The Kitchen, Food, and Cooking in Reformation Germany by Bach Volker;

Author:Bach, Volker;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781442251281
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2016-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

EATING PROPERLY—STRUCTURING THE MEAL

Most people in Reformation-era Germany ate twice a day, the Frühmahl in the late morning or noon, and the Nachtmahl in the evening. Reconstructing exact hours is impossible because most people’s work schedules were dictated by daylight hours, which would also have shifted mealtimes. Eating after dark was unusual and wasteful, since it required artificial lighting. Meals during wintertime would therefore have been taken earlier and closer together than in summer. The only group that kept set mealtimes were monastics, whose schedules were regulated by the canonical hours. Even here, the times varied with the seasons and local custom. The three-meal pattern we find emerging later in the early modern period is only seen in some exceptional cases, with people engaged in hard physical labor sometimes taking an early breakfast on long summer days, and with the upper classes.18 Among the wealthy, it was also customary to sometimes take food with their late-night drink, the Schlaftrunk, which could turn into a full-scale party if guests were present. For most people, the Nachtmahl was the more important meal of the day, not out of health considerations but because they were often away from home during the working day and relied on food they had taken from home or brought to them. Only the evening meal was regularly eaten at home.

The typical meal, in the sense of the meal as it was experienced by most people, did not require much of a structure. Most often, there would have been a single cooked dish, most likely a vegetable gemues, soup, porridge, or dairy food, accompanied by bread and butter. Meat or fish was served occasionally in most homes, daily only in wealthy ones, and would always be accompanied by at least one side dish, the zugemues. It is likely that the kind of manners suggested for the bourgeois and upper-class table had an equivalent further down the social scale that ensured a distribution of portions according to age, status, and gender. Reconstructing these in detail is difficult, since little data survives, but stories recount conflict over meat portions, butter, fat, and cheese that must have had some form of regular resolution.19 Most likely, the habit of taking food in order of rank we find enshrined in the Tischzuchten prevailed everywhere.

All meals we have credible descriptions for began with a prayer of thanks and ended with the formal dismissal of the diners by the person at the head of the table. This is probably an idealized view, but an ideal that people at the time shared. The sense of community that was created by eating together was felt acutely and used to enforce hierarchies—for example, when apprentices and journeymen were forbidden to eat meals outside the home of their masters without their permission. Gratitude for the food was owed to God and the head of the household. To what degree this was enforced among the poor is hard to say, but they were probably more invested in their own ritual and sense of propriety than writers of the time give them credit for.

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