And for each day of the feast they should be provided with six thousand eggs.
Furthermore, for the aforesaid feast they must have two charges of gross spices, that is, white ginger, Mecca ginger, cinnamon, grains of paradise and pepper.
Of minor spices, that is, nutmeg (6 lbs), cloves (6 lbs), mace (6 lbs), galingale (6 lbs); thirty loaves of sugar, 25 lbs of saffron, six charges of almonds, one charge of rice, 30 lbs of starch, twelve cabas of candied raisins, twelve cabas of good candied figs, twelve cabas of candied prunes, a quintal of dates, 40 lbs of pinenuts, 18 lbs of Orchil lichen, 18 lbs of alkanet, 18 lbs of goldleaf and, yet furthermore, one lb of camphor, one hundred aunes [130 yds] of good, fine bolting-cloth: these things are solely for cooking purposes. Moreover, for the feast you need two hundred boxes of all sorts and colors of dragees to garnish the dishes. And if the feast should last longer, additional materials should be available.
For the profit of the lord who is offering the feast, and to expedite its preparation as much as possible, the abovementioned spices, in whatever generous amount is necessary for the feast, should be ground into powder, and each should be set aside in good big leather bags.
In order to do this feast as well as possible and without blame or fault, the Household Stewards, the Kitchen Squires, and the Chief Cook should meet to locate, inspect and organize good, adequate places to carry out the cooking activities. This space should be large enough that great double work-tables can be set up in such a way that the Kitchen Squires can move comfortably between the serving-tables and the work-tables, in order to pass the dishes on and to receive them back again.
There should be a provision of good big cauldrons to boil large cuts of meat, and a great number of moderate-sized ones for making pottages and for other cooking operations, and great suspended pans for cooking fish and other things, and a great number of large and ordinary-sized boilers for pottages and other things, and a dozen good big mortars. Decide on the place where sauces will be prepared. And you will need some twenty large frying pans, a dozen great kettles, fifty pots, sixty two-handled pots, a hundred hampers, a dozen grills, six large graters, a hundred wooden spoons, twenty-five holed spoons, both large and small, six pot-hooks, twenty oven-shovels, twenty roasters, both those with turnable spits and those with spits mounted on andirons. You should not put your trust in wooden skewers or spits, because you could spoil all your meat, or even lose it; rather, you should have six score iron spits which are strong and thirteen feet long; and you need three dozen other spits which are just as long but not as thick, in order to roast poultry, piglets and water birds: Si volucris verrat, qui torret eam procul errat; volucrem a torre procul de flumine torre. And besides this, four dozen slender skewers for doing glazing and for fastening things.
You need two boces of vinegar, one white and the other claret, each of eight sommes; one good twenty-somme boce of good verjuice; and a ten-somme boce of oil.
You need one thousand cart-loads of good dry firewood, and a large barnful of coal; and you should always know where to get more so as not to run out.
So that the workers not be idle or lack anything, ample money should be assigned to the Kitchen Squires to get salt, ingredients and any other things which might be necessary for cooking—of which I shall make no mention at present.
For the sake of decency and cleanliness, and to speed the service as much as possible, you must have a great supply of dishes, of gold, silver, pewter and wood, that is to say, four thousand or more of them, in such quantity that when you have presented the first serving you will have enough for the second serving and still some left over; and in the meantime you can wash and clean the dishes used in that first serving.
Since at such a feast there may be very high, mighty, noble, venerable and honorable lords and ladies who will not eat meat, it is necessary to have similar amounts of sea-fish and fresh-water fish, both fresh and salted, and these in as varied preparations as can be.
And because the dolphin is king of all the other sea-fish, it will be put first, then congers, grey mullet, hake, sole, red mullet, John Dory, plaice, turbot, lobsters, tuna, sturgeon, salmon, sprats, sardines, sea-urchins, mussels, eels, bogues, ray, calamary, weever and anchovies; the eels, both fresh and salted.
Of fresh-water fish: large trout, large eels, lampreys, filets of char, great pike filets, great carp filets, great perch, dace, pollacks, greylings, burbots, crayfish, and all other fish.
Because there are at this feast a few great lords or ladies, as was mentioned before, who will have with them their Chief Cook whom they will order to arrange and cook particular things for them, that Chief Cook should have supplied and dispensed to him, quickly, fully, generously and cheerfully, anything he may ask for or that may be necessary for his lord or lady, or for the both of them, so that he may serve them as he should.
In addition, you must have six score quintals [3600 lbs] of fine cheese; six hundred aunes [750 yds] of good, fine white cloth to cover the serving tables and the fish, meat and roasts; sixty aunes [75 yds] of linen to make the strainers for jellies; and enough fine white sheeting to make a dozen strainers similar in nature to a hippocras strainer.
You need two large two-handed knives to cut up the oxen, a dozen dressing knives for dressing, and two dozen knives for cutting up ingredients for pottages and for stuffings, and to prepare poultry and fish; and, as well, a half-dozen rasps to clean the work-tables and the chopping blocks, a hundred baskets for carrying meat to the pots and vats, both raw meat and cooked meat that is being borne to or from the work-tables; and also to carry coal for roasts and for whatever other purpose; and also to carry and to gather the dishes.
If it should happen that the feast is held in winter, each night for cooking you will need sixty torches, twenty lbs of tallow candle, and sixty lbs of suet tapers to inspect the butchery, the pastry kitchen, the fish kitchen, and all of the activities of the kitchen.
And, as for the pastry kitchen you must have a good big room as close as possible to the kitchen to hold two good big ovens for baking meat- and fish-pies, tarts, flans, custards, and ratons, and all other things that are necessary in cooking.
And for this the workers should be supplied with thirty sommes [3600 lbs] of fine flour for the abovementioned purposes, and they should be sure of being able to get more if the feast should last longer.
Since by the pleasure of the blessed Holy Trinity, which unfailingly grants us freely of everything, we shall have good, fine, great provisions to do our feast in grand fashion, we must get Chief Cooks and workers who will make the dishes and entremets for that feast; and if it should turn out that these cooks and workers are not available, send someone to look for some in places where they can be found, so that the feast can be done in a grand and honorable fashion.
Now that we have the chief workers that we need for the feast, it remains to organize them, which ones will be handling meats, and which fish. And let them be well instructed on how to make fish dishes of colors similar to those of the meat dishes for each serving, as will be explained.
—from On Cookery, 1420,
translated from the French by Terence Scully
ERNEST HEMINGWAY ON HOW HE LIKES TO EAT
No, people are funny in the way they are constructed. I only like to eat at sea or in the hills where I get hungry. What I really like is good fresh fish, grilled, good steaks (not these comic steaks they have bred for slobs to eat so they have no taste but only size) but good steaks with the bone and very rare. Good lamb, rare. Elk, mountain sheep, venison and antelope in that order and grouse, young sage-hen, quail and teal, canvasback and mallards in that order. With mashed potatoes and gravy. For vegetables I like celery and artichokes best; artichokes cold with sauce vinagreat (mis-spelled), Brussels sprouts, Swiss chard, broccoli and all fruits.
To eat when you write is just a stupefyeing bore unless they have some of the above.
So don’t worry about me down here eating nothing and makeing an ass of myself. I
have had strange eating habits since I was a boy. It is nothing to be proud of, ashamed of nor alarmed about. Bears don’t eat all winter and Harry Wills fasts a month each year.
Best always,
Ernest
—Letter to Charles Scribner, 18–19 May, 1951
SARAH JOSEPHA HALE ON THANKSGIVING DINNER
Sarah Josepha Hale was said to be one of the most influential American women of her day. She pioneered the women’s magazine—she edited Ladies Magazine from 1827 to 1836, and then Godey’s Lady’s Book from 1837 to 1877—which is not to say that she was in the forefront of all the major issues of the day. During the Civil War, Godey’s barely mentioned that there was a war because such was not the affair of a lady. But through her magazines, her novel, short stories, and articles, Hale did have a tremendous impact. One of her most visible imprints on American culture is that she was the great promoter of the holiday of Thanksgiving and had much to do with not only the fact that Americans celebrate it but the turkey-and-cranberry way in which they do it.
—M.K.
And now for our Thanksgiving dinner.
The roasted turkey took precedence on this occasion, being placed at the head of the table; and well did it become its lordly station, sending forth the rich odor of its savory stuffing, and finely covered with the froth of the basting. At the foot of the board, a sirloin of beef, flanked on either side by a leg of pork and loin of mutton, seemed placed as a bastion to defend the innumerable bowls of gravy and plates of vegetables disposed in that quarter. A goose and pair of ducklings occupied side stations on the table; the middle being graced … by that rich burgomaster of the provisions, called a chicken pie. This pie, which is wholly formed of the choicest parts of fowls, enriched and seasoned with a profusion of butter and pepper, and covered with an excellent puff paste is, like the celebrated pumpkin pie, an indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving.
Plates of pickles, preserves and butter, and all the necessaries for increasing the seasoning of the viands to the demands of each palate, filled the interstices on the table, leaving hardly sufficient room for the plates of the company, a wine glass and two tumblers for each, with a slice of wheat bread lying on one of the inverted tumblers. A side table was literally loaded with the preparations for the second course.
There was a huge plum pudding, custards and pies of every name and description known in Yankee land; yet the pumpkin pie occupied the most distinguished niche. There were also several kinds of rich cake, and a variety of sweetmeats and fruits.
—from The Good Housekeeper, 1841
NELSON ALGREN ON THE LAND OF MIGHTY BREAKFASTS
In the 1930s, Nelson Algren, a young fiction writer who in 1949 would win the first National Book Award for The Man with the Golden Arm, joined the Illinois Writers Project, part of the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA). Other writers who joined included Saul Bellow and Richard Wright. They were to document American foodways for a national program called “America Eats,” a series of guides showing the impact of immigration and customs on the food traditions of each region. Algren’s assignment, which he completed, was the Midwest. But “America Eats” was never completed because of World War II.
—M.K.
Following the Civil War, a considerable migration into the lumber country of Michigan occurred. Houses were rudely built in these areas, and settlement was transitory. Hundreds of small communities would spring up, only to disappear when the land was cut over and the sawmills removed to new timberland. Such conditions did not encourage variation in diet; food monotony reached a new high in lumber-operating sections of the state during the last three decades of the nineteenth century.
Paul Bunyan felt there were two kinds of Michigan lumber-camp cooks, the Baking Powder Buns and the Sourdough Stiffs. One Sourdough Sam belonged to the latter school. He made everything but coffee out of sourdough. He had only one arm and one leg, the other members having been lost when his sourdough barrel blew up.
The hyperbole serves to emphasize a truth. The sourdough pancake has always been a favorite among lumberjacks everywhere. To the camp cook a continuous supply of sourdough is an indispensable part of camp equipment, and he is never without his batch of starter. The starter is a portion of dough reserved from previous mixtures and stored in the kind of barrel that proved disastrous to Sourdough Sam. Zealously guarded, the starter can be kept for weeks in ordinary temperatures.
The night before the pancakes are to be fried, the cook assembles his batter, using the starter as a leavening agent. Flour and water are added to the starter, and the mixture is left near the stove to rise. By morning it is a light and frothy mass, smelling pungently of fermentation. After reserving from the batch a starter for the next morning’s pancakes, the cook adds salt, sugar, eggs, a little fat, and a pinch of soda. He pours large spoonfuls of the batter on a huge, fire-blackened griddle, abundantly greased with smoking pork rind and very hot. Then, after the griddle cake has fried a few moments, he flips it expertly and it’s as good as done.
In the old camps it was customary for the cook to install near the door of the shanty a crock containing sourdough batter in various stages of fermentation. Into the crock went all leftover batter and scraps of bread, doughnuts, cake, or pancakes, which quickly attained the semiliquid consistency of the batter.
Standing in a box sled among steaming kettles of beans, beef stew, and tea, the bull cook drove over a road to a central point in the woods to blow his dinner horn. The call carried five miles through the snowy forest. Then he howled like an Irish wolf: “Ye-ow!’s goin’ to waste.” The men swarmed toward the box sled from every direction. Though they ate around a big fire of slash, the beans froze on their plates and the tea froze in their whiskers.
At night they came into camp stamping with cold and grim with hunger. In the cookhouse the long tables were loaded with food—smoking platters of fresh mush, bowls of mashed potatoes, piles of pancakes and pitchers of corn syrup, kettles of rich brown beans, pans of prunes, dried peaches, rice pudding, rows of apple pies. The big camps fed the men bountifully and well.
Run here, men, it’s bilin’ hot,
Sam ’n Dave’s both eatin’ out the pot.
Old Uncle Jake says, “I’ll be damn,
If I can’t get a foreleg I’ll take a ham.”
The jacks ate silently, with great speed. If a greenhorn was tempted to make conversation, he was reminded by a placard on the wall: “No talking at the table.”
The cook was the king bee of the camp. He was well paid and well worth his pay, handling prodigious quantities of food, baking, roasting, frying, stewing for a hundred men who ate like horses, feeding them lavishly on an allowance of thirty cents a day per man.
The preparation of beans verged on ritual. A deep hole was dug on one side of the fire and filled with glowing embers. When the beans had been soaked for twenty-four hours, they were taken out and scalded. With deliberation the cook now chose the right kind of onion and placed it on the bottom of the pot. Then the beans were poured in until the pot was filled within six inches of the top. Slices of fat pork were laid across this, a sufficiency of molasses was poured upon the whole, and the pot sealed. The embers were now taken from the hole in the floor and the pot inserted. All space around the sides was filled and packed with hot coals and the bean hole covered up. The fire was made over it and kept burning twenty-four hours, when the cooking was complete. This made a rich and golden breakfast dish.
—from America Eats, c. 1940
W. H. AUDEN AND LOUIS MACNEICE ON ICELANDIC FOOD
In the summer of 1936, two young British poets, W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, spent three months in Iceland. They produced one of the most whimsical and quirky, perhaps even goofy, pieces of travel writing of all times. The book includes poetry and prose, a verse letter to Lord Byron, and a jointly written last will and testament, which begins:
We, Wystan Hugh Auden and Louis MacNeice
Brought up to speak and wr
ite the English tongue
Being led in the eighteenth year of the Western Peace
To the duck-shaped mountainous island with a Danish King,…
Years later, Auden would write, “As to the merits of the book, if any, I am in no position to judge. But the three months in Iceland upon which it is based stand out in my memory as among the happiest in a life which has so far been unusually happy.…”
Here is their assessment of the local Icelandic food.
—M.K.
Food.
In the larger hotels in Reykjavik you will of course get ordinary European food, but in the farms you will only get what there is, which is on the whole rather peculiar.
Breakfast: (9.0 a.m.). If you stay in a farm this will be brought to you in bed. Coffee, bread and cheese, and small cakes. Coffee, which is drunk all through the day—I must have drunk about 1,500 cups in three months—is generally good. There is white bread, brown bread, rock-hard but quite edible, and unleavened rye bread like cake. The ordinary cheese is like a strong Dutch and good. There is also a brown sweet cheese, like the Norwegian. I don’t like cakes so I never ate any, but other people say they are good.
Lunch and Dinner: (12 noon and 7 p.m.). If you are staying anywhere, lunch is the chief meal, but farmers are always willing to give you a chief meal at any time of the day or night that you care. (I once had supper at 11 p.m.)
Soups: Many of these are sweet and very unfortunate. I remember three with particular horror, one of sweet milk and hard macaroni, one tasting of hot marzipan, and one of scented hair oil. (But there is a good sweet soup, raspberry coloured, made of bilberry. L.M.)
Fish: Dried fish is a staple food in Iceland. This should be shredded with the fingers and eaten with butter. It varies in toughness. The tougher kind tastes like toe-nails, and the softer kind like the skin off the soles of one’s feet.
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