by Jack Turner
Aldobrandino of Siena, thirteenth century, Le Régime du corps
If the dish is hot, mix it with another cold one; if it is wet, join it with its opposite.
Avicenna (c.980–1037), Canon of Medicine
Alas for poor King Henry I. Though he arrived in Lyons-la-Forêt (Normandy) in the autumn of 1135 sound in body and mind, he left there a corpse, all on account of an ill-advised meal. In the words of Henry of Huntingdon, author of Historia Anglorum, or History of the English: ‘When he came to Saint-Denis in the forest of Lyons, he ate the flesh of lampreys, which always made him ill, though he always loved them. When a doctor forbade him to eat the dish, the king did not take this salutary advice … So this meal brought on a most destructive humour, and violently stimulated similar symptoms, producing a deadly chill in his aged body, and a sudden and extreme convulsion.’ Within a few days he was dead, and his kingdom was at war.
Seldom can a poor menu selection have mattered more, at least in the chronicler’s version of events. The ensuing wrangle took the better part of two decades to sort out: ‘When King Henry died … the peace and harmony of the kingdom were buried with him,’ as a contemporary put it. With his son and heir dead in the disaster of the White Ship, drowned in the English Channel, Henry had proclaimed his daughter Matilda next in line to the throne, but his nephew Stephen and the Norman nobility were not so sure. Overlooking his sworn oath of loyalty, Stephen made a rival claim for the crown, resulting in a civil war that ended only with his death and the accession of the young King Henry II in 1154. If only the first Henry had listened to his physician, or read his cookbooks.
At the time, they amounted to much the same thing. In the modern bookshop the contents of the food section can typically be divided into three categories: the practical, the dietetic and the whimsical. During the Middle Ages the whimsical, by which I refer to travel, history and essays on gastronomy, did not exist, and between the first two there was no clear distinction. Cooking was dietetics. The concern of the medieval food writer was as much with maintaining or restoring health as with creating an aesthetic effect. Cooking was considered more a medical science than an art. (There is a distant echo of this past in the modern term ‘recipe’, which originates with the medical precepts of the Salernitan school, the most widely read medical textbooks of the Middle Ages. These were written as a series of formulae beginning with the Latin injunction recipe, i.e., ‘take …’.) In the opinion of Andrew Borde, author of the Dyetary and Breviary of Helthe, both published in 1547, ‘A good cook is half a physician, for the chief physic (the counsel of a physician except) doth come from the kitchen.’ Once this fact is appreciated much of the mystery of medieval cooking is explained. Were it possible to beam a celebrity chef back to the court of Henry I, the king would find her bestsellers bland, bizarre and more than a little dangerous, bound to finish him off even faster than a surfeit of prohibited lamprey.
The medieval overlap of cuisine and health is particularly significant to understanding the taste for spices. (The European taste for coffee and tea likewise began on doctors’ orders, as it were.) Medical theory held that all foods diverging from the temperate ideal risked causing a humoral imbalance: that is, illness. Many a death occasioned by natural causes or some unknown agency was attributed to food provoking a supposed disruption of the humours – as was the case, in all likelihood, with Henry’s death-dealing lamprey. Writing early in the sixth century, Anthimus claimed to have witnessed two peasants brought near death by eating turtle doves, a bird believed to be replete with melancholy humours, resulting in an alarming outbreak of diarrhoea and ‘vomiting that constricted part of the face’. Aldobrandino of Siena claimed that foods he classed as cold and moist, such as fruit, brains and oily fish, were ‘viscous … producing abomination’.
With dire warnings like this ringing in the diner’s ears the spiced dishes that were such a feature of medieval cuisine made a good deal of medical sense. It was all a question of striking the right balance. There was nothing new in this notion; indeed its sheer antiquity guaranteed its authority. From Hippocrates onward all the major medical writers of antiquity cite various spicy recipes, many of which reappear, sometimes changed little if at all, in the cooking of the Middle Ages. Even the cookbook of Apicius, the foremost document of the Roman delight in the belly, pragmatically counsels a dose of spiced salts ‘for the digestion’ and for warding off ‘all diseases and the plague and all types of cold’. Sanctioned by the wisdom of the ancients – if wisdom it was – spices were believed to heal, mitigate and rectify as much as they delighted.
Underlying this faith – for medieval medicine had a great deal more to do with belief than empiricism – was an acute suspicion of many foods now regarded as eminently nutritional. Food frequently took the blame for all the far more deadly but as yet inexplicable and invisible killers such as salmonella, cholera, pneumonia, typhus and tuberculosis. According to medieval medical theory, many foods required modification before they could be eaten safely, the supposedly heating and drying properties of the spices being seen as a form of compensation, their primary duty to rectify the otherwise harmful properties of the food. If the premise was not scientific, the methods were. Writing in the 1330s, the Milanese physician Maino de Maineri claimed that spiced sauces could counterbalance the effects of ‘intemperate’ foodstuffs. His Opusculum de Saporibus – a ‘Medieval Sauce-Book’ was Lynn Thorndike’s apt translation – begins with a summary of meats, fish and fowl, setting out a classification system by which to judge their place on the spectra of hot through cold and dry through wet, with the appropriate sauce tailored accordingly. Depending on their classification, some otherwise problematic foods could be rectified with spices, the potentially dangerous effect of one cancelling out the other. Pork was generally seen as cool and moist by nature, apt to generate phlegmatic humours and therefore amenable to spices. Beef in contrast was dry and cold, suitable for spicing but requiring some wetting as well.
There was an equal though opposite danger from foods occupying the hot and dry end of the spectrum. Like all creatures, wildfowl were held to take after their element, being regarded as warm and a little on the dry side – all that flying around in the dry, hot air – from which it followed that they had to be seasoned accordingly. One common remedy was the addition of a compensatory ‘cool and moist’ pea puree. For the same reason birds were apparently seldom eaten with spices, at least not without some countervailing ‘cooling’.
Some foodstuffs were more dangerous than others. Lamb was widely regarded as dangerously warm and moist, for which reason it was never popular. One of the most problematic meats was beaver tail, widely classified as fish and therefore much sought after by certain monastic communities for fish days.* Like fish, it was judged as ‘a very delicate dish’, for which reason the medieval diner apparently never ate his beaver au naturel. It was not gastronomy so much as dietetics that was in Edward Topsell’s mind when he advised how to get one’s beaver done right: ‘The manner of their dressing is, first roasting, and afterward seething in an open pot, that so the evill vapours may go away, and some in pottage made with Saffron; other with Ginger, and many with Brine; it is certain that the tail and forefeet taste very sweet, from whence came the proverbe, that sweet is that fish, which is not fish at all.’
But it was not the fishy beaver so much as the real fishes that caused the greatest concern. Taking after their cool and moist native element, they were held liable to nourish bitter humours, a consideration that made them particularly amenable to spicing. According to Maino de Maineri, the porpoise was a ‘bestial’ fish, cold and wet, calling for a particularly sharp and hot pepper sauce. It was likewise with King Henry’s regicide lamprey, classed as cold and moist and as such highly dangerous. Though it was throughout the Middle Ages an esteemed and luxurious dish, lamprey was apparently never eaten without amending, or not without the fear of dire consequences. (One of the ironies of Henry’s fate is that he was, his exit aside, a monarch
with a keen interest in medicine.) For this reason it was customary to kill lampreys by drowning them in wine, classed as warm and drying, after which they were invariably cooked by the heating and drying method of roasting, then spiced. According to Laurence Andrew, author of The noble lyfe and natures of man of 1521, lamprey ‘must be soaked in good wine with herbs and spices, or else it is very dangerous to eat, for it has many venomous humours, and is evil to digest’. Similar concerns dictated the preparation of molluscs, oysters, mussels, cockles, scallops, eels and congers, classed as wetter and colder still.
King Henry’s death was, then, a particularly dramatic illustration of a broader orthodoxy: you became what you ate. Complicating the issue still further was the consideration that it was not just qualities inherent to the food, but the imagined qualities of the diner as well that had to be taken into account. Like diseases, individual variations were accounted for in terms of one’s natural humoral balance or ‘complexion’, as determined on the basis of a number of outward signs such as eyes, temper, voice, laughter, urine or colouring (whence, very obviously, the modern use of the term complexion). Diet had to be tailored accordingly, as with Jack Sprat’s celebrated diagnosis: he could eat no fat and his wife no lean, his natural disposition being on the wet side, hers on the dry. An early-fifteenth-century handbook of health summarised the physician’s belief that ‘A man should choose meat and drink according to his complexion: if he is of a hot complexion he should use hot meats in moderation, and if the bodily heat augments and is inflamed by a surfeit of overly strong meat and drink, or by any other happenstance, then contrary meat and drink are more helpful to his health.’ Melancholics were to avoid cold and dry beef, for it would only aggravate their condition. So too it was possible to alleviate one’s natural predisposition by means of the appropriate diet. Falstaff said of Prince Hal that through drinking sufficient Spanish sack he had so heated the ‘cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father’ that he became ‘very hot and valiant’. Hence the old soldier’s claim: ‘If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.’
What sack did for Hal, spices did more powerfully. For those whose complexions inclined to cool or melancholy, the risk of illness could be mitigated or neutralised. A patient with a cold and dry complexion should be given spices (hot) and meat (wet), whereas a ‘hot’ individual should avoid them, for they would merely aggravate a predisposition to choleric humours. Erasmus (1469–1536) attributed the endemic plague and ‘deadly sweating fever’ in England partly to the national addiction to seasonings, ‘in which the people take an uncommon delight’. These considerations varied with age as well as nation. An old, cold and dry man could benefit from a little meat ‘lightly flavoured with sweet spices, such as cinnamon, ginger and others that are suitable’. On the other hand: ‘The use of pepper is of no good to sanguine or choleric men, since pepper dissolves and dries the blood … ultimately breeding measles and other full evil sickness and evils.’ The trick of finding the right balance varied according to age, the ageing process being seen as a progressive cooling down and drying up of the organism – the reason why spices are continually recommended for ‘old folkes’, but cautioned against for the young. As the widely read, pseudo-Aristotleian Secretum Secretorum puts it: ‘For young men, an abundant, moist diet, to old men, moderate diet and hot.’
Reaching such judgements was, needless to say, a subjective business. A certain degree of objectivity was at least possible with the final variable, it being an article of faith that certain foods should be eaten at certain times of the year and avoided at others. Hot weather called for cool food, and vice versa. It followed that spices should be used only moderately or not at all in the hot summer months; the cold and wet winter, on the other hand, was the season for hot, dry foods, such as birds and roasted and spiced meats. The Venerable Bede advised cloves and pepper for the winter months; they should be avoided in the summer. He had it on the authority of Hippocrates that pepper and warm sauces could counteract the phlegm of the season. On cold days a cup of spiced wine was not only warming but healthy, the perfect excuse to indulge – ‘With Wines and Spice the Winter may be bolder,’ in the words of the Elizabethan poet Sir John Harrington. (Another source of heat recommended for the winter was sex; summer was the season of chastity.) The risk of catching a wintry affliction was redoubled by the Lenten diet of fish, in a season ever prone to wet and cool diseases. The impression of the unmitigated spiciness of medieval cuisine can largely be attributed to the highly spiced seasonings developed to offset (and relieve the tedium of) the cold and fishy season of Lent.
Medically, of course, the greater part of this was nonsense. (Though who are we to laugh? Modern dietary fads can be just as bizarre – and we have fewer excuses for our gullibility.) But if the foundations of medieval dietetics rested less on verifiable proofs than on inherited belief, from the practitioner’s point of view the supreme merit of humoral theory – and one reason for its durability – lay in its flexibility to fit any situation: retrospectively, any disease could be ‘explained’.
In the wealthier household, the task of juggling these considerations fell to the speciarius, or spicer. Occupying a role midway between pharmacist and in-house health consultant, the spicer was considered an indispensable employee. In 1317 the household of the French king found room (or cash) for only four officers of his chamber: a barber, a tailor, a taster and a spicer. Charged both with acquiring and then supervising supply, his main duties were the acquisition, composition and prescription of the appropriate drugs and seasonings. In conjunction with the physician and the cook – arrangements varied from one time and place to another – he was there to ensure the suitability of dinner, taking into account both constitution and the different courses on offer at any given meal, their proportions, qualities and quantities. Among the most important of his tasks was the preparation of the after-dinner spices that were such a conspicuous feature of medieval cuisine. Occupying a place somewhere between dessert and medicine, these were regarded as healthy pleasures, the idea being that the warming and heating spices helped digest or ‘cook’ a meal in the stomach, suppressing the stomach’s tendency to generate wet and cold humours. The household of King Edward IV had an ‘Office of Greate Spycerye’ charged with delivering sugar and spice to the ‘Office of Confectionarye’ for the preparation of highly sweetened after-dinner spices. It was doubtless a diagnosis of a cold and wet stomach that explains an entry in the account books of the Avignon papacy in 1340, recording the pontiff’s consumption of a whopping thirty-two pounds of ginger, a remedy for the pain in his belly.
Few medieval Europeans, as we shall see, could afford to eat (or indulge their hypochondria) on such a grand scale. For those who could, the reputed physiological effects of spice were an important determinant of how and when food was prepared – and a reminder that medieval food was not as overwhelmingly or as uniformly spicy as later ages have tended to imagine. Fear of the consequences of overdoing it were very real. In the wealthy household the physician would often stand behind the head of the household and ensure that things did not get out of hand. During his brief stint as governor of the island of Barataria, Sancho Panza is tormented by a comically finicky physician who stands behind him as he eats, rejecting every dish but for the wafer cakes and a few thin slices of quince. He considered the fruits too cold and wet, and even the hot spices are inappropriate:
My chief duty is to attend on his [Sancho’s] meals and feasts, and to let him eat in my opinion what is suitable for him, and to keep from him that I think will be harmful, and injurious to his stomach; and therefore I ordered the plate of fruit to be removed on account of its excessive moistness, and that other dish likewise, as being too hot and containing many spices that aggravate thirst; and he who drinks a lot kills and consumes the radical moisture wherein the life force resides.
This was parody, but even Sancho was no more credulo
us than the well-informed. But if getting the balance right was deadly serious, what of the quality of the end result? How spicy was it? Some old preconceptions can easily be dispensed with. The medical context argues strongly against the familiar images of medieval cuisine as an overspiced and pungent welter of competing flavours. One reason why people have been so willing to accept the received wisdom on medieval cuisine – besides the fact that it makes for a good story – is that medieval cookbooks seldom stipulate quantities, leaving the balance up to the cook’s discretion. But any immoderation modern readers detect therein is of the readers’ making.
Moreover, moderation with the spices made economic sense as well as medical. As we have seen, the spices were expensive, and so were not to be thrown around without good reason. In middling households they were kept under lock and key in a special hutch. The accounts of some noble households and monasteries detail a very modest expenditure. In England in the fifteenth century the pepper consumed in the household of Dame Alice de Bryene averaged out at about one teaspoon per person per week, cinnamon, a paltry 2½ ounces per year. A fourteenth-century Parisian book of household management advises the following quantities of spice for a dinner for forty people: one pound of ginger, ½ pound of cinnamon, ¼ pound of clove, ⅛ pound of long pepper, ⅛ pound of galangal and ⅛ pound of mace. These are impressive though not swamping quantities – less than half an ounce of ginger per person is less than one would use in a mild Indian curry, and even this was spread over several courses. Furthermore, all of these spices were staler than we know them, having spent at least a year in transit from harvest in Asia, nor were they sealed in airtight containers, as they are today.
At least some medieval cooks were well aware of the need for balance in cooking, as much for aesthetic as medical reasons. Cookbooks constantly stressed the need to offset one ingredient with another, stipulating which spices went with which foods. One English recipe specifically cautions against overspicing the dish: ‘Add ground mace, cinnamon and cubebs, take care it is not too hot.’ John Russell, whom we met above advising would-be cooks to know their repertoire, warns darkly that in the endless search for new combinations cooks’ ‘nice excess … of life will make an ending’. The fifteenth-century Italian culinary manuscript known as the Neapolitan collection advises discretion with the spices, one recipe stipulating a moderate five or six cloves for a standard serving. This is not the voice of an age of anaesthetised palates and cast-iron guts.
