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Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus. This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: But the text is not unsystematic or lacking in thoroughness. After it explains how to make walnut oil, it goes on to specify the making of almond oil, almond butter, and almond milk.
Then it discusses sauces of various kinds, made of basic vehicles like almond milk, vinegar, broth, and honey, to which seasonings like mustard, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, garlic, and ginger are added. The food is typical of what we know of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century cookery in western Europe, although the dishes are not as complex or heavily spiced and sweet as in other texts of the same kind.
Recipes were nothing new even in the Middle Ages. But it was one thing to pass recipes along by oral demonstration, as most had been passed on from cook to cook since the beginning of cooking, and another thing to do so by written communication. It thus forestalls variation, while at the same time allowing for greater precision and complexity. It is because all of these operations and ingredients are included that this precise dish, named and categorized and in this way enshrined, can be duplicated in a kitchen—can be duplicated, in fact, in a kitchen far away in time and place from the kitchen where the recipe originated.
So one of the chief impulses behind the recording of recipes is memory. And many of the recipes that have survived in manuscript would seem to have originated in just this way. We find them not only in the context of formal cookbooks but also in household accounts and commonplace books, where housewives and household workers both male and female sporadically recorded the how-tos and what-abouts of daily experience. We find them mixed in with instructions for preparing a salve for wounds or hand soap or eye shadow, juxtaposed with lyrics from a song and notations about animals bought and sold.
This is how to make. This is how to make it. Somehow, then, in the midst of a tradition of cookery that was mainly handed down by oral tradition and demonstration, the first extant copy of the Libellus de arte coquinaria was recorded. It was mildly thorough and systematic, supplementing tradition with the fixity of the written word. But it was heterogeneous in character too, and its origins are hard to pin down. The book mixed two languages and included borrowings from still other languages. It also mixed different kinds of ingredients, procedures, tastes, and styles.
It has no identifiable author. We cannot even be sure who the scribe was, although he was evidently associated with a monastery. Culinary philologists producing modern texts of early cookbooks in manuscript are often on the lookout for an original text, in a single language, with a single style of cookery, by the pen of a single author, from which other, compromised, copies derive.
This Danish-Latin book would seem to be a case of this: It is assumed that a fully self-present moment of origination, a pure expression of unmixed and unprecedented intentions, usually lost to time, lies at the core of most any early modern cookery book. What about the egg yolks?
One will never find out in many cases, not only because the traces of origin have been lost to legend, but because the recipes themselves often function less as inventions sprung from the mind of a creator than as momentary codifications of sensual experience that afterward take on the appearance of original inventions. To this assemblage and the engagement in writing it involves, a Foucauldian author function is often added, either after the fact or as part of the scribal enterprise.
The collection is a site where diverse impulses from diverse sources have been assembled; it does not spring full-blown from the mind of a single-minded author, to whom a name and a biography may be assigned. The multilingual, multifarious nature of a text like the Libellus de arte coquinaria is a sign of that. Latin vies with Danish. Terms adopted from French, Italian, and German vie with the Danish. Soon the whole guide gets absorbed into an Icelandic variant, where a pastel, a pastil, and a koken sit side by side. By the same token, ingredient vies with ingredient in such a text. After the walnut oil come the products made from almonds, which are then incorporated into several composed dishes.
But almonds do not naturally grow in Denmark. Recipes migrate; collections migrate.
An account book from fourteenth-century Florence includes the names of dishes served whose first known recorded recipes stem from contemporary Venice and the Mezzogiorno. So recipes are always on the move. And as recipes migrate, so do texts like the Libellus. None of this is to say that the medieval cookbook is without intentionality. According to Bruno Laurioux, to whom almost everything I have to say here is greatly indebted, the sudden appearance of a number of cookbooks like the Libellus in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century nothing in Europe appears before then in a vernacular, going back to the fall of the Roman Empire bespeaks a change in the relation of cooks to both their craft and their patrons.
Clearly, professional cooks were mainly responsible for the inception of the manuscripts, cooks who were now, after centuries of oblivion, accorded a more prestigious role in princely households, and who accordingly imagined their craft in more exalted terms. Recruited from the ranks of learned men, raised in social status, and charged with overseeing larger and larger staffs, whose members need to be directed by more and more precise instructions, the cooks were readers and writers.
They wrote things down; they read what others had written down. They copied some things; they invented or improvised some others. And on occasion by their labors a document in the form of a coherent, comprehensive text took shape. Although it is not always the case in medieval manuscripts, the various editions of the Libellus, Le viandier, and some others of the period articulated an orderly and general view of the culture of the kitchen, from rudimentary preparations oils, condiments, and sauces to complex variations of major dishes.
By the end of the earliest extant version of the Libellus, the reader has participated more or less systematically in a repertoire of tastes and textures and the means for producing and combining them.
The available ingredients and protocols are of course finite. No iguana or jellyfish appears; nor does galingale, pimento, or soya, nor even, in this Danish text, rice. But the ingredients and protocols included, which of course have their source in traditional practices—in the foodstuffs and technologies that had been adopted by this time in the northern European kitchen—are not only finite: This coherence is what the attentive reader is meant to walk away with.
The recipes for chickens hunter style and related dishes provide an example of how the system works. The collection includes eight chicken dishes in all. There are three boiled chicken dishes: There is a dish of boiled dumplings made with diced chicken meat, binders, and seasonings including cumin and wine. There is the chickens hunter style, another boiled dish, later thickened and garnished with innards, where the chicken is first roasted and then cooked in broth as well as other liquids, and garlic is added.
There is a dish somewhat related to this in which chicken pieces are served heated in a sauce made of chopped hard-boiled eggs and vinegar, thickened with egg yolks, and seasoned with pepper, cinnamon, cardamom, saffron, and salt. Then there are the two baked meats, the pastel or pasty, and the koken or pie, neither of which uses minced chicken but rather chicken parts. The pastel is made of a hen cut in two, covered with sage leaves, and seasoned with bacon and salt. From all this, one can not only compile an inventory of goods, but also distinguish a common pattern of selection, combination, and variation.
The chickens hunter style, it is apparent, is not only something unique, of mysterious origin, and of a winning quality that would make for its centuries-long popularity; it is also a variation culled from a standard repertoire of ingredients and techniques. A seething liquid of broth, wine, lard, and salt—this is little different from any of the other boiled dishes, except for the use of broth rather than water, the absence of vinegar though a vinegar-like role is played by the wine , and the addition of garlic which appears elsewhere in the text, in a fish sauce. A garnish of livers is also standard.
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