A Hermit’s Cookbook: Monks, Food and Fasting in the Middle Ages (review)

This is an engaging volume, written with care and wearing gently a great deal of learning. Its premise is that we cannot comprehend an important dimension of ascetic and monastic practice unless we understand food and its consumption. The link is critical in appreciating notions of self-denial, especially practices that set out to avoid sensory stimulation. Andrew Jotischky takes us to the outset of eremetic and monastic practice, in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine, and its transfer to Western Europe by way of Ss. John Cassian and Benedict. Sources like the Apophthegmata Patrum give us flashes of insight into monastic life such as consumption of partly cooked lentils—and St. Jerome’s Life of Hilarion notes this as his subject’s diet for three years. Among the religious in the desert, there were those who chose a diet of uncooked food, gathering wild foods in particular. Although dietary practices, particularly abstinence from flesh, are later emblematic of their subject’s virtue, it is argued here that the main ethical reasons were initially a desire not to spend time on practices that diverted energy and time from higher matters, allowing one to preserve indifference to food; and second, that food was the link to original sin and was therefore suspect. One sees similar food practices in the West at a much later date—for example, in the twelfth century, in the Life of St. Godric of Finchale—but monastic living could be good, and Jotischky develops his argument by way of a series of vignettes that show the interplay between ethics and food practices. St. Bernard of Clairvaux criticized the Cluniacs for their eating habits and culinary preparations, mutating food into new shapes and forms, away from its “natural” qualities. Cluniac food was alluring to the eye and stimulating to the appetite. It was as impressive in English Benedictine houses such as St. Swithun’s, Winchester, where the monks petitioned King Henry II over an attempt to reduce by three the dishes at their main meal—but somewhat shamefacedly had to admit that they were left with ten. Other dimensions of food practice are considered, from plant lore to questions of health and the role of diet in maintaining humoral balance to monastic gardens, the use of herbs, and the link between monks and the growing of food. This last was important, not only in terms of self-sufficiency in the desert but also in Western Europe with its implications for the management of vast estates and regional agricultural productivity. Large monasteries required sophisticated logistics to ensure that all were fed, and woe betide cellarers and cooks who failed ensure that their monks ate well.

The monastic diet was changing. The extremes of ascetic practice were not to be replicated in a monastic environment, and diet increasingly matched that found in upper-class secular establishments. Jotischky points to a shift in dietary patterns in the eleventh century, from a period in which everyone had largely eaten the same food—the wealthy had more of it—to one in which there was much more variety, with the elite having access to a wider range of foods. He sketches a revolution in taste, with the use of expensive spices. These foodstuffs were as desirable in monasteries as elsewhere, and patterns of consumption were negotiated that legitimized even the flesh meat of quadrupeds. This volume is a thoughtful guide to these changes and to an important component in monastic life and practice.