How Much is Too Much?

Sometimes people say things that make me twitch, the most common one being the old canard that medieval cooks used spices to cover up the taste of spoiled meat (hint: they didn't).

The thing that sent me into fits today though was a bit I read in an article on the NPR website entitled How Snobbery Helped Take The Spice Out Of European Cooking. You ready? Here it is:

Back in the Middle Ages, spices were really expensive, which meant that only the upper class could afford them.

That doesn't sound unreasonable, does it? They even linked to the website of Professor John Munro (Department of Economics, University of Toronto), which is a site I've often used and cited myself.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

See, the thing is that if you actually look at the numbers Professor Munro provides, you find that they don't make such a clear case for "really expensive", and they certainly don't show spices to have been completely out of reach for the working and middle classes.

Near the bottom of Munro's website is a bunch of tables where he lists the actual prices of a number of goods, and includes the quantity that could be bought by the daily wage of a carpenter or mason. Cinnamon, for example was 24 pence/pound in 1439 London, and the day's wages for a carpenter (8d) could buy about a third of a pound.

Yeah, that's a lot. If you go by the daily wage of an unskilled worker instead (2d) and assume that's the equivalent to today's minimum wage, it works out to about ten times what spices cost in the local grocery store.

Here's the thing: that's for a third of a frickken' pound of cinnamon. Most people don't use that much cinnamon in their entire life.

They could, however, go down to the local spice seller and buy a small amount of cinnamon, say a quarter of an ounce, and it wouldn't bust their budget for the month.

Now take into account that, like today, many in medieval Europe's working class relied on fast food -pies, sausages, and stews from the local cookshops. In order to attract more customers, the owners of the cookshops are going to do their best to make the food taste good. That means sometimes adding ... wait for it ... spices. So even the poorest folks in London likely had a little spice in their lives.

The article goes on to quote some other theories about late medieval and early modern diet, and most of them are even further off the mark than the whole spice thing. I can go into details if you really want, but I should probably take anti-seizure medicine first.

In summary: Yes, spices were expensive, but they weren't that expensive.

... and no, you couldn't really buy a horse with a single peppercorn.

Food Porn - Molecular Gastronomy

The whole Molecular Gastronomy movement has always made me a bit uneasy, and I wasn't exactly sure why.

For a while I thought it might be the reliance on technology that it encourages.  After all, having spent the last decade or so with my head stuck in the techniques of pre-16th century cooking must have conditioned me towards a more low-tech approach.  But then again, aside from being a medieval food geek, I'm also a science-fiction geek.  I love futuristic stuff, and that includes the depictions of food in movies and novels about possible (or impossible) futures.

More recently I began to suspect it had something to do with the chefs.  They tend to be flamboyant and egotistical, with an attitude that seems to be screaming "THIS IS MY ART, AND AS SUCH IT IS BEYOND CONTESTATION!"  However I have spent an awful lot of time around the highbrow artsy crowd, and I'm pretty comfortable with the fact that art can be quirky, controversial, impractical, and sometimes even downright incomprehensible, and as the art goes so does the artist.

Then a friend (Hi Broom!) posted a link to this video, and another possibility occurred to me.  Go ahead and watch it - it's a bit long (over 8 minutes) but it's fascinating and the music is soothing and pretty.

What I realized is that in this particular ... food product, and pretty much in all of the Molecular Gastronomy movement, it's all about the art.  The cook's cleverness, the use of unusual tools and technology, and unconventional form are all so important that the fact that it's food is almost irrelevant.  There seems to be no concern about whether it will taste nice or be pleasant to eat, or if it has any nutritional value whatsoever.

Compare this to another cooking tradition from the same country: sushi.

Here the presentation is very important, but the food aspects (flavor, nutrition, etc.) are still at the center.  Novelty is desirable, but it's not the only thing that is being supplied.

Really, it's the old argument of form and function.  Function without form is utilitarian, ugly, and dull.  Form without function is just fluff, pointless and useless.

To tie this back to medieval cooking, I feel it's worth remembering that artful food can be produced with surprisingly little in the way of technology.  Throughout most of history, cooks used very simple tools to produce surprisingly complicated and elegant works of art.

In the 17th century painting above, there are two pies that are beautiful examples of the cook's art.  The smaller one, just to the lower left of center, is a traditional straight-walled pie, carefully prepared and filled with all sorts of good things to eat.  In the background on the left is a huge turkey pie, it's sides covered with intricate fine detail, and topped with the stuffed skin of the turkey.

Perhaps I'd feel better about Molecular Gastronomy if I stopped thinking about it as food entirely and reframed it in my mind as only being art - edible art, but art nonetheless.  After all, they did have non-edible food art in medieval Europe.  Medieval cooks would often sculpt plates and goblets out of sugar paste, and then decorate them with limner's paints that were known at the time to be toxic.

The more things change ...

Madeleine and the Mad Cow

Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears
Madeleine Ferrières
Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231131925
I haven't had much time to read lately (or post on the blog, for that matter), but if you're curious about what kind of book I keep on the nightstand (and who isn't?) this is it. Yes, I know I'm a geek.

The really cool thing about this book (so far) is that in just the first two chapters, Madeleine Ferrières manages to completely destroy the Moldy Meat Myth™. She does this not through menus or recipes, nor through logic or reasoning. Instead she references several surviving medieval laws and charters.

Some of these laws explicitly forbid the sale of spoiled meat. Others establish an inspection process that rivals that of the USDA. However the laws that most effectively debunk the myth are those that prohibit the sale of meat that was slaughtered the previous day.

So here's a brief recap of medieval meat consumption:

1. On average, urban residents ate three to five pounds of meat each week.
2. Butchers were forbidden to sell day-old meat for human consumption.
3. Livestock was brought into the town alive.
4. Livestock and butchered meat were both inspected for wholesomeness.
5. Butchers were forbidden to sell cooked meat, and cooks were forbidden to slaughter livestock.
6. Meat was a lot cheaper than spices.

So, as the myth would have it, butchers would bring in the huge quantity of livestock needed, butcher it all right away, let it sit around for days, hide it from the inspectors, sell it illegally, and hope that the spice merchants can convince the customers to use £10 worth of spices on a 2p piece of meat.

Yeah, sure.

Hoodwinked

As an example of how far behind I am on things, last night I watched the 2010 movie version of Robin Hood. I'm generally a big fan of movies set in the middle ages (no surprise there), and since the film had Ridley Scott for a director I was expecting something impressive.

By the end of the film I was just sitting there thinking, "Wha?"

I thought Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett were both too old for their parts, but I was willing to ignore that; they're big-named stars, after all. The acting was passable, the dialogue was decent, and the sets and costuming were much better that what Hollywood usually foists off on the unsuspecting public. I could even tolerate the fight scenes - though every time I see a film that uses the high-speed, choppy style of editing for fight scenes I find myself thinking, "Pity they couldn't afford a fight choreographer and had to cover it up by shaking the camera a lot."

The real problem was the incoherent story. It wasn't just the historical inaccuracies. The whole film seemed to be doing things at random. It's hard to evaluate how well the writer and director accomplished their goals when I can't even tell what they were trying to do in the first place. This suggested trouble with the film on a whole different level, so I turned to IMDB for clues.

The answer came pretty quickly: there were five writers. Here's a note from IMDB about the original story:

"Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris's original script "Nottingham" turned the traditional story on its head by portraying the Sheriff of Nottingham in a more sympathetic light and Robin Hood as more of a villain." [IMDB]

Right there is the first problem. Note for writers and producers: if you're going to turn a well-loved story "on its head", then you're writing an artsy film and not a summer blockbuster. Universal ignored this and tried to find a director who could make it into a blockbuster anyways, looking at Bryan Singer, Sam Raimi, and Jon Turteltaub before finally betting on Scott to make it work. They'd have done better if they'd gone with a much lower budget film, some new and edgy director, and a limited art-house release.

"The script was extensively re-written by Brian Helgeland because director Ridley Scott wanted the Sheriff of Nottingham to be a more conflicted character." [IMDB]

In the new story where Robin is the villain and the Sheriff is the hero, the Sheriff wasn't interesting enough? Maybe likable enough? It's hard to tell because in the final version of the film the Sheriff is hardly there at all. That is probably due to subsequent rewrites.

"New rewrites were done by British playwright Paul Webb ..."

The rest of the sentence is the real kicker:

"... and later by Tom Stoppard, who reworked the story while the movie was already being filmed." [IMDB]

Somewhere along the line they scrapped the whole premise that Robin was the villain and tried to go back to a more traditional Robin Hood story, but it still wasn't working so they hired a big-gun like Stoppard to fix the script while they were shooting. I think if I were a writer called in to work on it, I would have asked that my name not be associated with the film.

Now for those interested in action scenes, the film isn't bad. I'm not sorry I saw it but at the same time, when the closing credits started to roll, I found myself thinking that I'd like to see a movie about Robin Hood.

Food Fads

This post may put some people off, but sometimes you’ve just got to speak out.

People often assume that because I’m a food geek then I’m all over the latest food trends. The thing is that in addition to food geek, I’m also a food snob and a bit of a food luddite. I feel that traditional foods exist for a reason – they fill a need for a given culture, and they fill it well. This means that when a food fad becomes too prominent and is given far more exposure than it’s worth (in my opinion, of course) I start to become … irritated.

So here are the food-related trends I’m sick of – in no particular order:

Grilling
Yes, with enough work and specialized widgets you can probably prepare anything on a grill. I think I had enough of grilling many years back when I tried grilled lobster. It had that great, smokey flavor you get with a barbecue. The problem was the one thing I couldn’t taste – lobster.

Single-Use Appliances
Panini grills, juicers, veg-o-matics, ice cream makers, dehydrators, infusers, a thousand new things every year to spend money on to "save time in the kitchen." Most of the time there is a multi-purpose tool which will achieve the same end and take up a lot less space. The multi-purpose tools are usually easier to clean as well.

Bacon
I like bacon, really I do, but I like things that don’t taste like bacon too. I don’t want to hear about bacon salt, bacon ice cream, bacon clothing, chocolate-covered bacon, bacon mayo, baconsicles, bacon soda, etc. If I want a dish to taste like bacon then I’ll add bacon, but most of the time I’ll skip it.

Deep Frying
Twinkies, Oreos, Mars bars, macaroni and cheese, butter – this one’s almost as bad as the bacon (in fact, people are batter-coating and deep frying bacon as well). Look, it’s nice to have something fried now and then. The frying process makes things crispy, adds the fat that people naturally crave, and even caramelizes natural sugars in foods. However, like grilling, it can also obliterate subtle flavors. What’s more, too much of this stuff will turn you into the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

Superfoods
Like clockwork, some agricultural collective will fund a health study which ends up showing that their product is packed full of something that conclusively reduces risks of somesuch or helps promote someother. Then for the next year or so that product is put into everything from floor wax to dessert toppings … until another study comes out and shows that the product works almost as well as a sugar pill.

Molecular Gastronomy
I suspect this term appears in a scientific dictionary and is defined as "overprocessed and overpriced". I suppose it could be considered to be edible art, but it also could be considered as food porn.

Dinner-in-a-Bowl
A biscuit, covered in mashed-potatoes, sprinkled with fried meat, gravy, and a ton of cheese. I’ve seen ads for all sorts of these from a variety of restaurants. Most (all?) of the time they’ve just taken the ingredients they already had on hand and plopped them down in a heap. I suppose they could just give us a trough or feed bag.

"Foodie"
I simply hate this word. It just screams "dweeb".

Levels of Medievalness

Whether it is dinner at a "medieval-themed" restaurant, a feast held by a historic recreation group, or a home-cooked dinner made for a school project (or even just for the fun of it), a question that might arise is "How medieval is this meal?"

Really, it's a very tricky thing to work out. There's all sorts of things that can enter into it, including such diverse elements as the type and source of the ingredients, the atmosphere (both ambiance and air quality) of the dining area, and even the time of year in relation to the foods served. In fact, considering all the extended variables, I suspect the answer to "How medieval is this meal?" is "Not very."

However, there are some aspects that are more easily controlled and which have a much larger impact on the ... medievalness? ... medievalosity? ... medievalery? ... ok, authenticity.  Let's look at them in order from least medieval to most medieval.

1. Medieval Ingredients

There are a number of foods that weren't available in medieval Europe. Some are things from the Americas (e.g. turkey, potatoes, capsicum peppers, peanuts, vanilla, chocolate) and weren't imported into Europe until after 1500.  Some are from other places (e.g. bananas, tea, coffee, yams), but were still not in common use in Europe.  Some are things that were invented well after 1500 (e.g. baking powder, mayonnaise).

The presence of any of these marks a meal as being modern.  It doesn't matter what recipe was used or how the food was cooked, they're simply not medieval.

2. Real Recipes

Even if all the ingredients used to make the meal were available in medieval Europe, that doesn't mean the resulting dishes would have been familiar to a medieval European.  Bread, ground beef, cheese, lettuce, and pickles are all reasonably medieval foods, but there's no account of any medieval cook ever making a cheeseburger (or any other type of sandwich, for that matter).

Fortunately there are a large number of medieval European cookbooks available, both in print and for free online. What's more, many have been translated into several different languages (for the benefit of those who don't read Middle-French or whatever), and there are even recipes that have been worked out with modern measurements and instructions.

3. Menu Consistency

Given both medieval ingredients and recipes, the consistency of the menu becomes an issue. By this I don't mean that the menu is too runny or somesuch, but rather that the individual dishes on the menu make sense to be served together.

While a World Fusion dinner can be fun, most people would be confused to be served a dinner menu of curried beef, Szechuan vegetables, tamales, poi, and hot chocolate. It's too strange a mix of cultures and cuisines.  The differences within regions and time periods in medieval European cultures can be very subtle, but they are there.  Twelfth century English food is very different from sixteenth century German.

Sometimes there are menus along with the recipes in many of the medieval cookbooks, which makes this part a lot easier. However there is still a lot of uncertainty to this aspect, and it's a great area for research.

It is only when the ingredients are medieval, the recipes are medieval, and the menu is medieval, that other aspects become important (like the apple variety, the quality of the spices, the shape of the serving vessel, the way the food is served, the color of the walls).

It's also important to work things in the above order.  Using non-medieval ingredients or modern recipes is kind of like building a ten-million dollar home and skimping on the quality of the materials or workmanship.  The final product simply won't hold together.

Thoughts on "Medieval Japan"

Every now and then I get asked for recipes or information about medieval cooking outside of Europe, and each time it happens I end up mulling it over for days trying to work out an answer.  I suppose I could say that I focus on Europe (and sometimes I do), but that answer is an evasion.  It doesn't address the question of why I don't research medieval cooking from other cultures.

The first problematical point rests in what is meant by "medieval".  Webster's defines the word as "of, relating to, or in the style of the Middle Ages," and goes on to define the middle ages as:

"... the time in European history between classical antiquity and the Italian renaissance (from about 500 a.d. to about 1350): sometimes restricted to the later part of this period (after 1100) and sometimes extended to 1450 or 1500."

This goes back to the origin of the word, which is from the Latin medium aevum - the middle age, or the time between the classical era and the Renaissance, and most definitions I've seen of "medieval" look something like this.

Europe during this time period had a surprisingly consistent culture.  Yes, there were stylistic and political differences for different regions and countries within Europe, but there was also an amazing degree of uniformity in terms of technology, clothing, and (most significantly) food.

These definitions are rather Roman-centered.  They clearly make sense when applied to Italy: it's the time between the fall of the Roman empire and the Renaissance.  With the extension of years they also make sense when applied to northern Europe (England, France, etc.) as it took much longer for the Renaissance to percolate that far north.  It's a bit of a stretch to get it to mesh with places on the edge of Europe though.

When someone then asks about cooking in medieval Japan (or China, or India, or Central America, etc.) I'm first stuck trying to figure out what "medieval Japanese cooking" means.  Are they asking about Japanese cooking between the years 500 to 1350?  What about 500 to 1500?  Maybe some other date range?  To the best of my (limited) knowledge of Japan, there isn't that much difference in the culture and cooking in Japan between 1000 and 1800, so just where is the dividing line?

Now if they asked about cooking in "feudal Japan", or "India before the British empire", or "pre-1500 Central America," those are concepts I can deal with.  Of course my answer would simply be something like "I just don't study that."  I also suspect that answer would be no more surprising than the response to a car dealer's response to "Why don't you sell bicycles?"

It's not that I don't like Chinese or Indian or other cuisines - as my somewhat padded outline will attest, I like a wide variety of foods.  It's not even that I don't like the history of the other places.  It's just that medieval European cuisine is, in itself, a distinctive cooking system, and since I don't have time to research everything about food and cooking to any real depth, I choose just that one part.

Excuses, excuses...

Before getting into the subject of this rant, here's a warning about what triggered it:

Yes, I've been watching The Tudors

From what I've been told by people who research various aspects of medieval life (clothing, painting, religion, history, etc.) this program is filled with all sorts of wild inaccuracies, so why should cooking and food be treated any differently?

Surprisingly, for a television series that is so lavish with costumes and settings, food is almost ignored (well, maybe that's not too surprising - very few shows or films deal much with food, probably because it's a very hard thing to film well). Where the show does touch on the topic, they seem to invariably go way wrong.

At the end of the second season, King Henry is presented with a swan pie. Awesome! The thing is the right shape, and they even decorated it with the head and wings of the swan. Then Henry breaks the top crust and starts eating the contents with his fingers. This is a minor quibble, I know, but he would have used a spoon. They had spoons in medieval times. They even have spoons at Medieval Times ("Would you like a refill on that Pepsi?").

Then there are the grapes. In almost every scene depicting a dinner or banquet there are grapes on the table - even in the scenes set in winter. Somehow they've got grapes ready for harvest year round in England. That, or they've managed to work out overnight transport from the southern hemisphere.

What really set my teeth on edge though was something in the episode I watched last night. Henry holds up a piece of fruit and tells Suffolk that it comes from the New World. That would have been Ok, but it was a starfruit, which aren't native to anywhere in the New World but instead come from Indonesia.

[Aside: I suppose they could have used a pawpaw, but given their short shelf life that wouldn't have been much better (maybe they were brought over on the same express flight as the grapes). Tomato? No, they were known but considered poisonous. A potato then, or maybe a peanut. Heck, how about tobacco?]

Now some might say that this kind of criticism is misplaced. The show's creator, Michael Hirst, dismissed complaints of inaccuracy by stating "Showtime commissioned me to write an entertainment, a soap opera, and not history ... And we wanted people to watch it."

That's just bunk.

Hirst is spinning his departures from reality as being artistic deviation, changes to make the story more interesting. I'll buy that for the bit with Henry eating the swan pie, but for the other errors it's just an excuse for laziness. Hirst simply doesn't care enough to expend the minuscule amount of effort to even get vaguely close to right (like on the same continent).

In the meanwhile, I keep watching. It is entertaining, after all, and it helps me to keep up with the nonsense that people learn from Hollywood about medieval Europe.

Thoughts on Misconceptions

I don't normally let a short story get to me, but one I finished reading yesterday is still bugging me. I won't mention the title or author's name as they're actually irrelevant to my point here. It's not that the story was particularly bad in terms of writing style or plot. I probably would have enjoyed the thing if it hadn't been for one small problem: the author had no idea what he was talking about.

Line many stories, the tale centered upon a person from a primitive culture being taken to a more developed one. This is all well and fine, except that instead of learning what primitive human cultures are/were really like, the tale's author simply repeated every myth about "naked savages" he'd ever read or seen in movies regardless of whether they made sense. Ugh! I did laugh when he actually used the phrase "naked savage" when the main character saw himself in a mirror, but it wasn't a good laugh so much as a shocked laugh of disbelief.

So where's the medieval angle here? Well oddly enough, most of the myths the author perpetuated are often applied to medieval European culture as well. There seems to be some need in humanity to assume that life in any given time of the past must have been shorter, simpler, and nastier than it is now. I'll address some of the specific myths in the story from the viewpoint of a historian and medievalist, but the answers pretty much apply to all human cultures.

Cleanliness

Some cultures do indeed bathe more than others, but if a human is going to live long enough to breed then it must maintain some level of hygiene. Medieval Europeans bathed, and it was more than once a year. No, they probably didn't smell like roses or lemons, but neither do some of the people I deal with on a daily basis. They did understand the importance of washing their hands, cleaning their teeth, and the like. Dirt and sweat are one thing, filth and vermin are another.

Diet

Not everyone lived their entire life on the edge of starvation. Yes, there were periods of famine in the middle ages, but there were also time were people had enough to eat. While they didn't have modern agriculture or preservation techniques, they were generally capable of getting enough food from their lands and storing enough of it to get through the winter.

Intelligence

While the sum of human knowledge has increased, the level of human intelligence has not changed for many thousands of years. In other words, medieval people were just as smart as modern people, but they didn't have as much information as we do. There were geniuses and idiots in ancient Rome, and they were much like their modern counterparts.

Sophistication

Live was not simpler in medieval Europe. The merchants there/then had already invented things like insurance and stock futures. They had bank accounts, brokers, overseas manufacturing, fraud, cartels, and everything else we expect from modern business. People - even in the working or farming classes - didn't spend all their time at work. They had fashion trends, theater, religious debates, wedding celebrations, and even fast food. It seems that humans will always make things as complicated as possible given their environment in order to keep from being bored. (Don't believe me? Check out Polynesian cultures)

So yes, I'm sure there were some people in medieval Europe who were stupid and filthy, who worked all of their waking hours, and lived their entire lives on the edge of starvation. However I'm also sure that I could find such people living in modern cities as well. Their lives are not (and were not) typical.