Mostly Medieval:Images and Reflections

Since election day, writing about medieval food and cooking has seemed a little silly to me.  I've wanted to privately take refuge in the Middle Ages, reading books and writing my lectures about medieval art, but putting medieval stuff out over the interwebs has seemed to be beside the point. But.  Then I got thinking about this recipe, which I made the week before the election, and is a medieval Middle Eastern dish.  According to Pleyn Delit , Middle Eastern or "Saracen" food was the trendy new cuisine in western Europe in the Middle Ages.  That fits a pattern I often talking about in teaching medieval and Islamic material: the medieval perception of the east and specifically of the Islamic world as a source of good things that people wanted for themselves.  In the current political climate, it also strikes a useful contrast against perceptions of the Middle Ages that have begun to concern the broad community of medievalist scholars: specifically the ide...

In talking about my food preferences and how they are shaping this project, I neglected to mention one thing: I have a major sweet tooth.  I love chocolate, but it's off the table for this project since it's a New World product.  I'm also a big fan of baked fruit desserts and so, when I saw a recipe for an apple tart in Plyen Delit , I knew I would have to give it a try. The original recipe reads: "Tak gode applys & gode spycis & figs & reysons & perys, & wan they arn wel ybrayd colour wyth safroun wel & do yt in a cofyn, & do yt forth to bake wel."  I substituted prunes for figs, because I had some in my cupboard, and I didn't use any pears, because I didn't want to wait for them to get ripe.  For apples, I used Granny Smiths, as my favorite for baking in general.  The most unusual part of the recipe was the direction that the fruits be "wel ybrayd:" the authors of Plyen Delit translate that as chopping them u...

I picked this for my second recipe from Pleyn Delit because it looked fairly simple and looked like it would reheat well - that's one of my major criteria for normal recipes since I don't have time to cook every night.  I was also curious about it because I couldn't imagine what texture it was going to have.  Pleyn Delit doesn't include any photographs of the prepared food so it's hard to imagine in advance was the finished dishes are going to look like.  The original is given as "Take yong gowrdes; par hem and kerve hem on pecys.  Cast hem in gode broth, and do therto a gode pertye of oynouns mynced.  Take pork soden; grynde it and alye it therwith and with yokes of ayren.  Do therto safroun and salt, and messe it forth with powdor douce."  "Gourds" here means squash and I chose to use butternut, since its a squash I'm used to working with.  The squash is boiled in broth along with some onions and then that is mashed together: I used ...

  I'm starting this project by focusing on the cooking aspect and, for now, I'm not worrying about connecting the cooking to medieval art-making practices, but am focusing on getting familiar with medieval techniques and tastes.   Focusing on the cooking allows me to integrate this work into my everyday life, by simply making one of the meals I prepare each week a medieval recipe.  This should allow me to make progress on this new project even while I keep up on my work as department chair, teach, and put finishing touches on the book. Since I am integrating this aspect of the work into my regular cooking, it is being shaped by my preferences and practices when it comes to food.  To set some of that out: I do eat meat and I eat a broad range of meats - chicken and beef but also pork, lamb, veal, duck, and occasionally rabbit.  Sorry if that bothers anyone.  I don't eat much fish, but I do like shellfish.  I try to avoid carbohydrates, only bec...

Last fall, I taught a seminar entitled "Materials, Making, and Meaning in Medieval Art," for which the main text was Theophilus' twelfth-century art-making manual, On Divers Arts .  As we read that text, my students and I kept making connections to our own, twenty-first century, culture of food and cooking: his from-scratch instructions for making artists' materials read to us like recipes; his directions for using extra fish parts (heads and guts) for making glue reminded us of the current interest in using the whole animal; and his prescription that certain twigs be gathered at a specific time of year recalled for us the movement towards seasonality in food.  Those connections peaked my interest in exploring connections between medieval art-making and medieval cooking and food culture and so, with this blog post, I announce my new research project, "Eating Medieval Art."  To be clear, this is not a project about images of food in medieval art (not tha...