Queeste. Tijdschrift over middeleeuwse letterkunde in de Nederlanden. Jaargang 2007

Ab ovo usque ad mala
Livia Visser-Fuchs

With regard to: Johanna Maria van Winter, Spices and Comfits. Collected papers on medieval food. Foreword by Patricia Lysaght. Totnes, Devon, UK: Prospect Books, 2007. 439 pp. 10 b & wills. ISBN 978-1-903018-45-3. Price: €49,-.

When this book landed, as they say, on my desk I had just started reading the latest annual publication of the proceedings of the Centre européen d'études bourguignonnes, which covers its meeting at Boulogne-sur-Mer in September 2006, where ‘Boire et manger en pays bourguignons’ was the subject¹ It is a fat volume this time and shows how much there is to say on the matter; the nineteen contributors indicate how many people today are interested in researching and discussing food and drink in medieval and early modern times, in whatever format or context: literary or quantitative, ceremonial or logistical. It makes the extent and range of the van Winter ‘collected works’ even more impressive, as they are all by one person, a pioneer in the field, and the result of a writing and teaching career that was already well under way over forty years ago.

Marietje van Winter's collection is divided into four main sections: Medieval Food Habits, The Netherlands and their Neighbours, Fasting and Feasting and Food and Health, twenty-eight entries in all. They consist of originally separate articles, based on papers given at various conferences, contributions to composite volumes on more general or very specific subjects and the seminal introduction to van Winter's own Van Soeter Cokene, recepten uit de Romeinse en middeleeuwse keuken, which quite rightly opens the collection. Where necessary the texts have been translated into very readable English reflecting the author's pleasant style, five are in easy-to-read German (one with an English summary), one is in French. The first main section presents earlier work, both in terms of the author's life and chronologically as far as the subject is concerned. It starts with Roman eating and is relatively general, emphasizing some basic truths, for example the lack of information we have about the food of the lower classes, as most of our knowledge comes from written sources; only recently archaeology has started to reveal more about the eating habits of the non-literate. We are also, for example, warned concerning the prevalent misunderstanding that medieval food was always highly spiced in order to mask the offensive smell and taste of meat that was already off: ‘it is unrealistic to pretend that [people] always teetered on the edge of food-poisoning’ and:

I disagree with those who believe that medieval people had different stomachs from ours and could digest the most impossible dishes. On the contrary, medieval food is not impossible to eat at all and can taste delicious, if prepared in the proper way (pp. 22-23).

Indeed, as one of Marietje's former students and one that took part in some of her medieval cooking sessions - one cannot call them ‘experiments’, she was far too experienced for that - I can testify to the tastiness of the food.

In this first section the reader is also introduced - and not for the last time - to the theory of the

1 ‘Boire et manger en pays bourguignons (xiv^e-xvi^e siècles)’, Rencontres de Boulogne-sur-Mer (21 au 24 septembre 2006), Publication du Centre européen d'études bourguignonnes (xiv^e-xvi^e siècles), vol. 47, 2007.

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four humours and their correspondence to the four temperaments of man, which played a large role both in cookery and health care. We are told that very little uncooked fruit and vegetables was eaten because they were generally considered to be unhealthy. Several cookbooks are mentioned in those first chapters: e.g. Le viandier by Guillaume Tirel dit Taillevent of c. 1370, the well-known but anonymous Ménagier de Paris of c. 1393, Maistre Chiquart's Du fait de cuisine of 1420 and the English Forme of Curye, temp. Richard II. The first surviving Dutch text is Een notabel boecxken van cokeeryen, printed by the Brussels printer Thomas van der Noot around 1514. All these titles and a few more are returned to many times throughout the collection, in different contexts and with different details. We are informed about meals in Lent and other periods of abstinence, and how the conventions influenced the choice of ingredients and recipes even to the point of ‘imitation’, when almonds were made to look and taste like eggs, and carp was prepared in such a way that it tasted like cheese (p. 41, p. 58). The first main section ends with two pieces on the influence of the cooking in one region on that in another, within Germany and the Netherlands and from the Arab world to Western Europe.

The second section focuses on the Netherlands themselves and northern Germany, from the feasts of Florence V, Count of Holland, to the surprisingly well-stocked ‘catering service’ of the toller of Lobith on the Rhine. For the years 1426-27, 1427-28 and 1428-29 the toller kept detailed accounts not only of the victuals he bought for his household and his guests, both noble and non-noble, their servants and their horses and how much they cost, but also of the quantity he used from his stock. Among other things these accounts show exactly when meat was eaten and when it was not because of the many and various days of abstinence. Meat, poultry, fish, cereal, nuts, dairy products and eggs feature largely in the accounts, fruit and vegetables, Mediterranean fruit and spices to a lesser extent; some information about how they were prepared can also be gleaned from them. The article concludes with lists of goods and their prices. Of special interest, too, are the sections in the book that focus wholly or partly on a specific group of people, such as the Knights Hospitallers in their Haarlem commandery, the Brothers of the Swan at Bois-le-Duc, or Cistercian or Benedictine monks, with their special rules and traditions.

The unavoidable problem with presenting ‘collected works’ on a relatively circumscribed subject in one volume is repetition. In this case this has the rather fascinating side effect that one can establish ascending sequences in the information provided, which seem almost to reflect the author's learning curve, and certainly and quite effectively instils the facts into the mind of the persevering reader. Take, for example, the humble potato: when it is first mentioned we are told it was unknown in Roman and medieval times (p. 19); this is repeated a couple of times, once with the addendum that it only became food for the masses in the eighteenth century (p. 24, p. 53); elsewhere we are reminded that the potato plant belongs to the nightshade family, which was regarded with suspicion in the middle ages anyway (pp. 60-61), and that it was not thought fit for human consumption, even when it had been introduced (p. 64), but used for cattle only (p. 119); it is explained that potatoes were not included in the pre-modern version of hutspot (p. 232); and finally a whole article is devoted to Die giftige Schwestern der Kartoffelpflanze und ihre Verwendung im Mittelalter, discussing their medical use as a narcotic, of which the dangers were realised by the end of the Middle Ages (pp. 361-68).

A similar ‘development’ can be traced for the herring: from the simple explanation of the medieval Latin word for (salted) herring, allec, -cis, which originally referred to one of the famous and distinctive liquid salts - like the garum that has recently been in the news - of the Roman cuisine (p. 18, p. 52), through the fact that herring was the food of the poorer classes (p. 58, p. 60, p. 108), and that it was eaten salted or smoked, like today (p. 108), to the invention of haringkaken (p. 121), and a more extensive discussion of the possible ways of preparing this particular fish (pp. 274-76).

Any thought of overlap or repetition disappears when one reads the more specialist articles on fasting - ‘Obligatory feasts and voluntary asceticism in the Middle Ages’; on food and health - ‘Medieval recipes for invalid food’, ‘Medieval opinions about food and drink in connection with bathing’; on the role of preserved food; the ceramic utensils found in the kitchen, or the author's well-known study of the use of cannabis. Something else that needs to be remembered when one gets any sense of déja-vu

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is the simple fact that before Marietje van Winter opened up the subject of medieval food and drink most of us knew virtually nothing about it, and it is thanks to her, especially in the Netherlands, that those who are interested are at all able to feel familiar with the subject. Her book Van Soeter Cokene was a fascinating novelty to my mother's generation and my own.

There are ten black and white illustrations in all, attractive but not stunning. At the end there is a bibliography of the author's published work from 1966 until 2006, excluding reviews.

Unfortunately and no doubt unavoidably the book has endnotes rather than footnotes and each series of notes appears in a slightly different format left over from its original publication; in some cases the notes are so long and packed with information that they could hardly have fitted at the bottom of the page anyway, in other instances the information of the notes has been brought up to date for the present edition. There are indices of persons and places and one of foods and ingredients. The latter is quite impressive and crucial to the collection: it is said to be in three languages, English, German and French, but actually has the Latin terms for most items as well, and the odd Arabic word. As it is subdivided into categories, such as ‘Dairy products’, ‘Dyes’, ‘Fat and oils’, ‘Fish’, the reader should not assume too quickly that an entry is not there.

The book is full of unexpected insights, such as the knowledge that the Low Countries were already a highly developed area for cattle-breeding, but that the cows were not primarily bred for milk production, or the fact that Germans in medieval times already enjoyed sour tasting foods like sauerkraut and sour brawn. Quite a number of recipes and ‘menus’ have been given in full and as usual make fascinating reading. To me, as a ‘non-foodie’, both in real life and in my medieval research, the collection has been a reminder of another of those sometimes forgotten aspects of medieval life, as well as an eye-opener. Reading the whole book from cover to cover - which not all users are likely to do in one session - taught me a lot and it also made be feel quite peckish at times. Everything is there and in abundance: as the Romans would say: ‘from the egg to the apples’.

Address of the author: Faas Eliaslaan 43, nl - 3742 as Baarn; [e-mail]