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2 hours ago
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You can learn a lot about yourself by reading things that make no sense to you. Those writings made sense to someone, perhaps someone with foundational assumptions very different from your own. If you can figure out what those are, you can at least articulate a view you don’t hold, perhaps a view you didn’t even realize was even an option. It was with this hope, at least, that I turned to medieval cookbooks.
Consider The Forme of Cury, a manuscript scroll compiled around 1390 at the court of Richard II and preserved for posterity in a 1780 print edition by one Samuel Pegge. Pegge was an antiquarian, a kind of 18th century gentleman proto-archaeologist. Through a series of very posh garage sales, one of his buddies managed to acquire a copy of the scroll, which Pegge borrowed and dutifully typed up.
He also added a frankly over-the-top 9,000+ word preface with more than 100 footnotes. The reason for all the editorial hand-holding, I think, is that Pegge understood that The Forme of Cury was a seriously weird read. Even by the 18th century—whose literary conventions strike us as slightly out-there—you couldn’t exactly just sit down and read a 14th century scroll cover to cover. So Pegge attempted to turn a literary face-plant into more of a controlled crash landing, dropping footnotes on every line to explain this or that obstacle for his reader.
What makes it so difficult? It’s probably best explained by example.
Here’s a representative recipe from The Forme of Cury:
EGURDOUCE [1]. XXI.
Take Conynges or Kydde and smyte hem on pecys rawe. and frye hem in white grece. take raysouns of Coraunce and fry hem take oynouns parboile hem and hewe hem small and fry hem. take rede wyne suger with powdour of peper. of gynger of canel. salt. and cast þerto. and lat it seeþ with a gode quantite of white grece an serue it forth.
There is a lot to take in here, starting with the facts that the language is barely readable and the title is maybe not even a real word. Before I comment, I will allow Mr. Pegge one of his many footnotes:
[1] Egurdouce. The term expresses piccante dolce, a mixture of sour and sweet; but there is nothing of the former in the composition.
Pegge unhelpfully glosses the term in Italian for some reason, but “egurdouce” is just a Middle English transcription of the Norman French “aigre-douce”, or “sour-sweet”. The book is largely written in Middle English, but occasionally the authors will lapse into French or Latin for a few sentences before picking back up as if nothing unusual had happened. Below I’ve tried to render the recipe as literally as possible while modernizing the spelling and punctuation:
SOUR-SWEET [RABBIT OR GOAT]
Take rabbits or [a] young goat and smite [!] them into pieces raw. And fry them in white grease [lard]. Take raisins of Corinth [dried currants] and fry them. Take onions, parboil them and hew them small and fry them. Take red wine [and] sugar with powder of pepper, [powder] of ginger, [powder] of cinnamon, and salt; and cast thereto. And let it seethe with a good quantity of white grease and serve it forth.
Having read the recipe in modern English, do you feel like that clears everything up? Or do you feel that it might as well still be in Chaucerese? Lat it seeþ, indeed.
A few things stand out. First, the recipe is indifferent as to its own primary ingredient: rabbit, goat, whatever you’ve got lying around is probably fine. Even more oddly, there are exactly zero quantitative measurements anywhere. Volume, weight, time, and temperature are just not a thing in this recipe. The closest we get is “a gode quantite" of lard for serving. How much lard, exactly? You know, a good quantity. Finally, did you notice how the recipe seemed to take place almost cosmically outside of space and time, rather than in a real-world kitchen containing a stove, pots, mixing bowls, a cutting board, &c.? There is no “in a small mixing bowl…”, no “pre-heat the oven to 375…”, no nothing.
If you tried to reproduce this recipe from the written text, do you think you could execute the author’s vision, or would the result be something like a culinary game of Telephone? I personally am not hopeful.
It’s tempting to conclude that the medievals were just as clueless as the average 18th century Enlightenment edgelord thought they were. (And remember that these are the king’s cooks, presumably þe fyneste of þe fyneste.) I propose a different conclusion, though: medieval recipes were adapted to a culture very different from our own.
Imagine a typical medieval kitchen, or even a really swanky medieval kitchen such as Richard II might have had. Where is your stove? Well, you don’t have one, exactly. Instead you have a fireplace with some iron hooks and cranes for suspending food at various heights above the coals. The fire had to be managed along with the rest of the cookery and was arguably the hardest part of it—maintaining a wood fire at constant temperature against fuel consumption and drafts wasn’t easy. “Bake at 350 for 30 minutes” is totally useless in this context: just cook it until it lookeþ done.
Also, what is a “minute”? Clocks won’t have minute hands until perhaps 1475, the better part of a century away. To measure short intervals of time, people would typically recite a given prayer. But as anyone who has ever served detention in a Catholic school can attest, this method can yield variable results.
What about weight measurements? The avoirdupois system of weights (viz. pounds and ounces) had probably been in England for a century at that point. In principle, accurate gravimetric measurements could be made with a pan scale and sets of standardized weights. But these were expensive, and maybe not even all that standardized—English history records repeated efforts to standardize weights and measures, suggesting that earlier efforts never quite took. In any case, they seemed to have been used primarily for commodity trade between strangers rather than for private daily tasks.
So clearly there were some practical obstacles to measurements in medieval cookbooks: most of the relevant measurement tools didn’t exist yet, and the foundation of the medieval culinary tech stack was so touchy that it didn’t make much sense to refine the other parts. The day-to-day physical culture of the Middle Ages was just not that amenable to quantification, and if no one else is quantifying then there’s little point in being the first to start.
I suspect, though, there are more fundamental reasons that medieval cookbooks made more sense to the medievals than they do to us. Consider some assumptions that are generally true of modern recipes:
The recipe is an algorithm for producing the dish. The same steps must be taken each time, and the same dish must result.
The recipe should be followable by someone who may be separated from the author by time and space, and who therefore can’t ask for clarification or follow-ups.
The recipe may involve specialized techniques and/or ingredients that are unfamiliar to the reader.
The intended recipient of the text’s message can read [!]
I’m not sure that any of these assumptions were actually true of medieval recipes. The first two aren’t even true of the notes I write to myself about cooking. After I’ve made a dish a few times, the most helpful form of written record is simply a list of ingredients and their amounts—I may not remember the optimal ratio of flour to baking powder in a batter, but I do know how pancakes work. The recipes in The Forme of Cury read similarly, more like notes to oneself than something you’d put on a Voyager plate and send to the Andromeda galaxy. Today you can read stuff written by total strangers about exotic cuisines from halfway around the world, but medieval recipes were interpreted by people who were already well-versed in a tradition that was changing slowly relative to a human lifetime.
Let’s try to work out, in concrete detail, how a document like the Forme of Cury might have actually functioned in the context of a real live medieval court.
When you think of the court of Richard II, think less of a household and more of a kind of medieval Warped Tour: a mobile entourage of hundreds of lords and courtiers plus all of their respective posses, traveling the country, crashing at various venues for a few days, then moving on. Richard II in particular was known for rolling deep, supporting an infamously large and lavish court. Feeding all of these people was a huge logistical operation involving at least dozens of cooks.
Copying a manuscript in this world was expensive, so it must have served some purpose. You don’t just handwrite ten thousand words by accident. You have to assume that this thing was useful to someone. But to whom?
I’ll let The Forme of Cury answer by quoting original introduction in full:
[The] fome [sic] of cury was compiled of the chef Maister Cokes of kyng Richard the Secunde kyng of ynglond aftir the Conquest. the which was acounted þe best and ryallest vyand of alle csten [k]ynges and it was compiled by assent and avysement of Maisters [of] phisik and of philosophie þat dwellid in his court. First it techiþ a man for to make commune potages and commune meetis for howshold as þey shold be made craftly and holsomly. Aftirward it techiþ for to make curious potages & meetes and sotiltees for alle maner of States bothe hye and lowe. And the techyng of the forme of making of potages & of meetes bothe of flessh and of fissh. buth y sette here by noumbre and by ordre. sso þis little table here sewyng wole teche a man with oute taryyng: to fynde what meete þat hym lust for to have.
Here’s a translation in case you are tempted to Too Chaucer; Didn’t Read:
The Form of Cookery was compiled by the Chief Master Cooks of King Richard the Second, King of England after the Conquest, who had the best and most royal victuals of all Christian kings, and it was compiled by assent and advisement of Masters of physic and philosophy that dwelled in his court. First it teaches one how to make common stews and common meals for the household as they should be made: craftily and wholesomely. Afterwards it teaches how to make intriguing stews and meals and subtleties [elaborate dessert sculptures] for all manner of States [social ranks] both high and low. And the teaching of the form of making of soups and of meals both of flesh and of fish are set here by number and by order. So this little table here following will teach anyone, without tarrying, to find what meal they would like to have.
So, in the court of Richard II, there were such things as Chief Master Cooks, and more than one of them. There were also Masters of physic and philosophy. “Physic” is the origin of the modern term “physician”, though medieval and modern medicine so different that it seems more fair to just leave it untranslated. “Philosophy” means philosophy (but with the same caveat). Both were thought important to consult before preparing Rabbit-or-Goat.
If those were the authors, you may be wondering who the intended audience was. For that matter, could any of these cooks actually read?
Estimates of medieval literacy are famously contentious, depending on whose literacy is being measured, where, when, and according to what standard. By 1400, estimates that 5-10% of all men could seem plausible, with rates varying inversely with social distance from the clergy. I’m going to guess that then, as now, the guy or gal slaving over the hot coals was unlikely to be a man or woman of letters. More likely, the intended audience of The Forme of Cury was someone more like a Master Cook, a middle manager in the royal household apparatus responsible for managing the execution and quality assurance for hundreds of covers every night. Such a man could probably read and could translate a recipe into actionable instructions for a subordinate, supplying additional context as necessary.
Even the fact that the text is (mostly!) in Middle English seems significant. Government records from this period were generally still in French if not Latin, supporting the sense that The Forme of Cury was intended more as a practical, internal household aid than as a public-facing document per se. At most you could imagine the book being gifted to other noble households and used by English-speaking staff.
To really appreciate The Forme of Cury and all of its embedded assumptions, contrast it with The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, published almost five hundred years later in 1896 by one Fannie Farmer. While it is too strong to say that Miss Farmer invented measuring cups, she rams home their importance with all the zeal of a 19th century New England Unitarian social reformer, which of course she was. The section entitled “How to Measure” begins:
Correct measurements are absolutely necessary to insure [sic] the best results. Good judgment, with experience, has taught some to measure by sight; but the majority need definite guides.
She wasn’t kidding, either. Here is her recipe for Belgian Hare, Sour Cream Sauce, the fairest comparison I could find to Egurdouce. All emphases mine:
Clean and split a hare. Lard back and hind legs, and season with salt and pepper. Cook eight slices carrot cut in small pieces and one-half small onion in two tablespoons bacon fat five minutes. Add one cup Brown Stock, and pour around hare in pan. Bake forty-five minutes, basting often. Add one cup heavy cream and the juice of one lemon. Cook fifteen minutes longer, and baste every five minutes. Remove to serving dish, strain sauce, thicken, season with salt and pepper, and pour around hare.
In eight sentences, we have ten different quantitative descriptions. Other recipes are even more involved, listing spice measurements down to a quarter teaspoon. Elsewhere in the book we have pages of tables listing conversion charts for weights and volumes, and the expected times of various cooking procedures. Common ingredients are listed with their complete macronutrient breakdowns and, where applicable, chemical formulae [!] All of this, by the way, is written in complete paragraphs with topic sentences, supporting details, conclusions and everything.
Clearly we are a world away from vibecooking.
But so is the 14th century a world away from the 19th. One world has manuscripts; the other, books. Manuscripts get copied by hand; books by printing. The marginal manuscript copy takes a substantial fraction of the effort to write in the first place; the marginal print copy is cheap. The manuscript is typically written in scroll form, which must be scanned linearly to be searched; the book has numbered pages which can be turned in random-access mode and support metadata such as a table of contents and index. One world has artisans making bespoke artifact; the other has mechanized factories that can crank out affordable and identical copies of measurement devices. 14th century Old England was a largely oral culture with literate elites; 19th century New England probably came as close to true universal literacy as any society in history. The intended reader of a 14th century text was often someone with whom the author shared a great deal of context; by the 19th century, print culture had made mass anonymous readership inevitable and its texts are accordingly more crisp and self-contained, almost as if addressed to no one in particular. The list goes on and on.
Debates about pre-modern mentality have a way of making their participants sound insane. Was ancient Sumeria organized by mass hallucination? Could Homeric Greeks tell green from blue? Did Gutenberg usher in a new form of spiritual experience? Usually, though, the strongest versions of these claims are doubtful and the weakest versions are trivially true. The rub’s really in locating the strongest defensible formulation.
So here’s a modest claim: the medieval world was very different from our own in all kinds of objective ways, especially in the ways that we measured the world itself. If cognition requires a world-model, those differences in the world must have made differences inside medieval minds. Pile up enough of these differences, and perhaps the world-model just flips like a Necker cube.
In that other world, there are still recognizable touch-points (some things truly never change) but now alongside baffling or even scandalizing differences. You might find soaring cathedrals against casual animal torture, sublime theology against gangland murder rates, or cookbooks against all common sense about cooking. But at its height medieval world wasn’t choking on its own contradictions: things just seemed to hang together in a different way. The details that make no sense to us today are hints as to how the world-picture must have flipped.
Thanks to
and
for helpful conversations and comments. All errors are of course my own.
