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Review
| Food in Medieval Times, by Melitta Weiss Adamson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. 256 pages. $49.95, cloth.
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| Melitta W. Adamson, well known for previous works on medieval food, medicine and regimen, provides a veritable feast of a book on the geographical, social, medical, religious, and cultural context for the preparation and consumption of food in the Middle Ages. Although most information concerns the upper classes, she includes regional differences among the city dwellers and the lower classes where she can. Adamson mines, among many sources, medieval cookbooks, literary, historical, legal, and medical treatises, household and municipal records, saints' lives, artistic representations, and archeology. She also offers a significant list of modern secondary readings. She has chapters on foodstuffs available seasonally acquired through trade, food preparation and presentation, regional and international cuisines, habits and ideas concerning food, religious aspects of food consumption, and beliefs concerning diet, nutrition and the medicinal qualities of foods. She also includes a few sample recipes and a glossary of terms. |
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Not surprisingly, Adamson argues that food collection, preparation, presentation and consumption were central to the lives of medieval people and that what one ate depended largely on one's social class. Even the medical literature supports the notion of social inequality by claiming that the stomachs of the nobility were more "dainty" than those of the peasants, and therefore, the nobility deserved more delicate and rare foodstuffs. The sick also required different foods, depending on the nature of the disease and the person's social class. Adamson briefly considers the origin, history, preparation, social significance and medical use of the common, and not so common, foodstuffs available to medieval people. Of special note is the widespread use of almonds in various preparations; the recommendation that beef not be included in the diets of the nobility (because, physicians argued, beef and veal were too "coarse" for most nobles' stomachs) and the ingenuity of cooks in preparing banquet foods based on colors, shapes, and "surprises" (sotelties). Cooks prepared sauces to be sweet and sour, a commonplace of medieval cookery, with spices such as pepper, saffron, and "verjuice" (from unripe fruits), among other ingredients. Sauces also counteracted the "hot" and "dry" nature of meats to "cool" and "moisten" them, supporting contemporary medical theories about the nature of diet and its relation to humoral theory. |
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Most notable about medieval cookery was the influence of the "Arab world" on regional cuisines as diverse as the Italian, Spanish and English. Regional cooking always remained remarkably open to new foods, preparation and serving methods. "International" dishes included the blanc manger, a preparation that usually contained chicken or fish, rice, almond milk, and sugar. Discussion of changes in the use of utensils, the gradual replacement of the bread "trenchers" with pottery or other materials, the number, variety and changing order of courses, table coverings, seating arrangements, and table manners rounds out the cultural context of serving food. |
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Adamson concludes with two brief chapters on religion and food and contemporary medical thought concerning diet and nutrition. Because there were so many dietary restrictions placed on Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages (she does not discuss Muslim dietary restrictions here), medieval cooks had to be ingenious in preparing acceptable meals for Lent and other fasting periods. Fish, and even beaver tail, substituted for meats as did nuts and other foodstuffs. The cook's challenge was to prepare a dish that looked and tasted like meat. Lent and other periods of fasting could double the food budget, because of expensive substitute foods, increasing the hardship on peasants. Fasting did not turn people into vegetarians, but rather emphasized the central role of meat in the upper class diet. Vegetarians sometimes came under suspicion of heresy, as the Cathars and Bogomils, among others, were strictly vegetarian. Fasting also cleansed the body both of the sin of gluttony and the closely related sin of lust. Taken too far, fasting to induce "purity and transcendence of their [girls' and women's] earthly existence," could lead to "holy anorexia," in the words of Caroline Bynum, cited by Adamson (p. 195). Adamson concludes with the importance of diet as part of medieval medical regimens. Based on her previous work in this area, she demonstrates how important knowledge of medieval humoral theory was in designing a regimen to maintain or restore health through balancing the humors. |
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Adamson has provided an extremely useful popular summary of the best recent international scholarship. High school and college teachers looking to improve their understanding of the place of food, its culture and relation to medical ideas, profitably will consult this book. As part of Greenwood's "Food through History" series, it should remain a standard survey for a long time. |
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| University of West Georgia |
Charles W. Clark |
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