Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe: A Book of Essays 0415803616, 9780415803618

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
Chapter 1. The Greco-Roman World / Melitta Weiss Adamson 1
Chapter 2. Medieval Britain / Constance B. Hieatt 19
Chapter 3. Medieval France
A. THE NORTH / Terence Scully 47
B. THE SOUTH / Carole Lambert 67
Chapter 4. Medieval and Renaissance Italy
A. THE PENINSULA / Simon Varey 85
B. SICILY / Habeeb Salloum 113
Chapter 5. Medieval Spain / Rafael Chabran 125
Chapter 6. Medieval Germany / Melitta Weiss Adamson 153
Chapter 7. The Low Countries in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries / Johanna Maria van Winter 197
Bibliography 215
Contributors 235
Index 239

Citation preview

Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe

ROUTLEDGE MEDIEVAL CASEBOOKS CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ AND MARCIA COLISH, THE CHESTER MYSTERY CYCLE

Series Editors

MEDIEVAL LITURGY

A Casebook edited by Kevin J. Harty

A Book if Essays edited by Lizette Larson-Miller

MEDIEVAL NUMEROLOGY

MEDIEVAL PURITY AND PIETY

A Book if Essays edited by Robert L. Surles MANUSCRIPT SOURCES OF MEDIEVAL MEDICINE

Essays on Medieval Clerical Celibacy and Religious Reform edited by Michael Frassetto HILDEGARD OF BINGEN

A Book if Essays edited by Margaret R. Schleissner

A Book of Essays edited by Maud Burnett Mcinerney

SAINT AUGUSTINE THE BISHOP

JULIAN OF NORWICH

A Book if Essays edited by Fannie LeMoine and Christopher Kleinhenz MEDIEVAL CHRISTIAN PERCEPTIONS OF ISLAM

A Book if Essays edited by John Victor Tolan

A Book of Essays edited by Sandra J. McEntire THE MARK OF THE BEAST

The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature edited by Debra Hassig THE BOOK AND THE MAGIC OF

SOVEREIGN LADY

READING IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Essays on VVcJmen in Middle English Literature edited by Muriel Whitaker

edited by Albert Classen CONFLICTED IDENTITIES AND MULTIPLE MASCULINITIES

FOOD IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Men in the Medieval U-ist edited by Jacqueline Murray

ANIMALS IN THE MIDDLE AGES

MIDDLE AGES

A Book if Essays edited by Melitta Weiss Adamson A Book if Essays edited by Nona C. Flores

SANCTITY AND MOTHERHOOD

Essays on Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages edited by Annecke B. Mulder-Bakker MEDIEVAL FAMILY ROLES

IMAGINING HEAVEN IN THE

A Book of Essays edited by Jan Swango Emerson and Hugh Feiss, o.S.B. ANNA KOMNENE AND HER TIMES

edited by Thalia Gouma-Peterson WILLIAM LANGLAND'S PIERS PLOWMAN

A Book if Essays edited by Cathy Jorgensen Itnyre

A Book if Essays edited by Kathleen M. Hewett-Smith

THE MABINOGI

THE POETIC EDDA

A Book if Essays edited by C.W Sullivan III THE PILGRIMMAGE TO COMPOSTELA IN THE MIDDLE AGES

A Book of Essays edited by Maryjane Dunn and Linda Kay Davidson

Essays on Old Norse Mythology edited by Paul Acker and Carolyne Larrington REGIONAL CUISINES OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE

A Book if Essays edited by Melitta Weiss Adamson

Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe A Book of Essays

edited by Melitta Weiss Adamson

Routledge New York • London

Published in 2002 by Routledge 711 Third Ave, New York, NY 10017 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Pa rk, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Croup, First issued in paperback 2012 Transferred to Digital Printing 2010 Copyright 0 2002 by Melitta Weiss Adamson All rights reserved, No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical , or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storaee or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress_

Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent. IS6N13: 978·0·415---92994·3 (hbk) IS6N13: 978·0·415·80361 · 8 (pbk)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction ix

Chapter 1

The Greco-Roman World Melitta Weiss Adamson 1

Chapter 2

Medieval Britain Constance B. Hieatt 19

Chapter 3

Medieval France A.

THE NORTH

Terence Scully

47 B. THE SOUTH Carole Lambert

67

v

Chapter 4

Medieval and Renaissance Italy A. THE PENINSULA

Simon Varey 85 B. SICILY

Habeeb Salloum

113 Chapter 5

Medieval Spain Rafael Chabran

125 Chapter 6

Medieval Germany Melitta Weiss Adamson

153 Chapter 7

The Low Countries in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries Johanna Maria van Winter

197

Bibliography 215

Contributors 235

Index 239

Acknowledgments

I

wish to thank the contributors to this volume without whom the project could not have been realized. My thanks also go to Waxmann Verlag GmbH. for permission to reprint in English translation Johanna Maria van Winter's article "Nahrungsmittel in den Niederlanden im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert," which previously appeared in Nahrung und Tischkultur im Hanseraum, edited by GUnter Wiegelmann and Ruth-E. Mohrmann (MUnster and New York: Waxmann, 1996), 303-18; see Chapter 7, "The Low Countries in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries." Routledge Publishing I wish to thank for its enthusiastic support of the book. And finally, my thanks go to my husband, Alan Adamson, for his computer expertise and general advice in cultural and linguistic matters.

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Introduction

T

he subject of this book is the art of cookery as it evolved in Europe in the millennium between the Fall of Rome and the beginning of the Renaissance, a period commonly referred to as the Middle Ages. Although various aspects of medieval food have been studied in the past, no book exists to date that looks at western Europe as a whole and systematically explores the questions of regionalism and interregional influences in the area of food production and consumption. The articles in this volume are all written by food historians who are experts in the respective cultures, and they cover the cuisines of medieval Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and the Low Countries. Since most of Europe was at some point part of the Roman Empire and thus exposed to Roman food habits, which in turn were influenced by Greek cookery, the cuisines of Antiquity will be discussed first. Chapter I provides a brief overview of the culinary traditions found in classical and post-classical Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, which formed the basis for many of the regional cuisines of Christian Europe. First the foodstuffs and dishes eaten in Greece during the classical period from 650 to 250 B.C. are discussed, which included various types of meat, sweeteners, cheeses, fish and seafood, fruits and nuts, vegetables, herbs and spices, and pulses and cereals. Among the remarkable traits of this early cuisine were the recent introduction of the hen as a meat source, the use of all animal parts, a predilection for exotic flavorings such as sumach and silphium, and a fish sauce called garos. When it comes to innovations, Lydia and Sicily were the leaders during this period. In the post-classical era from 300 B.C. to 300 A.D. the trendsetter was no longer Athens but Alexander's homeland Macedonia, and with it came changes in Greek cuisine, which was enriched with food; stuffs from the east (spices, fruits, nuts). the south (citrus fruits). and the west (some herbs and spices from western Europe). put more emphasis on meat, and developed an early version of the trencher. IX

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Roman cuisine is shown to be strongly indebted to Greek food customs and terminology, and yet, some Roman dishes and dish names also got appropriated by the Greeks. Gastronomical literature came into its own in Imperial Rome with agricultural manuals and the first Latin cookbook, Apicius's De re coquil1aria. Meat, spices, and vegetables played an important role in the collection, as did flavored wines and fruit juices, which together with honey and garum-the Greek garos-formed the basis for countless sweet/sour and sweet/salty sauces. Naming dishes after people or places was also a Roman trait. Chapter I concludes with a look at the cuisine of Byzantium, which has traditionally been neglected by food historians. Located on the crossroads between east and west, Byzantium held on to Greco-Roman cooking practices such as the use of garum for much longer than the west, and yet it also acquired a taste for new foods, such as caviar from the Black Sea, and especially for the cuisine of its Arab neighbors. A whole continent lay between Byzantium and the British Isles, and yet the Arab influence was also felt strongly in the first cookbooks from Britain, as Constance B. Hieatt is able to show in chapter 2. Faced with the problem that the oldest extant cookbook manuscripts are Anglo-Norman and not Anglo-Saxon, she begins her investigation with other sources from which information on Anglo-Saxon cookery can be gleaned. They range from poetry and archeology to monastic rules, medical recipes, and the Bayeux tapestry. When it comes to the earliest Anglo-Norman cookbooks from the 1290s, Hieatt has a surprise in store for the reader, who might assume that their closest relatives are found in northern France. As it turns out, the Anglo-Norman recipes have more in common with Italian and Arab than with medieval French cooking. After all, what is more Italian than lasagne and ravioli, and more Arab than meatballs? In painstaking detail Hieatt analyzes the Anglo-Norman recipes and compares them with recipes from continental Europe and the Middle East. Despite the fact that connections between dishes are often obscured by later modifications (to make a meat dish suitable for fishdays, for instance), scribal misunderstanding, and textual corruption, the author comes up with some startling results, such as the culinary affinities between Britain and Sicily brought about by the Normans who occupied both islands. The recipes from Britain, though primarily rooted in foreign traditions, do make it possible to filter out some uniquely British culinary traits: a love for sweets (frequently containing cooked fruit), the use of flower petals in dishes, conservative spicing, and a playfulness that expressed itself in a variety of "subtleties," or phantastic creations such as pastry castles or the infamous Turk's Head, also known as Monk's Head or Monkey's Head in the different Mediterranean cultures. Hieatt then traces the evolution of· the culinary recipe in Britain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from cook's shorthand to elaborate instructions at times written in a hybrid of English and French before English won out. She concludes her chapter with

Introduction

an outlook on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the lingering effects of medieval cooking on early modern British recipe collections. Chapter 3 is devoted to the cookery of France, which because of substantial differences between the north and the south is divided into two parts. Terence Scully, who bases his description of northern French cuisine on five cookbooks from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, begins with various caveats to the reader: that the recorded recipes reflect French haute cuisine only, that they do not contain information on raw foods and common cooking procedures, and that orality was still a major factor in the cooking profession of the time. He observes the presence of some standard dishes in the recipe collections, above all the white dish blanc manger. The high degree of homogeneity in northern French cookery can be seen in the countless recipes for broths, pottages, gravies, civets, roasts, sops, cullis, purees, jellies, deep-fried dishes, and standard sauces, with the broth being the quintessential French dish. Scully's comparison between French and Italian recipes shows that the French used dough and eggs more sparingly and hence were less enthusiastic about tortes and omelettes. Like the Romans, they frequently named dishes after locations, especially European ones, thereby giving them an international flair. From the dishes Scully moves on to the foodstuffs that were characteristic of northern France. Among the staples he identifies are bread, which was also used as a thickener; the meat of domestic animals, especially pork, mutton, chicken, and small birds; and lard as the preferred cooking fat. Butter played a minor role, with cow's milk being mainly turned into cheeses. As in many European cookbooks of the time, vegetables and fruits are underrepresented in the French sources. Grapes, however, added a distinct flavor to the cuisine in the form of must, verjuice, wine, and vinegar, and so did the ubiquitous almond milk. Spices , used for their medicinal properties, flavor, and color, come in strong and mild combinations in the cookbooks. By the fifteenth century, pepper, mustard, and honey were in northern France replaced by grain of paradise, ginger, and cane sugar. In conclusion, Scully names color and flavor as the two distinguishing features of northern French cuisine. The virtuosity of cooks expressed itself in multicolored dishes and in flavors achieved by combining spices with almond milk and/or the various fermented and unfermented types of grape juice. Compared to the rich culinary literature of northern France, the source material for the south is sparse. Aside from historical documents and archeological evidence, only one fourteenth-century cookbook from Languedoc exists. Carole Lambert, who edited this collection of fifty-one recipes, is also the author of the section on the cuisine of southern France. By comparing and contrasting the recipes with northern French, English, Catalan, and Italian ones, she is able to filter out the characteristic features of southern French cooking and the traditions to which the cuisine is indebted. Two of the dishes she discusses in detail are still prepared in the region today, escabecne, a fish-dish, and aillade , a garlic sauce. The cookbook also includes

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poultry dishes with pomegranate and lemon juice, a rocket and a serpolet sauce, preserved eel, tortes, and a festive dish called matafeam. Lambert shows that nearly all of them are Arab in origin and have counterparts in Italian and Catalan collections. Some of these recipes even made it to the British Isles, which seems to confirm Hieatt's theory of the cultural exchange between Britain and the Continent. The matafeam is an interesting example of an Hispano-Arabic-Jewish recipe appropriated by Christians who substituted pork for mutton. Typical of southern France, according to the author, was the extensive use of ovens to prepare food, in particular a type of portable oven known as trapa that was buried in ashes. When it comes to the selection of foodstuffs, the south shows its affinity with Mediterranean cooking. Pomegranates, lemons, and chickpeas are ingredients absent from northern French collections; peas, butter, and pork fat, on the other hand, are missing from the Languedoc cookbook. The author'S statistical analysis of the use of spices in European cookbooks shows the south of France was influenced by both northern and Mediterranean preferences, thereby creating its own special character. Ginger, pepper, and saffron were the most popular spices, and sugar, must, and fruit the most popular sweeteners. Lambert concludes her study with some regional specialities such as the confections and flavored wines Montpellier was famous for, and the figs from Provence. In medieval Italy the Arab influence was stronger in the south than in the north, which is why the chapter on Italian cuisine deals with the peninsula and Sicily separately Simon Varey in his discussion of Italian food emphasizes the social aspect of dining-which, he claims, was as important in Antiquity as it was in the fifteenth century-and connects Apicius with Platina. When it appeared in 1470, platina's De nonesta voluptate et valetudine, Europe's first printed cookbook, became an instant bestseller. The product of a successful collaboration between a cook and a scholar, this Latin text was soon translated into all the major European languages. Varey's detailed study of the book's genesis and contents shows the enduring influence of Apicius and classical literature on healthcare and nutrition from Galen to Celsus. The book, which propagates moderate Epicureanism, follows the classical model in listing the dishes in the order in which they were eaten at dinner rather than distinguishing between dishes for fast and feast days as many medieval cookbooks do. For the modern cook eager to recreate Platina's dishes, the problems, according to Varey, are manyfold They range from vague instructions to mistranslations of the recipes , which were originally recorded in colloquial Italian; plagiarism, that is, recipes copied out of context; the unavailability of ingredients such as hedgehog, porcupine, and stork, and the change in taste of many ingredients over centuries of hybridization. In the 240 recipes of Platina's cookbook Varey observes the same respect for flavors, short cooking times, and light seasoning that are today still the hallmark of Italian cuisine. Meat and birds, often in sauce, figure prom i-

Introduction

nently, as do soups, stews, fish dishes, and cooked or fried vegetables. Purees and porridges, so popular north of the Alps, are of minor importance. The Arab influence is apparent in the exotic ingredients from sugar to dates, pomegranates, rice, and oranges. From platina the author turns to other sources that provide information on Italian food. They include Boccaccio's Decameron, the Italian illustrations to the Arabic health book known as Tacuinum sanitatis, Marsilio Ficino's De vita tripiici, and the writings of the alchemist Alessio Piemonte. Varey rejects the notion of a homogenous Italian cuisine and instead highlights some of the differences in taste between Tuscan, Piemontese, Venetian, Milanese, and Neapolitan cooking, just to name a few of the diverse regions. He also shows that the response to foods from the New World was not the same throughout Italy. Nevertheless he does list a number of foodstuffs that were staples all over medieval Italy. They include bread, especially wheat bread; pasta; pizza, that is, pie shells with a wide range of toppings; polenta; sausages, in particular mortadella; risotto; frittat a or omelettes; spiced cakes; biscotti; and Naples morsels. Popular ingredients were veal. local cheeses, eggs, grapes, lemons, and the ubiquitous olive oil. When it comes to the culinary exchange between Italy and other parts of Europe, Varey names Catherine de Medici's influence on upperclass French cooking, and Italian dishes that claim to be of Arab, Catalan, English, or Hungarian origin, however authentic these claims may be. The author concludes by constrasting the food of the ordinary Italians, which had not changed much since Roman times, with the different courses for a lavish banquet as propagated by Platina and others. In the absence of a medieval Sicilian cookbook, Habeeb Salloum turns to the island's history and modern Sicilian cuisine to illustrate the enormous impact Arab civilization had on Sicilian life in general and on cooking in particular. Occupied successively by the Phoenicians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, and Normans, Sicily reached its peak under the Arabs between 878 and 1091 A.D. Arab innovations in areas such as government, trade, architecture, agriculture, and silk, cotton, and papyrus production substantially improved the lives of Sicilians and also left their mark on the language. Salloum points to the many place names on the island which are of Arabic origin and the farming technology and foodstuffs that were introduced by the Arabs together with their Arabic terminology. At a time when the Arab standard of living was much higher than that of most Europeans, the favorable comments of Arab travelers who visited Sicily and its bustling capital Palermo, are particularly revealing. Little wonder then that the Norman conquerors of the island, rather than impose their way of life, ended up adopting many of the Arab customs. When it comes to food, Salloum singles out preservation, distillation, flavoring, and pasta and icecream making as some of the new elements the Arabs brought to Sicilian cooking, and he attributes the fact that modern Sicilian cuisine is still generally hotter. spicier, and sweeter than that of northern Italy to the Arab influence.

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Aside from Sicily. Spain was the other major gateway through which Arab culture entered Europe. Rafael Chabran opens his chapter on the cuisine of medieval Spain with a fourteenth-century Castilian poem that tells the reader of the types of foods eaten in various parts of the country. He then discusses the geographic. religious. and ethnic diversity of the independent kingdoms that constituted medieval Spain . The author begins his culinary history of Iberia with the Romans. whose staples olive oil. bread. grapes. wine. cheese. and fish are still the staples of modern Spain. and provides evidence that in Imperial Rome garum from Spain was considered the best and commanded the highest price. Less significant for the evolution of Spanish cookery than the Roman occupation was the Visigothic period. which brought Christianity to the Iberian Peninsula. With the arrival of the Moors in 711 A.D .• on the other hand. Spanish cuisine. like that of Sicily. was changed forever. As the author points out. a fusion took place between the Roman culinary substratum and the haute cuisine of Baghdad. which the Arabs in Spain sought to emulate. Along with the introduction of new foodstuffs came new food techniques and tastes. a case in point being the escabeche encountered earlier in the cookbook from Languedoc. and which in time spread from Spain even to the New World. The Arabs also introduced Spain to the classical theory of nutrition that is contained in the vast dietetic literature of the Middle Ages. Of the Spanish authors who deal with food in the context of preventive medicine. Chabran discusses Arnald de Villanova. Luis Lobera de Avila. Enrique Jorge Enrfquez. and Francisco Nunez de Oria. As one of the first European alchemists. Arnald de Villanova also learned from the Arabs the practice of distilling. which was initially used for medical purposes only. In addition to the Arabs. it was the Sephardic Jews who influenced Spanish cooking and nutrition in the medieval period. Following a brief history of the Jews and converted Jews in Spain. the author turns to Jewish cookery. which shows close ties with that of the Arabs. According to Chabran. ada/ina is the Hispano-Jewish dish par excellence. which may be related to the matafeam contained in the cookbook from southern France. When the Spanish Christians prepared ada/ina. they substituted mutton with pork and oil with pork fat. In the absence of a cookbook from the Central Meseta. the author turns to Cervantes' Don Quixote and the information it contains on the food of the peasants. The dish that figures prominently in the book is the stew. known as alia. usually made from beef or mutton . Catalonia. by contrast. is a region whose cuisine is well documented in several extant cookbooks. The fact that one of them was written by the cook to the King of Naples and is composed of Catalan. Italian. French. and Arab dishes illustrates the active cultural exchange that is characteristic of the Mediterranean basin-at least among the upper classes. Recipes for soups. roasts. stews. escabeche. and desserts are plentiful. with fish playing a pivotal role as Lenten food. Blanc manger. which according to the author may have been invented near Tarragona in the early Middle Ages. comes in both fast-

Introduction

and feast-day versions in the cookbooks. The Arab influence is felt everywhere, in the use of fruits and vegetables such as oranges, lemons, citrons, and eggplants, and nuts such as almonds and hazelnuts, as well as in the great selection of desserts. Chabran ends his culinary tour through medieval Spain in Castile where a courtly handbook for carvers was written, which provides valuable insights in Castilian food and even gives a number of recipes. Like the Catalan cookbooks it differentiates between meat dishes and Lenten food, describes the contents of a Spanish larder, and includes recipes for desserts, among them the infamous Turk's Head that was also encountered in Sicily and England. In conclusion, Chabran looks at the culinary revolution in Spain following the discovery of the New World and observes that none of the new foodstuffs gained instant popularity or made it into Spanish cookbooks before the end of the sixteenth century. Among the ones that were incorporated into Spanish cooking first were beans, maize, chocolate, and the tomato, while the potato had to wait until the end of the seventeenth century. Chapter 6 is dedicated to the cuisine of German-speaking Europe in the Middle Ages. It draws on a variety of sources from literature, chronicles, and account books to medicine, archeology, meal plans, and cookbooks. An examination of the earliest comments on the food of the Teutonic tribes by Caesar, Tacitus, and others reveals a bias of the Latin writers against their neighbors to the north, whose diet of meat, dairy products, fish, eggs, bacon, lard, and beer is constrasted with the sophisticated cuisines of Rome and Byzantium. German literature of the high and late Middle Ages treats food mostly as a cliche: the aristocracy indulges in game, fish, white bread, and wine, while the peasants make do with dark bread, porridge, turnips, sidemeat, water, milk, cider, and beer. Culinary transgressions by the peasants are ridiculed or severely punished, while the food of the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie is not even mentioned. Late medieval chronicles and account books from Germany present a more realistic picture of foodstuffs and their prices, as an analysis of Ulrich von Richental's chronicle of the Council of Constance, a Nuremberg chronicle, as well as hospital and municipal records from southern German towns illustrates. Nevertheless some caveats also apply when dealing with these sources, such as the international cuisine at the Council, which drew Church dignitaries from all over Europe and especially Italy, the tendency of chroniclers to exaggerate when reporting on wars and famines, and the omission in account books of foodstuffs that were not bought but home grown or donated. In Germany as elsewhere in Europe the diet of the population was also subject to various norms among which the chapter singles out sumptuary laws, the fasting laws of the Catholic Church, and medical advice on nutrition. Lent created a particular problem for people north of the Alps where fish and olive oil, the staples of the Mediterranean diet, were expensive and rare. Oil from seeds and nuts that grew locally and a certain liberalization by the curia in Rome allowing milk,

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dairy products, and eggs to be consumed on certain fast days brought some relief. Among the German physicians who wrote extensively on nutrition and are dealt with in the chapter are Konrad von Eichstatt, and Arnold von Bamberg. Through their studies and travels they had become familiar with Mediterranean cooking, and in their works they propagated everything from verjuice and almond milk to lasagne, ravioli, tortes, and snails. Their occasional remarks on German culinary preferences are in stark contrast to the wealth of information on German food in the sixteenth-century dietetic literature of Hieronymus Bock and Walther Ryff. In it sauerkraut, apples, pigs, chicken, butter, wine, and beer are among the staples of the Germans whose high-fat diet by then had earned them the nickname Gra~ Alemant among their Latin neighbors. To counteract the sometimes skewed picture of the German diet in the written sources and fill in some of the blanks for the periods from which no written records exist, the study also draws on archeology. Evidence is presented that suggests a major shift in Germany in the tenth and eleventh century from a meat-based to a grain-based diet. By the thirteenth century bread and gruel had become staples, and the game of the early medieval period was replaced by the meat of domesticated animals, in particular pork and beef. The thrust of the chapter is devoted to meal plans and cookbooks, which provide important information on dishes and the order in which they were consumed. Judging from the meal plans of a Benedictine monastery in Tegernsee, the meatless diet of the monks consisted of soups, purees, vegetables, fish, and pastries. When it comes to cookbooks, southern Germany is among the best-documented regions in all of medieval Europe. The influential BUch von guter spise, the oldest German cookbook written in WOrzburg around 1350, is analyzed in detail. Compiled from two different sources, the cookbook is a peculiar mix of dishes made from German favorites such as chicken, pork, beef. lard, butter, bacon, freshwater fish, eggs, bread, salt, sage, and parsley and expensive imports from the Mediterranean, especially almonds, rice, sugar, and saffron. As in other European collections, vegetables are mentioned rarely; fruit, however, does appear in a number of recipes for purees and fritters. Fladen, that is, rolled-out dough with vegetarian, meat, or fish toppings, were popular; soups, on the other hand, are completely absent. Multiple cooking, the use of molds, a love for color, and naming dishes after locations are some of the characteristic features of early German cookery. The author then follows the manuscript tradition of the WOrzburg cookbook in the fifteenth century. Copied either verbatim or rephrased and incorporated in bigger collections, its recipes circulated widely in Germany and Austria. Another manuscript tradition discussed in the chapter is centered on the Tyrolean Alps and, in addition to local delicacies like roe's head, shows strong Italian influence. Compared to the south, the northern

Introduction

German cookbook tradition is much poorer, but has parallels with Icelandic and Danish collections, which predate the WOrzburg cookbook. Evidence of an albeit limited reception of an eleventh-century dietetic cookbook from Baghdad in fifteenth-century Bavaria is followed by a brief look at the first printed cookbooks in Germany, their sources, organizing principles, illustrations, and intended audience. The chapter concludes with a preliminary overview of the culinary preferences in the various regions of Germany based on a small sample of edited cookbooks. In the Low Countries the cookbook tradition sets in at the end of the fifteenth century, which is later than in most other European countries. In her study of Dutch cuisine, Johanna Maria van Winter therefore first discusses other sources that contain information on food and drink and that predate the cookbooks. They are the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century household accounts of the counts and du¥Ps of Holland, Guelders, and Burgundy, the Bishop of Utrecht, and a cust