The Medieval Cook by Bridget Ann Henisch

Author:Bridget Ann Henisch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Group Ltd
Published: 2013-12-18T16:00:00+00:00

Kitchen Comforts

Cooks and their rag-tag crew of helpers faced strenuous days. Not only did they have to produce the meals, they also had to prepare the ingredients in all those messy ways which rarely have to be faced by their counterparts today, from plucking feathers to emptying entrails. In a household ruled by a reasonably benevolent master, certain permitted indulgences softened the rigours of the working hours. The Goodman of Paris did not encourage idleness, but recognized the need for breaks to ease the daily pressure. He knew how to control his servants without appearing to coerce them: ‘And do you bid them to eat well and drink well and deeply, for it is reasonable that they should eat at a stretch, without sitting too long over their food and without lingering over their meat, or staying with their elbows on the table.’54

Many kitchen jobs can be done while sitting down. Here and there in the pictorial record it is possible to find someone taking the weight off the feet while busy with the task at hand. One picture in a beautiful manuscript copy of Virgil’s poems, made in Ferrara in 1458,55 shows a black maid seated on a high-backed chair as she stirs the contents of a cooking-pot suspended over the fire.56 Close by, a young man sits astride a trestle-table, pounding something in a mortar with his pestle. In the cycle of images devised to illustrate the luxurious copies of the health handbook, Tacuinum sanitatis, made in northern Italy in the late fourteenth century, other pictures offer glimpses of leisurely assembly-line co-operation. Legs of lamb are trimmed by one woman at a table, while another sits on a stool by the fire to cook them. Tripe is scraped by one maid, and cooked by another. At the end of the day, young and old sit and talk around the kitchen fire, while hams hang high in the chimney to cure.57

The companionship hinted at in such scenes does not invariably sweeten tempers. There is a distinct edge of sarcasm to that collective term recorded in a fifteenth-century recipe book: ‘a temperance of cooks’.58 Even so, in a shared workplace, whenever a running battle is not being fought between two clashing personalities, the chance of a little gossip, a touch of flirtation, a muttered grumble or a whispered joke, can do a lot to lighten loads and ease tensions.

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