by Jack Turner
But if the medieval diner was not quite the bone-tossing oaf of Hollywood legend, it does not follow that medieval cookery was all that delicate or refined – we should not go looking for modern gastronomes dressed in medieval clothes. ‘Gastronomy’ is not yet the word (at least in Europe), nor does it make much sense before the end of the seventeenth century. For while the medieval cook may not exactly have smothered all other flavours with spice, there can be little doubt that at times he laid it on thick. The Franklin of the Canterbury Tales, a middling landowner, was something of a gourmand – ‘Epicurus’ own son’ – with a taste for spicy sauces. He liked it hot, and had a temper to match:
Woe to bis cook, if his sauce was not
Pungent and sharp, and all his utensils at the ready.
When the fifteenth-century Book of Vices and Virtues weighed the merits of a meal, the terms of the question were whether the sauces had been sharp enough.
No aspect of the past vanishes so completely as its tastes. Perhaps the best that can be said is that though some liked it spicy, some did not. And notwithstanding the doctors’ abundant caution, there can be little doubt that on occasion spices were indeed used with a heavy hand, for reasons that apparently had very little to do with taste. The Middle Ages were after all an age that developed elaborate public rituals in which machismo could be publicly paraded and tested. If manliness could be paraded and strutted on mock fields of battle, why not at the table? For characters such as the Franklin, a hale and hearty stomach was a declaration of sanguinity; toughness of guts was more of a manly virtue (and certainly more of an asset) than now. As the English writer Robert Burton (1576–1640) put matters, ‘As much valour is to be found in feasting as in fighting, and some of our city captains and carpet knights* will make this good, and prove it.’ After all, similar instincts are alive and well in our own day. At the start of the third millennium, the market offers a variety of scorching chilli sauces, suggestively if not always appetisingly trademarked: Liquid Lucifer, Dave’s Insanity Sauce, Blair’s Sudden Death Sauce, Psycho Bitch on Fire, and Rectal Revenge (‘particularly effective on in-laws’). Since a drop or two benumbs the palate it seems a reasonable assumption that the appeal of these products is not culinary, at least not in the conventional sense of the term. It is more about seeing than tasting.
But at this point we are heading into different realms of appetite, which is likewise where we must go if we are to account for the attraction of spices. We need to look beyond the table, beyond even the dictates of medicine and cuisine, to the equally powerful and perennial demands of society.
Keeping up with the Percys
Nobility is judged by the costliness of the table, And taste gratified by the greater expense.
John of Hauteville, Archithrenius, c.1190
Let not your table be rustic if you are to be counted rich.
Anonymous, Modus cenandi, c.1400
For a young crusader setting off to win his spurs it was imperative that the catering should rise to the occasion. The scene was the house of Prince Henrique of Portugal, the occasion Christmas Eve, 1414. Better known in the English-speaking world as ‘Henry the Navigator’ (because he sent others to navigate), Henrique was about to set off to attack the Moroccan town of Ceuta. Before this first step on his and Portugal’s imperialist career he was determined to show himself as generous a host as he was valiant a knight. Noblemen, bishops, family – anyone who was anyone was invited, and supplies ordered in from all corners of the kingdom. There were rich silk cloths, wax for hundreds of candles, torches ‘in such a number that it would be impossible to count’, barrels of the finest wines, sugared confections, all sorts of meats, fresh and preserved fruits. Rounding off this extravagant display was a lavish selection of spices. Why go Moor-killing on an empty stomach?
At the time Henrique’s catering arrangements seemed very much more impressive than they do now. The details are taken from the Account of the Capture of Ceuta, written around 1450 by King Afonso V’s chronicler-royal, Gomes Eanes de Zurara. Unencumbered by the modern historian’s qualms about objectivity, Zurara’s job was to present Henrique in as regal a manner as possible: the flower of chivalry, an exemplary knight and nobleman. Hence the lengthy description of the Christmas Eve feast, notwithstanding the menu’s complete and utter irrelevance to the ostensible topic of the work, the capture of Ceuta. Hence, too, the exacting catalogue of Henrique’s largesse: the prince had to be seen to be rich, and generous. On account of their high cost and exclusivity spices, along with the other luxuries listed by Zurara, were the ideal means to that end.
It is no coincidence that the rise of the spice trade towards the end of the first millennium coincides with the re-emergence of the European nobility, a nascent class with surpluses to spend and social needs to meet. Just as in Roman times, much of the appeal of spices was not so much that they tasted good as the fact that they looked good. Along with the other luxuries with which they are almost invariably grouped – pearls, gems, furs, tapestries and mirrors – spices fulfilled a need for flaunting it, for conspicuous consumption. Spices’ attraction was not so much that they were necessary, but that they were unnecessary: money on a plate.
At the table as indeed anywhere else, the medieval nobleman was unconstrained by a sense of modesty. This is to put it very mildly. To live the life of the medieval monarch, nobleman or higher clergy required being seen to live that life. Wealth was something to be paraded, with its purposes as well as pleasures. As Max Weber (1864–1920) said of a later age, luxury was ‘a means of social self-assertion’. And what was true of the various other trappings of wealth flaunted by the medieval nobility – the number of retainers, the architecture, the jewellery, the dress, the halls bedecked with rich tapestries – held equally true at the table. At the semi-public event of the feast, the flavour or any imagined salutary effects of the food were no more esteemed than its sheer cost or superfluity.
The food, in not so many words, proclaimed the man. (Whereas the noblewoman was less frequently in a position to dispense largesse. Her birth and station had to be advertised by means of other, less material refinements.) Accordingly, an elaborate ceremonial developed around the rituals of the table. In the noble or royal household, the after-dinner spices were typically served on gold or silver spice-plates, often highly prized works of exquisite craftsmanship. In England in 1459, one well-born merchant owned one such plate ‘well gilt like a double rose, with my master’s helmet in the middle, surrounded by red roses of my master’s arms’. So heavy was the baggage of class that the desserts these plates carried – ‘dainties’ – took their name from the Latin dignitas, conveying a sense of honour, station and bearing. From the head of the table the host would dispense his dainties as he saw fit, yet another means of signalling honour and precedence. If the situation and rank of the guests and hosts demanded, the quantities could be immense. When he hosted the emperor Charles IV at Valence in May 1365 the Avignon Pope Urban spent a stupendous 150 pounds on spices for his guests.
Likewise during the main part of the meal, when many a spiced dish was intended more to be seen than savoured. At the marriage of Charles the Bold of Burgundy (1433–1477), six models of ships were mounted on the main table, one for each of the duke’s territories. These in turn were orbited by sixteen smaller vessels, each trailing still smaller craft brimming with spices and candied fruits. On a more modest scale, around the year 1400 the Parisian merchant Jacques Duché had a walk-in gingerbread house constructed, its walls inlaid with precious stones and spices.
Cost, convenience and aura all suited spices to the medieval penchant for courtly playfulness, as exemplified by the exotic food-fight staged by Albizzo da Fiore, podesta of Padua, in 1214. For his guests’ enjoyment he constructed a ‘Court of Solace and Mirth’, at the centre of which stood an allegorical castle of love, defended by a dozen of the noblest and fairest ladies and besieged with mock ferocity by selected noblemen. The battlements were of sable and furs, precious tiss
ues, ermine, and brocades of Baghdad, which the besiegers assaulted with an extravagant arsenal of apples, dates, nutmeg, tarts, pears, quinces, roses, lilies, violets, rosewater, pomegranates, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves ‘and all manner of flowers or spices that are fragrant to smell or fair to see’. All went swimmingly until the Venetian guests took their contention for the ladies’ honour a little too seriously, wrecking the party when they started a brawl with the Paduans – all in all, a very medieval mix: stage-managed gallantry and whimsy, offended honour, spice and blood.
The limits to such occasions of spiced largesse were set only by the budget of the host or by his imagination. A poem by Juan Manuel of Castile (1282–1348) tells of the weakness of the Moorish king of Seville for indulging the many whims of his wife Rramayquia. When she protested at the heat of the Andalusian climate, he had the hills around Cordoba planted with almond trees, so the blossom would remind her of snow. Still unsatisfied, she envied the bucolic life of a brickmaking peasant woman (mawkish nostalgia for the honest virtues of the peasant life was another common pastime of the rich), whereupon her husband had a lake filled with rosewater, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, musk and ‘all conceivable good spices and sweet odours’, so she could make bricks of fragrant mud amid the aromas to which she was accustomed; all this without leaving the comfort of her palace.
For more day-to-day purposes, the spiced sauces of the medieval kitchen were an opportunity for more affordable opulence. Medieval cooks were forever in search of new combinations, driven in large measure by what one critic described as their employers’ ‘Vainglory in rehearsing how they are fed, how many varieties of dishes they eat, and how inventively they are dressed’. As John Gower (c.1330–1408) punned in an untranslatable line, rich and expensive sauces were a social law for the rich and powerful.* Just as game and wildfowl were the nobleman’s meat, the yield of his fields and forests, kept off-limits to others by draconian laws against poaching and trespass, the rare and expensive spices were his natural seasonings, a marker of his class.† In the words of the Dutch author Jacob van Maerlant (1225–1291), they were the particular food of distinguished, worldly people.
The message, though essentially a very blunt one, was amenable to a thousand different permutations and reiterations. One of the many rituals of medieval life to which spices were ideally suited was the gift-giving that accompanied formal correspondence and diplomacy. Between 1294 and 1303 Pope Boniface VIII was regularly presented with spices by ambassadors and sovereigns. Early in the twelfth century the Venetians offered a gift of fifty pounds of pepper per annum to Emperor Henry V. An early-thirteenth-century Church ceremonial records that the Jews of Rome marked the accession of a new pope with a gift of pepper and cinnamon – though this is likely to have been less a spontaneous offering than a form of tribute. Like the best diplomatic gifts, spices were bound to impress. In May of 1290 envoys from England’s King Edward I sailed on board a ‘great ship’ from Yarmouth to Norway, their mission to arrange the marriage of Edward’s son to Margaret, ‘the Maid of Norway’ and rightful heir to the crown of Scotland. Along with standard provisions for crew and envoys – including beer, wine, whalemeat, beans, stockfish, nuts and flour and so forth – dynastic dealings were lubricated with ample supplies of sugar, pepper, ginger, zedoary, rice, figs, raisins and gingerbread.*
While there was no mistaking the bottom line of such abundance, it would be misleading to reduce spices’ cachet to a simple economic measure. Much of their charm derived from a sense of mystery and glamour, an intensely evocative effect of Utopian opulence. They were a totem of what the great Dutch medievalist Johan Huizinga called the ‘more beautiful life’ for which the medieval nobility continually hankered, in its rituals, tapestries, or in the dreamy make-believe of its literature.
Which is where, at the distance of half a millennium, in a culture less disposed to public culinary exuberance, we can best sense their effect. For literary purposes, spices meant nobility. In the anonymous Middle English poem known as ‘The Debate of the Body and the Soul’, the ghost of a ‘haughty knight’ reflects on the trappings of his proud and vainglorious life, not the least of which are the ‘fragrant spices sweet to smell’, prominent among the castles and towers, pages and palfreys, hounds, falcons and noble steeds, chambers and stately halls. Spices serve a similar purpose in Jehan Maillart’s early-fourteenth-century Roman du comte d’Anjou, in which a young countess tells the sorry tale of her banishment from home and family on account of her father’s incestuous passion. The heroine is pursued by one trial after another, forced to conceal her noble ancestry and live incognito off the kindness of strangers, all the while pining for the life of comfort and ease she knew in her father’s castle. At one point in her wanderings she is offered a piece of bread by an old peasant woman, but finding it black, hard and mouldy* she breaks down and, abandoning her disguise, recites the delights she knew at her father’s table, of which she has an encyclopaedic memory. The peasant is subjected to a catalogue of all manner of delectable fish and fowl including capons, peacocks, swan, partridge, pheasants, hare, venison, rabbits, boar, congers, cod, mullet, bream, lampreys, eels and sole, all served with the appropriate spicy sauce: black pepper sauce, green sauce with ginger, tawny brown with cinnamon and cloves. These are followed by confections such as spiced apples and pastries, washed down with spiced and precious wines from all over France, at which the gruel-chomping churl – and well-born readers – presumably shed a salty tear.
In the real world, however, spices were generally put to more prosaic purposes. And while this instinct to display was common to the European nobility and senior clergy, they found their most exuberant expression at the apex of that society: namely, at court. Royal superiority may have been divinely sanctioned, but still the message had to be hammered home. Along with an increasingly elaborate courtly etiquette, the architecture and the art, a royal meal was propaganda on a plate (or, more accurately, a trencher). When Henry II descended on Lincoln to celebrate Christmas in 1157 he demanded sixty pounds of pepper from the local grocers for his feast. This they were unable to cope with, and sent to London for extra supplies.
Given the scale of their appetites, the royal family and the court were a large part of the market for spice for all of the medieval period; in London, possibly the lion’s share until late in the era. When Edward I returned to London from the wars in Wales at the end of the thirteenth century his officers spent over £1,775 on spices, out of a total expenditure on luxuries of just under £10,000 – a staggering sum, even taking into account that many of his ‘spices’ included items such as oranges and sugar. To put the figure in perspective, his spice expenditure was about the same as the total annual income of an earl, of whom there were about a dozen in the kingdom. Such regal appetites ensured that the office of supplying the king’s ‘wardrobe’ with spices was highly sought after by medieval merchants. The risks, however, could be great: in 1301 Edward I owed the Genoese merchant Antonio Pessagno the staggering sum of £1,030 for spices alone.
Pessagno’s compatriots could afford to be more sanguine. The riches that flowed from the trade in Eastern luxuries routed through Genoa’s ports and factories on the Black Sea and Constantinople helped transform the physical fabric of Genoa from the twelfth century; much of the wealth that built the cathedral of San Lorenzo came from this traffic. It was therefore wholly natural that the poet known as the Anonymous of Genoa, a contemporary of Dante, should celebrate spices as symbols of civic pride and affluence. In a poem addressed to a citizen of Brescia arriving from Venice, he points to the rich spices, the shops and stalls crammed with Eastern luxuries, symbols of Genoa’s commercial and imperial greatness: ‘More pepper, ginger, nutmeg and merchandise … than in any other great city.’
In the medieval as in the modern world, however, the ultimate in ostentation was not to boast, display or dispense, but to discard. Early in the fifteenth century the Lord Mayor of London curried the favour of his king (and debtor) Henry V by publicly
burning the king’s IOUs in a fire of cinnamon and cloves: a fragrant twist on the medieval pyre of the vanities. The king was impressed: ‘Never king had such a subject,’ murmured a grateful Henry. This spiced incineration of debtors’ notes seems to have been something of a convention. When Charles V visited his creditor Jacob Fugger in Augsburg in 1530, the banker threw a promissory note into the stove with a bunch of cinnamon. Given the emperor’s chronic money troubles, the cinnamon was worth more than the note.
But of course the situations of a mayor, a king, a Fugger or an emperor were scarcely representative of the population as a whole. With spices as with any other luxury the instinct for ostentation could only be gratified by a very few. The celebrated spiciness of medieval cuisine holds true only for those with the money. For the poor the attractions of spices were, for the most part, strictly academic.
Researching the diet of the medieval poor is a frustrating business. By their very nature, most of the available sources are heavily biased in favour of the wealthy, the nobility, the Church and royalty, and even these speak less of day-to-day consumption than of special occasions such as weddings, feasts and coronations. These sources represent only a tiny segment of the population. By a crude estimate, for the greater part of the Middle Ages the clergy or nobility made up about 1 per cent of the population, and about 5 per cent of people lived in towns. The remainder was the rural and generally poor peasantry. At the start of the thirteenth century a majority of the population of western Europe was to some extent unfree, tied in some sense to land and lord.