was even tried in bread making. A similar interpretative procedure in the wake of tradition—psychologically and culturally defined as a “reduction of the unknown to the known”3—occurred in the case of corn, which came to replace other, inferior grains (primarily millet) that had been used for centuries to make polenta. As for the tomato, it established itself initially as a sauce, sauces being one of the foundations (an absolute must) of medieval cooking.
This is not to negate the importance of the new foodstuffs, but merely to say that, on the technical level, they did not significantly modify European gastronomic culture; rather, they served to confirm certain basic lines. The New World was itself exploited far and wide to produce foods, previously unknown there, that were intended for Old World consumers. Wheat, wine, oil, pork, and beef—basics of the European dietary model—appeared for the first time in the Americas, as did sugar and coffee, which the Europeans transplanted along with squadrons of African slaves sent to cultivate them. All these movements, though they overturned the economy of the world and the life of the people, served in a way to solidify, rather than modify, European culinary tastes, as they came to be defined at the beginning of the Middle Ages.
Less important on the social and economic levels, but more influential on the level of taste, was a second revolution that occurred between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A retrospective examination that goes from today back to the Middle Ages immediately reveals that our notion of cooking, the system of flavors that seem to us “naturally” desirable, is significantly different from the one that for ages—not only during the Middle Ages, but even a few centuries ago as well—people considered good and looked for in foods. Contemporary cooking (in Italy and other European countries) has a primarily analytic character that tends to separate sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and spicy, reserving for each one an autonomous place, both in individual foods and in the order of the meal. This kind of practice is allied with the idea that cooking must respect, insofar as possible, the natural flavor of each food, different and particular from one time to the next, and for that reason keep each one separate from others. But these simple rules do not constitute a universal archetype of cooking that always existed and was always the same. They are the result of a minor revolution that took place in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
“Cabbage soup has to taste of cabbage, leek of leek, turnip of turnip,” Nicolas de Bonnefons recommended in his “letter to masters of the house” in the middle of the seventeenth century. This seemingly innocent affirmation is, in reality, an upheaval of modes of thinking and eating, established over centuries. Renaissance cooking, medieval cooking, and, going back even further, ancient Roman cooking had evolved a model based principally on the idea of artificiality and the mingling of flavors. The preparation of a single foodstuff, as well as its position within the meal, corresponded to a synthetic rather than an analytic logic: to keep together rather than separate.4 This went back to rules of dietary science that held as “equilibrated” a food containing within itself all the nutritional qualities, each perceived in turn, and made perceptible by the other flavors.5 The perfect food was thought to be the one in which all flavors, and therefore all benefits, were present simultaneously. The cook was thus expected to intervene, to alter the character of food products in a manner that was radical at times. Cooking was seen as an art of blending, intended to modify or transform the “natural” taste of foods into something else, something “artificial.”
A typical example of this culture is the taste for sweet and sour, which combines sugar with lemon juice (reinterpreting and refining the mixture of honey and vinegar, characteristic of ancient Roman cooking, when these two products of Middle Eastern origin were brought to Europe by the Arabs). It is a taste that has not completely disappeared and is still found in more conservative European cooking, such as that of Germany, and more generally in the cooking of eastern Europe. What comes to mind are lingonberry preserves and cooked pears and apples to accompany meat (in particular, game); this is medieval cooking. Or, from Cremona, Italy, such products as mostarda, which combines the pungency of spices with the sweetness of sugar; this is medieval cooking. Or the pepper and sugar of panpepato and pfeffernuss along with other Christmas sweets. To go farther afield, there are the sweet and sour dishes of Chinese cuisine and bastilla, the pastry-covered pigeon with honey in the Moroccan tradition. This is medieval cooking, a cuisine of contrast that is in search of balance, the ground zero where distances between flavors are abridged. This “structure of taste”—intimately related to the science of dietetics and in a way also to a philosophy and a vision of the world—has been completely modified in Europe, beginning in France and later in Italy, during the past two centuries, and this modification is undoubtedly the major barrier to understanding a world as different as the Middle Ages. A piece of personal advice: a voyage in space to the gastronomic traditions of North Africa can serve as a visa in time to our own Middle Ages.
Another basic characteristic of medieval gastronomy that keeps it remote from us is the extreme paucity of fats. Medieval cooking is fundamentally lean, making use of such acidic ingredients for the sauces that inevitably accompanied fish and meat as wine, vinegar, citric juices, and agresta (the juice of sour grapes), mixed with spices and thickened with soft bread, liver, almonds, walnuts, or egg yolk.6 The oil- or butter-based sauces that are more familiar to our tastes—mayonnaise, white and brown roux—are all modern inventions that profoundly altered the taste and appearance of food as of the eighteenth century.7
The tendency in medieval cooking to superimpose and amalgamate flavors, rather than keeping them separate, has its analogue in cooking techniques; they, too, were not kept rigidly apart, but were “cumulative,” so to speak. Boiling, roasting, frying, and braising were obviously different methods of cooking, but in many cases, they were also different moments of the same procedure, planned one after the other as successive phases of the preparation. In some cases, this corresponded to practical requirements. For example, the preliminary boiling of meats—commonly practiced at least until the end of the eighteenth century—also served to preserve them while awaiting subsequent preparation. It could also be a method of tenderizing them. Like most other culinary choices, it was also, and mostly, a matter of taste.
By crossing various techniques, one could obtain special flavors and special textures. This last element was highly regarded by medieval taste, accustomed as it was to tactile contact with food far beyond ours, oral or manual, because food was more often than not directly manipulated without any intermediary, given that the use of cutlery was minimal.8 Only the spoon was really necessary for liquid foods. The fork was seen either as a form of excessive (and long-contested) refinement in table manners or else as a necessity to take hold of such foods as pasta, boiling hot and slippery, that could not readily be negotiated with the hands. It is not by chance that the fork appeared in Italy earlier than elsewhere because it was above all in Italy, already in the latter part of the Middle Ages, that pasta assumed an importance unknown elsewhere. As for meat, the use of the fork was considered unnatural and hygienically questionable even in the later modern era, and even in Italy.
Another reason for the distance between the Middle Ages and today is the order of dishes, the manner of serving foods.9 The fundamental difference is the absence—even long after the Middle Ages and at least until the mid-nineteenth century—of what came to be known as service à la russe, meaning a succession of predetermined and identical dishes served to all the guests. Today, this seems normal and even obvious. The medieval table, however, followed a different model, similar to the one still common in China, Japan, and other contemporary societies in which many dishes are served simultaneously and each guest chooses what he likes and the order in which he likes it. In informal meals, there is a single course; in more complex and more formal ones, a series of successive courses—hot and cold, of varying numbers, and composed of various ingredients—is determined by the importance and elegance of the banquet. In either setting, the choice is up to the individual diner, in keeping with a model seen today only at the buffet table. This can produce disastrous results when guests are obliged to eat standing up while juggling plates, cutlery, and glasses, but if carefully planned logistically, it can provide guests with a maximum of autonomy and movement.
Although medieval culture was resistant to uniformity, its culinary culture was not characterized by this liberal dimension of choice, bound as it was to a somewhat contradictory idea of eating: individuals did indeed have the right to satisfy their own needs and desires, but there were also the rights and duties that came from belonging to a certain social caste.10 In this regard, to eat certain things and not others was a sign of social distinction and discrimination. At important banquet tables, the same dishes were not served to everyone; rather, each person was served “according to the quality of his person,” meaning his social status. Only then did individual options come into play. Further, because the symbolic value of a single food was as important as its nutritional and gustative properties, the duty of a specific status might mandate the consumption of foods that were not necessarily desirable on the personal level. A case in point is a fourteenth-century Florentine, a member of the Council of Priors, who, “obliged” to eat pheasant and partridge on every holy day, confessed, once he returned to private life, that he loathed the flavors of those meats.11 The dynamic between individual taste and collective taste thus appears highly complex. Social conformism, always present when it comes to eating, was even more onerous in the Middle Ages than it is today.
It is precisely this inextricable link between the real and the imaginary, between flavors tasted and flavors conceived, that makes every gastronomic experience unrepeatable outside the cultural and psychological context in which it took place. If between us and the Middle Ages there are many points that bring us together, equally important are those that separate us. Among the ones we share are the products, many of medieval invention, that continue to be widely used in the alimentary identity of today: one need think only of pasta. Although pasta remains the leitmotif in the long history of Italian cooking, other products have also endured, such as polenta, bread, and a hundred other flour-based preparations that for centuries ensured the survival and pleasure of people. That continuity may be more important in peasant cooking, in the systems of consumption among the lower classes, but studies on this subject are too cursory and impressionistic to allow such an affirmation, which may be deductive. I would not deny that, basically, even the cooking of the poor (along with the alimentary resources of the poor) has undergone significant change over the centuries.
A question remains: Can this cuisine, however we manage to define it in all its chronological, geographic, and social variations, be reproduced? The key problem in “doing medieval cooking today” is that of determining the proper boundary between philological studies of the texts and practice in the kitchen. To put it unambiguously, that boundary is hard to identify beforehand. Only the sensibility and experience of the one who is doing the work can determine it properly, and even then the effort involves inevitable risk, given the contradiction mentioned above. If the gastronomic culture of past centuries, understood as a collective patrimony, can be studied and re-created with some measure of credibility, it is wholly unreliable on the level of personal experience (the sensations felt while eating). The object has changed: the products of today are no longer those of a thousand years ago, even if they carry the same name. More important, the subject has changed; the consumers are no longer the same, and their sensory education is vastly different. The situation is desperate, to say the least, for anyone who presumes to reach a “historically” plausible result. This is somewhat like listening to the fourteenth-century music of Ars Nova* or the innovative melodies of Guillaume de Machaut as reconstructed by lovers of ancient music. However we may try, we cannot eradicate from our brain our experience of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven (or Stravinsky or Schoenberg) and so can never relive the experience of someone a few centuries ago who heard Ars Nova as avant-garde music. On an intellectual level, “full immersion” in the past can work to some degree, but on an emotional level, it is technically impossible.
With regard to subjective emotion, it is not at all the case that philological fidelity to the text is the best way to re-create the sensation of the past. The very opposite can occur; that is, the highest degree of adaptation—knowledgeably controlled—may turn out to be much more faithful than formal fidelity. To take one example, the mortar and pestle are very different from an electric blender, and the consistencies obtained from the two utensils are also very different. However, in our experience it is the blender that works best to “grind finely,” as did the mortar during the Middle Ages. The two sensations, objectively very unalike, can coincide on a subjective level, but we will never know for sure.
And what applies to techniques is even more relevant to flavors: the over-spiced foods of the Middle Ages were not at all “over” for the people of that era. The same holds for the way food was taken: to eat with one’s hands, as we would have to in order to imitate medieval usage to the fullest, no longer corresponds to our cultural experience, although it does to those of other cultures, as in the case of Moroccan couscous. Once again, North Africa serves as a kind of mirror of the medieval experience. We are unaccustomed to eating with our hands, so that if ever we do, it is an exotic curiosity. During the Middle Ages, it was “normal” for Europeans; it no longer is (despite the occasional infraction of the rule when we go to McDonald’s, whose success is said to be due in part to the retrieval of repressed historical experiences).
We will have to make do with simple approximations and accept that our desire to know is destined to remain superficial, even if it is intellectually prudent and informed. This is like traveling in foreign countries and trying to understand cultures alien to our own, but being unable to feel them. All we can do is play at medieval cooking, abiding by certain rules (there is no game without rules) but not falling into the arrogance of philological reconstruction as an end in itself. Aside from resulting in inauthentic sensations, this would not even be possible in many cases, as medieval cookbooks often neglect to provide precise quantities of the ingredients—not out of carelessness, but rather because they are addressed to a readership of experts, if not always to one of professionals. To reconstruct the “authentic” recipe would moreover be a contradiction—contrary not only to the art of cooking, which is above all the art of invention (“if you have to follow to the letter the recipes in which nothing is left to chance,” Jean-Louis Flandrin wrote, “you might as well give them to a machine to make”12), but also to the more authentic spirit of the Middle Ages that we are trying to reshape. The incredible number of variations found in medieval cookbooks for dishes of the same name is an expression of regional and local variations; to give just one example, among the dozens of recipes for “blancmange,” a favored dish in medieval cooking, it is impossible to identify a single ingredient that is common to them all.13 It is also a metaphor for the basic principle that every good cook should follow: “a qualified cook,” we read in an Italian text of the fourteenth century, “will be knowledgable in all things according to the differences between regions, and will be able to vary and color foods as he sees fit.”14
