The Medieval Cook (review)

Bridget Henisch is a pioneer in the field of medieval culinary history. Her 1976 book Fast and Feast showed how sophisticated, varied and rather alien from modern tastes the medieval aesthetic was. Medieval cuisine favored fascinating combinations (sweet and sour), laborious cooking methods, dazzling color and elaboration, all discussed in Fast and Feast which also describes cooking methods and the physical and social setting for medieval dining. Although it comes with a few recipes, The Medieval Cook is less concerned with culinary results and more with the struggle to prepare the food. Directed to both a cultivated popular as well as scholarly audience, it covers some of the same ground as its predecessor with regard to kitchen equipment, cooking problems, staffing and table service. Both books make extensive use of art, especially manuscript decoration, to reconstruct and exemplify the challenges and adaptations of food preparation.

The present work expands the author's earlier treatment of the cook in his or her kitchen, describing both the routine of cooking and the social standing and reputation of cooks. The latter topic is new, and the first chapter, "The Cook in Context" concerns the ambiguous reputation of the professional cook who, as is still the case, was a comical or mock-heroic figure as well as a respected and even treasured artisan. Court cooks such as Taillevent in France and Chiquart in Savoy attained fame through their brilliant banquets and the extraordinary inventiveness of their cooking. The survival of their cookbooks is proof of their high status and their perfectly appropriate self-promotion. Ordinary cooks, however, were regarded with a degree of pity for their harsh conditions of their work. It is no accident that hell was often depicted as a gruesome kitchen with its terrible heat and smoke, its cauldrons, flesh-hooks and other implements deployed to tear apart and render human flesh. Cooks were reputed to be temperamental, conceited and focused on an activity that served as an emblem of human vanity: the deployment of great trouble and skill for an ephemeral and essentially gross pleasure.

Henisch devotes some attention to the anonymous, almost always female, family cook who suffered the inexorable demands, the constricting environment and the clumsy tools of the period without leaving much in the way of written traces. The crushing routine of the cottage kitchen is occasionally outlined in contemporary literature and devotional works, the latter sometimes designed to contrast the peace of the cloister with domestic chaos. The thirteenth-century treatise Hali Meidenhad portrays the typical scene in this manner: "The wife … hears, when she comes in, her child scream, sees the cat at the flitch [of bacon] and the hound at the hide. Her cake is burning on the hearthstone, her calf is sucking up all the milk, the earthenware pot is boiling over into the fire, and her husband is scolding."

Providing food for a modest family is contrasted with large-scale festivities and princely entertainments. Attention is also given to street food, catering and the management of affluent households, those rich enough to have a cook but not part of a court or aristocratic milieu.

Most of the evidence is from English and French sources, although much is now available from the rest of northern Europe and the Mediterranean countries that would have expanded the scope and detail of this study. The book is written in an engaging style and what it lacks in depth it makes up for in its varied observations and use of artistic as well as written sources. Some of the latter are not updated, so that for example Henisch relies on Eileen Power's 1928 translation of excerpts from the Ménagier and on Power's understandably dated exposition.