WHEN IT COMES to food and cooking, the Middle Ages often take the starring role. This is not only because medievalists, like all historians, devote much attention nowadays to this long neglected subject of history but also because marketing strategies for food production and catering were born in the Middle Ages. In truth, Middle Ages in most cases is no more than a generic term used to evoke an equally generic image. But that term and that image are evidently considered useful for selling and making more appealing commercial offerings. The term medieval attributes an added value to products and services. History is brought into play as the locus of “birth” and “origin.”
This is a concern typical of our era: to authenticate the present by recalling the past, to legitimize what we are making now by saying that it used to be made long ago. The expression “long ago,” historically meaningless, indicates something of a more genuine nature than does “a time past”; “long ago” is an indistinct, mythical time when things are presumed to have come into being. Then they came down to us, after a “historical” journey, which is, in reality, without history because nothing happens then. The “tradition” invoked is not the fruit of events, experiences, encounters, changes, inventions, and compromises—history, in a word—but is static and immobile. It is the “idol of origins,” about which Marc Bloch has written, which leads us “to explain the most recent by means of the most remote.”
If we look at European labels—DOP, IGP, STG—proclaiming the denomination of protected origins, protected geographic origins, and guaranteed traditional specialties, we are amazed by the vagueness of historical documentation, which, after all, is the requisite foundation for authenticating and registering a product. References, when there are any, are second- and thirdhand. History is reduced to anecdotal snippets of little interest other than fulfilling a legislative requirement to provide the pedigree of the product, placing it in a context of consolidated “tradition.” That “tradition” may even be extremely recent. At present, it takes only twenty-five years for a product to acquire recognition as typical or traditional. With regard to image, however, ancient looks better than modern. To claim “medieval” or, even better, “Roman” origin is a way of enhancing the nobility of the product. The older the history and the more remote the “origin,” the more the product will seem worthy of being safeguarded.
The basic assumption is to think of “continuity” as a seal of guarantee. That things are subject to continuous modifications, that the flavors of foods and the tastes of people change with time, that the social and cultural contexts determine constantly changing forms of usage, that the same objects do not always correspond to the same names—all this, which is obvious to the historian, is of no interest to the general public. They would rather believe that “tradition” all by itself is a guarantee of quality, and believing that “it has always been made this way,” generation after generation, is enough for total assurance.
The presumed continuity between present and past is based on a double mechanism of reduction: leading the present back to the past by projecting onto the Middle Ages the image of what we are today, of what we produce and consume today; and leading the past to the present, interpreting the Middle Ages simply as the premise or “beginning” of today. There is no question of dating practices or products or of placing them in a time frame. Quite the contrary. Aside from a few statements genuinely based on archival documents or literary works, to evoke the Middle Ages generally de-historicizes the subject, making it more vague and less precise, taking it out of history and into legend, out of reality and into fiction. Medievalists can rest easy: in the common perception, the term Middle Ages does not signify a period of history, defined by a chronology of its own and by events that occurred during that time; it is merely an idea, a concept.* The term Middle Ages used in the marketing of food means tradition, origins, antiquity; it means “once upon a time.”
By analyzing this imaginary construct, the language that produces it, and the rhetoric that sustains it, one thing becomes apparent. In the promotion of food products, no “discussion” under the aura of the Middle Ages is negative because of the value automatically endowed by the antiquity of “tradition,” whoever its guarantors: peasants weighted with experience and inventiveness, landowners in search of new pleasures, and cooks able to benefit from available resources (or from their occasional scarcity, for which they made up with ingenious creativity), as well as clever artisans and shopkeepers and, finally, monks, the absolute warranty of gastronomic know-how.
We should pause for a moment to consider the invariably positive nature of “medieval” images related to food products, for this is a culturally anomalous factor, contradictory to the ambiguity always associated with the idea of the Middle Ages in the contemporary imagination. Such an idea is twofold: the Middle Ages are a period of glorious adventures, of amorous damsels and brave knights, of deep and noble sentiments; but they are also a time of obscurity and fear, superstition, violence, and barbarism. The two images, both of them uncertain, are not gratuitous inventions of popular fantasy but arose out of centuries of historiographic inventions, initiated by the humanists of the Renaissance, who characterized the Middle Ages as “void” of civilization. What else can the term medieval suggest, linked by humanists to that millennium, if not the notion of a “middle period,” a lengthy pause while awaiting the return of civilization after a temporary eclipse? The obscure and irrational image of the Middle Ages was consolidated during the Protestant Reformation, which attacked the church of Rome as the depository of “medieval” corruption and superstition. To this was later added the Enlightenment polemic against “feudal” privileges and abusive powers incorrectly attributed to the Middle Ages (and, on the contrary, entirely “modern”).
Alongside these gloomy Middle Ages, a shimmering Middle Ages had evolved, put forth by the Counter-Reformation and later exalted by the Romantic period in the name of the very irrationality that the Enlightenment saw as unworthy, transforming it into the Romantic ideal of original purity, uncorrupted emotions, and national unity. All judgments (or rather prejudices) that slowly constructed the two contrasting images of the Middle Ages selected only partial aspects of the “real” Middle Ages, isolated from the context of the period’s entirety and from the life of its people. The obscure Middle Ages and the luminous one live side by side today in the collective imagination, which has digested and assimilated both premises, blending them in an unforeseeable manner. But when it comes to food, the Middle Ages are decidedly and exclusively good, for they represent the nostalgic dream of a pure and uncontaminated past that guarantees authenticity and quality.
Things change when the marketing of the Middle Ages introduces theme events, festivals, and rural or municipal feasts—all very common in many European countries—offering historical processions with ladies in costume, knights in noble combat, archery contests, games in the central square† along with reconstructions of artisans’ shops and markets and all kinds of amenities under the aegis of a Middle Ages filled with warmth and goodness, genuine humanity, and profound sentiments. During those festivals, however, even the other Middle Ages are revealed (and later become preponderant), reflecting the obscure and malevolent, with their classic stereotypes of black magic, witches, torture, poisoning, and exorcisms of fears and anxieties that are in us but that we prefer to relegate to a finished past.
Even gastronomy enters into this world of festivals when the tenebrous Middle Ages cohabit with the luminous Middle Ages. This would seem to be the “good” side, with its habitual trousseau of platitudes about the healthfulness, tastiness, and purity of medieval food. But beware: here, we are no longer talking about simple products, or products that boast “medieval origins.” Here, we are talking about cuisine and recipes prepared in the medieval manner, or presumed such. The experience is less trustworthy and requires a few precautions. The journey into time, in this case, is one we have to make. But are we really prepared to play the game and forget—if but for a few hours—our own customs?
Here, then, is a different strategy of marketing. On one side is the proposal of the conventional image of the “traditional” Middle Ages and as such already part of our experience (thus nothing to fear). On the other are strange dishes and unusual menus, exotic food, which we are invited to sample as curiosities for an evening out of the ordinary. However, since the unknown is not excluded from our disorientation, or, hypothetically, our disgust, we are immediately reassured that the game will not be too trying, that we will limit ourselves merely to sampling this medieval diversity, barely intuiting it, and be quickly brought back to domestic security. In short, so long as “medieval” remains synonymous with “tradition” everybody is happy. But when “medieval” risks exposing itself, acquiring more precise contours both cultural and chronological, then it is better to keep one’s distance.
For this reason, culinary dishes in festival menus tend toward the contemporary. “Tasty dishes on a medieval theme made of simple and genuine ingredients” will be served by “tavern keepers in period costumes” (quoted from the websites of various events), but this cuisine brought down from the past, as though to make it more flavorful, is kept within parameters of today. The Middle Ages thus invoked are “suspended between reality and fantasy,” but fantasy is hard to insert into cooking. The fantasy of the Middle Ages peters out in costumes and performances. The recipes are, in most cases, those of today, barely disguised by an unusual ingredient or a strange name but reassuring to the diners that this foray into the past will not lead them far from home.
There are many vocabularies and many choices. The range of possibilities differs widely between those who presume to reconstruct recipes and settings of an “authentic” medieval banquet and those who stop at amusing slogans such as “ristorante e pizzeria, Medioevo in allegria [restaurant and pizzeria, Middle Ages in fun]”; between those who take themselves too seriously and those who toy with an invented Middle Ages. What interests us, above all, is to confirm the ambiguity on which the marketing of medieval cooking is based: at the same time that it promotes its appeal, it cautions against it. The appeal is one of adventure, “a voyage in time,” yet the diffidence is the same as accompanies every traveler who undertakes an adventure to some distant land. Just as the traveler visits the many restaurants in exotic places that propose tamed versions of their own cuisine, so the traveler in time enjoys being protected from the Middle Ages (fascinating but barbaric), settling into the living room of the “tradition” and the “territory” they think they know. Or else they delude themselves—and that squares the circle—into believing that that “tradition” is “medieval.” It is what an advertisement, ingenious in its way, proclaims as an Emilian “medieval inn, near to home, far in time.”
If we move from the marketing of products to the marketing of cooking, things change progressively. Enthusiasm for the medieval (identified with “tradition” and therefore assuredly good) has cooled, leaving room for doubt about the quality of medieval food—and possibly the conviction that, all things considered, during the Middle Ages people ate worse than today. The myth of origins has given way to the myth of progress. The “obscure” Middle Ages have taken over the “luminous” Middle Ages. The paradigm of modernity—assumed to be better by definition—has won out in the end. Held at the right distance, the Middle Ages have the contours of a dream. To experience it personally (like Roberto Benigni and Massimo Troisi in the film Non ci resta che piangere [All we have left are tears] can become a nightmare—which is why the game of medieval cooking ends quickly, on the other side of the threshold that would really make it different. To use the language of the Michelin Guide, the Middle Ages “deserve a detour” but perhaps not the trip.
Personally, I think that traveling to unknown places is interesting and formative, which is why I would like to invite the reader on a voyage to the foods and cooking of the Middle Ages. In this volume, I have collected a number of works that over the years I have devoted to the history of medieval taste, in its broadest sense, in the full amplitude of the repertory of food: types of production, cooking practices and gastronomic preparation, attitudes toward consumption, table manners, rules and rituals related to food, and cultural and scientific coordinates. These are pieces that were written for various occasions, principally during the past decade but in some cases earlier. A few examine an overall picture; others look at specific products or practices. In all of them, I have tried to bring together the material as well as the symbolic dimensions of food, which seem to me inextricably related and which in turn explain and justify themselves in a relationship that I like to define as interactive. To emphasize the dynamic of historical change and to understand the elements of difference beyond continuity—this has been my constant objective.
During the course of this journey, I hope that a greater intimacy will develop between the reader and the Middle Ages and that this period will be seen no longer exclusively as the symbol of obscurity but also as the symbol of light—because shadow and light are part of every era. Let it simply be a piece of our history.
