Introduction: Evidence and documentation

Regardless of the period being studied, facets of daily life are frequently among the most difficult subjects to pin down and examine. The same is true when studying medieval eating habits. In an age when writing materials were costly and literacy limited to an educated minority, a scarcity of documentation on what must have to contemporaries appeared trivial detail is only to be expected. Therefore, for much of what we claim to know of customs in the Roman, Viking and Anglo-Saxon settlements in Britain, we rely on archaeological evidence and conjecture based on illustrations, literature and other material only peripherally related to gastronomic arts.

Manuscripts of more direct relevance to the study of cookery appear in the late 13th century. For England, undoubtedly the most significant would be the Forme of Cury, a late 14th century recipe collection; a great deal of dietary information can also be found in parts of the alliterative poem Piers Plowman. Castle records provide an insight into which foodstuffs a household purchased and in what quantities; dictionaries and phrasebooks provide lists of names for food, indicating items that stewards might have left out of their accounts, due to their being produced locally. Medical texts provide additional evidence, with their advice on the wholesomeness of different foods and maintaining a medieval physician's idea of a balanced and healthy diet.

Those rare texts, such as the Forme of Cury, which supply us with more or less direct information on medieval dishes, are peculiar reading. Recipes hardly ever indicate exact quantities of ingredients or suitable cooking times and temperatures; the information is apparently considered self-evident, or too difficult to explain in an understandable form. Bearing in mind the high degree of professionalism of medieval cooks on one hand, and cost of manuscripts and the low spread of literacy on the other, it is likely that the medieval cook book was dictated by the professional cook to a scribe, and intended to grace the aristocratic library rather than the kitchen. As Scully puts it, the manuscript was compiled by the medieval cook, not for him.

Nevertheless, even somewhat oblique recipe collections can be consulted to discover how a certain spice was used, or how widely a given dish was known. Several similar recipes in early cookery manuscripts across Europe suggest that there was at least a degree of cosmopolitanism in aristocratic kitchens of the time. Indeed, Menell remarks that geographical variation in medieval European eating habits is much less striking than hierarchical division. Though written sources deal primarily with idealised diets and feasts for the privileged, they supply us with an idea of the kinds and quantities of food that were available, and what procedures they were subjected to before human consumption. This knowledge also allows an educated guess as to what less privileged classes may have eaten.