by Matt Siegel
And because these rituals were often carried out at night and in secret, some scholars believe that their sights and sounds (e.g., the echoes of primal screams and glimpses of torchlit rituals held by people wearing animal masks) may have led to a mythology of mischievous gremlins wreaking havoc during the twelve nights of Christmas by stealing food, breaking furniture, and terrorizing children—and the subsequent Christian practices of lighting yule logs23 to keep them from climbing down chimneys and leaving food out as a peace offering on Christmas Eve (a precursor, perhaps, to leaving cookies out for Santa).
Note that the exact origins of yule are unknown; some say it was a Teutonic or Norse festival24 that involved fires, feasting, and presents; others that it was a Saxon rite of sacrifice, eating, and drinking25 in honor of Thor; others still that it came from the words hwéol,26 iol, or iul27 (“wheel”) to mark the rotation of the sun and seasons. Regardless of its beginnings, it was eventually adopted by the Church28 to mark the twelve days of Christmas and later the Christmas season* in general. There is also a theory that yule comes from the Old Norse jól,29 which became the Old French jolif, giving us the modern “jolly.” If only more people wrote things down . . .
Anyway, the rest of the winter feasts essentially suffered the same fate as Yule. Explains historian Madeline Shanahan, “No singular one of these festivals,30 which stretched from November through to January, is the direct ancestor of Christmas.” But together, they laid the groundwork.
As Christianity spread across Europe, the Church basically adopted these various pagan, Norse, Roman, and Celtic traditions as their own, choosing to celebrate the birth of Christ on December 25,31 for example, because it was already associated with feasting, sacrament, and rebirth. So torches became Christmas trees and yule logs; the rebirth of the sun became the rebirth of the son; and heathen spirits and ghosts became holy spirits and ghosts. “Christian symbolism,” writes Clement A. Miles in Christmas in Ritual and Tradition Christian and Pagan, “was merely a gloss upon pagan practices.”32
In fact, all of this was outlined in a 601 letter from Pope Gregory I, who essentially gave the blueprint for converting sacrificial feasts into Christian festivals:
Because they are wont to slay many oxen in sacrifices33 to demons, some solemnity should be put in the place of this, so that on the day of the dedication of the churches, or the nativities of the holy martyrs whose relics are placed there, they may make for themselves tabernacles of branches of trees around those churches which have been changed from heathen temples, and may celebrate the solemnity with religious feasting. Nor let them now sacrifice animals to the Devil, but to the praise of God kill animals for their own eating, and render thanks to the Giver of all for their abundance; so that while some outward joys are retained for them, they may more readily respond to inward joys. For from obdurate minds it is undoubtedly impossible to cut off everything at once, because he who strives to ascend to the highest place rises by degrees or steps and not by leaps.
Another conversion tactic not outlined in his letter was to balance these feasts with periods of religious fasting, ensuring that carnal joys and the sins of gluttony were officially checked by periods of modesty and restraint—and that law and social order ultimately and publicly prevailed.
Writes historian Bridget Ann Henisch:
The medieval year resembled a chessboard34 of black and white squares. It was patterned with periods of fast and feast, each distinct and limited in time, yet each dependent on the other for its significance and worth. To give true spiritual refreshment, feast and fast had to follow each other like the seasons. A Church feast was ushered in by a period of fasting; a fast was rewarded with not only a feast in this life but the hope of a celestial banquet in the next. To be of value, each had to be a deliberate, conscious offering by the individual or by society. Endless, thoughtless wining and dining by the prosperous was nothing but gross indulgence; the nagging, perpetual undernourishment of the poor, “in suche bare places where every day is Lent,” was nothing but misery.
An added by-product, of course, is that this showed who was really in control. Feasts weren’t necessarily acts of charity but demonstrations of power,35 a way for hosts (both sacred and secular) to display their wealth, worldliness, and privilege by flexing excess in ways that went beyond the caloric, i.e., displaying not just quantity to their guests but freshness, variety, novelty, and presentation.
Because keeping food fresh back then was an ordeal, most of the foods commoners enjoyed outside of these festivals—meats, vegetables, even cheeses—would have been heavily salted or dried for preservation.36 And this was particularly true during winter. “The end of the year,” explains historian Reay Tannahill, “was a time of salting down beef,37 pork, game, and freshwater fish for the gray days to come, and of feasting on the last fresh meat for several months.” Even something relatively simple and frugal, like bread, the ultimate medieval peasant food, would (by most people) have been baked just once a week,38 owing to the labor of milling grain, making fire, and waiting for dough to rise, and the overall economy of baking larger loaves less frequently. And remember that this was before modern preservatives, so six-day-old bread back then would have been much harder and staler (on average) than six-day-old bread today. In fact, there are accounts of peasant breads in France so hard that they had to be chopped with axes39 to slice them.
In contrast, the upper class not only had the means to enjoy fresh foods, such as bread, every day but were given the “upper crust” at meals,40 which is where the phrase comes from; in today’s cheap, presliced breads, the crust is often nothing to write home about, which is sad, because in proper bread the upper crust often has the most flavor, given both its texture and the common practice of sprinkling it with spices.
Variety was another way to display privilege; even today, the idea of multiple courses is, for most, a luxury, but medieval courses went even further. As historian Madeleine Pelner Cosman writes, “The medieval ‘course’ was closer than the modern to the Latin41 origins of the word currere, to run, a running, passing, flowing ordering in time.” So a medieval course meant simultaneously a swift motion, the order of said motion (“Follow the course”), and a succession of events (“Dinner has run its course”). A single course, then, might easily have involved a dozen or more dishes brought out in quick succession.
The coronation banquet for King Henry IV in 1399,42 for example, included just three meat courses but more than forty dishes, including meat in pepper sauce, boar’s head with tusks, cygnet (baby swan), fat capon, pheasant, heron, sturgeon, venison, stuffed pig, peacock, crane, rabbit, pullet (baby hen), egret, curlew, partridge, pigeon, quail, snipe, and eagle. And the funeral collation for Nicholas Bubwith,43 bishop of Bath and Wells, in 1424 featured just two meat and two fish courses but included such offerings as nomblys de roo (an umble pie made from the entrails of deer),44 pork chops, capon, swan, swan neck pudding, heron, pheasant, woodcock, partridge, plover, snipe, lark, venison, yrchoun (a stuffed pig stomach spiked with almonds, meant to resemble a sea urchin or hedgehog45), eel, herring, millwell and ling tail, salmon, pike, codling, haddock, hake, sole, bream, perch, fried minnows, and crab.
Spices were also used to flaunt wealth, simultaneously serving as “superb insignia of conspicuous wealth”46 and “indicators of ostentatious waste.”47 Essentially, by indulging diners with unprocurable flavors from all over the world, hosts demonstrated their mercantile reach and access to lesser-known spice routes and distant or even mythical lands.
Black pepper and cinnamon were two of the most common—and costly—medieval spices; in fact, spice traders used to make up stories about their exotic origins so they could charge more for them. Pepper was said to grow in forests guarded by serpents48 that had to be scared away by setting the trees on fire, which was why black pepper pods were the color of ashes. One story claimed that cinnamon came from giant bird nests (belonging to either the phoenix or something called the cinnamologus49) that were too h
igh for any man to climb and that had to be knocked down by shooting them with weighted arrows. Another story was that it had to be transported using rafts without oars, sails, or rudders on a treacherous journey that took five years and was powered by courage alone50; another still that it grew in lakes guarded by winged creatures51 that would tear a man’s eyes out unless he covered his entire body in animal hide. (The flip side of this, by the way, is that historically, whenever spices became affordable, they became less desirable,52 so once people figured out that cinnamon literally grew on trees, it was relegated mostly to desserts, while pepper and salt became free table ornaments; meanwhile, other popular medieval spices, such as mace and long pepper, all but disappeared from the spice cabinet.)
It’s common, of course, to quantify the cost of spices by comparing their value in weight to that of gold, but that point is sort of moot in regard to medieval cooking because cooks also used actual gold to spice up their dishes alongside other pretentious ingredients such as crushed pearls and rose water.53 Again, the idea wasn’t really to make foods taste better so much as it was to flaunt wealth, so spices were generally added with no real regard for finesse or balance. Writes William Edward Mead in The English Medieval Feast, “This means, of course, that simplicity was as far as possible avoided54 and that the cook, like the physician and the apothecary in their prescriptions, aimed to combine as much irreconcilable material in one dish as he could without making it impossible to swallow.” So ingredients like sugar would be added to oysters (fittingly, in a recipe called “oysters in gravy bastard”),55 not because this tasted good or made any culinary sense but because it was something only a rich person would do.
Like the festivals themselves, then, many of the foods served during medieval feasts also subverted order—or appeared to. The illusion of conquering nature was really the ultimate status symbol, so cooks essentially played God in the kitchen by performing edible magic tricks like fashioning artificial snow from egg whites, which was called “dyschefull of snowe” and was similar to meringue;56 having wine or rose water spew from naked statues;57 or changing the colors of foods using a palette of edible paints and dyes: blood for brown or black; mint or parsley for green;58 egg yolk, saffron, or dandelion for yellow. (A modern relic of this, according to some scholars, is the Easter egg, decorated to celebrate the return of eggs to the diet59 following Lent.)
Another popular presentation technique was to sew together different animals and stuff them back inside their skin after cooking, creating, in essence, edible taxidermy; for example, roasting and stuffing a cock or a hen, then crowning it with a helmet, tucking a silver- or gold-leaf lance under its wing, and posing it atop a roasted piglet so it looked like the bird was riding it into battle—a dish called coqz heaumex60 (“helmeted cocks”); or skinning and roasting a swan before redressing it in its skin and using skewers to hold it upright as if it were still alive: the classic cignes revestuz61 (“redressed swans”). The same thing was done with peacocks, with the added step of stuffing a ball of cloth soaked with alcohol62 into the beak and lighting it just before service so that they appeared to breathe fire—sort of a darker version of the onion volcanos in hibachi restaurants. And there was also the cokagrys (cok meaning “chicken,” grys meaning “pig”), which called for sewing the head of a pig onto the lower half of a chicken and the head of a chicken onto the lower half of a pig:
Take an olde cok and pull hym63 (pluck him) and wasshe hym, and flee hym all, safe the lygges (legs); and fyl hym full of the same farse (stuffing); and also take a pygge, and flee hym from the middes dounward, and fyl hym als full of the same farse, and sowe hym faste togedur, and sethe hom; and when thai have sothen a god while, take hom up, and do hom on a spette, and roste hom welle; and take zolkes of eggus, and do therto saffron, and endore hom therwithe; and when thai arne rosted dresse hom forthe, and lay on hom golde foyle and sylver.
Probably the best example of all of this coming together—and another key milestone in the evolution of Christmas feasts—was Carnival, from the Latin carne levare (“to remove meat”). Described by French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie as “one last pagan fling”64 before the sacrificial fasting of Lent, when Christians abstained from eating meat and animal products in recognition of Christ’s forty days of fasting in the wilderness, Carnival was a hodgepodge of pre-Christian harvest rituals repurposed for Christian penitence; it had all the bells and whistles we’ve covered so far—a safety valve for social tension, a lavish show of power, sexual and gustatory excess—but it added the artificial problem of having to consume foods before they became taboo for six weeks, so people had even more of an excuse to indulge than when they were merely eating against the natural threat of winter. This also, by the way, led to the inventive use of ingredients so they didn’t go to waste; for example, some historians attribute the origin of pain perdu (French toast) to the need to use up eggs before Lent.65
Yet the most important aspect of Carnival was its ending, when a mock swordfight was staged66 between the personification of Lent, typically an emaciated woman who’d emerge from the chaos armed with fish and vegetables, and Carnival, a fat man armored in meats and phallic sausages. Sometimes Lent would be armed with bread or a wooden baker’s peel (the giant spatula used to remove bread from ovens) and armor made of leeks, fish scales, or mussel shells67 and Carnival would wear a boar’s-head helmet while mounted upon a stag;68 regardless, Lent always won, signifying a return to normality and reminding people that mayhem and misrule weren’t sustainable: that righteousness and order inevitably won and sin and gluttony inevitably lost,* that playtime was over and people had to go back to work until the same time next year. Similarly, other medieval celebrations staged reenactments of Adam and Eve and the fall of Eden,69 a fearful reminder that bad things happened to people who didn’t follow the rules. And this sort of became the carrot and stick of Christmas, the whole idea that you had to be good all year long so you didn’t end up on the naughty list.
A lot of the same ideas were mirrored in medieval literature and fables, extending these themes throughout the rest of the year. Many of the cultures that celebrated Carnival, for example, also had tales of mythical, upside-down dream worlds “designed to make the miserable circumstances of everyday life more bearable.”70 And just like those of the POWs who wrote fantasy Christmas menus, these dream worlds revolved largely around food.
Probably the most famous was the Land of Cockaigne, pronounced similar to the modern “cocaine” but originating from the Middle Low German kokenje 71 (“cake”), though the Dutch similarly had Luilekkerland,72 a combination of leuzig (“lazy”)73 and likken (“lick”),74 and the Germans had Schlaraffenland,75 an adaptation of schlaff (“loose”).76 They were all sort of the adult equivalents of the story of Hansel and Gretel, where you still had candy houses, only they were also filled with beer and loose women: adult fantasylands constructed on the ideations of sloth, gluttony, and a complete absence of compromise, where debauchery ruled and there was no such thing as death, work, or taxes.
Notes historian of Dutch literature Herman Pleij, “By the Middle Ages no one any longer believed in such a place,77 yet the stories about it continued to circulate around Europe for centuries. Apparently it was vitally important to be able to fantasize about a place where everyday worries did not exist and overcompensation was offered in the form of dreams of the ideal life.”
The climate in these dream worlds was perfect year-round, though it might rain the occasional pie or custard,78 snow a dusting of powdered sugar, or hail sugared almonds.79 The streets were paved with ginger and nutmeg,80 the rivers flowed with wine, beer, or sweet milk,81 and the architecture was entirely edible. Houses were made of bacon, sausage,82 and cake held together with nails made of puddings or cloves; their beams were made of butter or pork;83 and their rooftops were tiled with warm pancakes or tarts.84
Work was strictly forbidden, sometimes punishable by jail time; sloth, encouraged. So if you were hungry, all you had to
do was open your mouth and a bird would fly into it, perfectly stewed and sprinkled with cloves and cinnamon;85 or a pig would run up to you,86 fully cooked with a knife and fork stuck into its back, crying “Eat me!”; or a grilled fish might jump into your hand87 from the river. Hot pastries slid from rooftops; plump cherries grew on the ground so you didn’t have to reach for them, their centers made of sugar rather than hard pits; trees grew scones, pies, and doughnuts; and donkeys, dogs, cows, and horses, respectively, “shit nothing but sweet figs,”88 nutmeg, pancakes, and poached eggs.89
Meanwhile, sex was attained just as easily—and, crucially, enjoyed without shame, judgment, or “the encumbrance of having to wed.”90
“Loose women are highly thought of in that country,”91 reads one description of Luilekkerland from 1546, “and the more wanton and frolicsome they are, the more they’re loved. Even though it’s said that lecherous whores are expensive to keep, this is certainly not the case in that land, where all sensual pleasures are readily available and at no cost whatever. One only has to say, or even just to think: Mouth, what do you want? Heart, what do you desire?”
In fact, Schlaraffenland was sometimes divided into districts where each vice was given its own territory;92 for example, there was the Republic of Venerea, home to such landmarks as Abortiva, Lustig, Bastarda, Concubina, and Lupanar (“wolf’s den”), which was medieval slang for a brothel, derived from the practice of calling prostitutes lupae (“she-wolves”) because they were “sexual and economic predator[s]”93 who “aggressively stripped their clients of wealth.”
Also, there was a fountain of youth that kept one perpetually thirty years of age,94 and you were paid for sleeping and telling lies.95
