The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages

by Terence Scully

The medieval kitchen revealed; facilities, seasonal foods, strictures of the church, and the interweaving of foodstuffs with medical theory.

The master cook who worked in the noble kitchens of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had to be both practical and knowledgeable. His apprenticeship acquainted him with a range of culinary skills and a wide repertoireof seasonal dishes, but he was also required to understand the inherent qualities of the foodstuffs he handled, as determined by contemporary medical theories, and to know the lean-day strictures of the Church. Research in original manuscript sources makes this a fascinating and authoritative study where little hard fact had previously existed.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Food History, Cookbooks, Food, Cooking

284 pages, Paperback

First published August 24, 1995

Reviews

[Jessica]

Finished in 2022, but read mostly over two months in late 2021. Rather dry until the end, when the author seemed to get a little giddy. Some take-always: The belief in the importance of balancing one’s humours to stay healthy drove medieval ideas about appropriate food combinations. Ingredients were thought to be on a spectrum of moist to dry and hot to cold. (Where any particular food item fell on these spectra did not always seem intuitive to this reader.) A hot, dry food could be combined with a moist, cold food (for example) to create a healthy combination, and the more finely chopped or ground these ingredients, the better they could counter each other’s extremes. This led to combinations that would seem strange today, but otherwise medieval cooks had access, at least in theory, to most of the same techniques and ingredients we use today. The book relied heavily on recipe collections associated with the elite and their cooks, so much of it wasn’t really applicable to the common person.

[Libby Beyreis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of great information. Strangely repetitive in spots (several times the author told the same anecdote twice within pages of each other) but for someone who's interested in medieval life, this has a wealth of social information as well as practical details about how a kitchen was run. Fascinating.

[Mary Catelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Late middle ages, of course, there being a certain paucity of knowledge about the earlier times.

It discusses the sorts of document we do have. Rare account books that record all the purchases of food, in a household where all the food was purchased; normally you raised at least some of it. Butchers' accounts. Recipes, which were more like brief reminders to cooks of things that might slip the mind. Also medical treatises. Not only did they discuss what foods were hot or cold and moist or dry, they discussed how to alleviate these humor imbalances in the cooking process. Most vegetables were dry, coming from earth as they did, and so were boiled; onions were moist and should be fried; fruits were moist and should be roasted. Which also feed their liking for chopping fine and mixing ingredients.

Techniques of preservation. The Lenten rules. Fancies such as sewing together the front half of a rooster and the back half of a piglet -- or mounting the rooster on the piglet and giving it a helmet and lance to make all clear. Beverages. The hall and the manners.

An extensive look

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is packed with a wealth of detailed information about medieval cookery. Particularly interesting is the information on cookery being based on the four humours and how foods had certain properties that had to be considered during preparation. A must for any medieval buff's bookshelf.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very informative read about food preparation in medieval Europe. If you're looking for recipes from the time period then look elswhere: This is a pretty dry scholarly examination of what foodstuffs were handled during the time period and why they were handled that way.

I knew that this wouldn't be a page-turner; however, I still had to drop 2 stars because there were frequent print and/or proofreading errors and there were sections of the text where the author almost repeats previous sentences and paragraphs verbatim.

[Rai · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book opens by asking "what was different about cooking in the middle ages?" and answers it with "not much". This point is reiterated over the next few chapters - which makes me wonder, why write a whole book about it if the author is convinced not much has changed? Its biggest value is how it discusses the role of the medieval theory of the four humours and how it related to cooking and medieval recipes. There's also some discussion about how finding recipe collections from the time period is difficult.
I wish it had contained more examples of recipes. There are a few in one of the late sections.
The author is prone to repeating himself and padding the word count with extensive lists. Also wins the award for the highest number of typos in a professionally published book.

[Heather Rosen]

Very interesting, and easy reading. It's a book about my hobby so i have to have lots of free time to get to this one