More Garbage, Anyone? Eating and Cooking Meat in Medieval
Rosalie Taylor
Copyright
2005
A Medieval Recipe for Garbage
Take fayre garbagys of chykonys, as že hed, že fete, že lyuerys, an že gysowrys; washe hem clene, an caste hem in a fayre potte, and caste žer-to freysshe brothe of Beef or ellys of moton, an let it boyle; an a-lye it with brede, an ley on Pepir an Safroun, Maces, Clowys, an a lytil verious an salt, an serue forth in the maner as a Sewe. (Two Fifteenth Century Cookery-Books, HARL 279.1.17)
This recipe for Garbage (Giblets) is enlightening to the modern cook, as well as the modern linguist, in terms of ingredients and cooking terms. This is typical of medieval English recipes because it is vague about quantities and cooking times, particular about seasonings, meat-based, similar to stew, and served with bread. In this article, I will examine various terms used in medieval recipes concerned with meat and its preparation.
Meat and Flesh, Broth and Brew: Etymologies for Meat Words
The term meat comes from Indo-European and distinguishes all solid food from all liquid food (OED cf. MEAT, n.). The term was used throughout the Old English (OE) period; the OE term flsc (flesh) was also used, though specifically implying the muscular tissue, or the tissues generally, of animals, regarded as an article of food (OED cf. FLESH, n.4a). These two terms described the eaten part of animals, whose names are still used in Present Day English: cķecen (chicken), *picga (pig), scéap (sheep), cu (cow). During the Middle English (ME) period, the French influence introduced words that describe the cooked form of the meat: pult(e)rie (poultry), porc (pork), motoun (mutton), boef (beef), and veel (veal). These loans entered ME either directly from Old French or from Latin through French. The terms garbage and gysowrys (gizzards) are Anglo-French and Old French respectively, both meaning the entrails of an animal meant for eating (OED, cf. GARBAGE, n., cf. GIZZARD). The other ingredients listed in making Garbage head, feet, and liver are all native to English. French loanwords usually had prestige over native words when they entered English. The result is that the words for the whole animals or parts of the animals that would eventually be used to produce the final, edible product were native words, and the end result, as well as the title of the recipe, were French loans. This signifies the importance of the finished, edible product, with less importance placed on what specifically went into making the stew.
This recipe calls for a fresshe brothe. The etymology of the word broth tells an interesting story: OE broš is a cognate
with Old High German brod,
which was adapted by the Romanic languages,
specifically brodum
in Latin (OED, cf. BROTH, n.). In Old
French, this became breu,
from which Middle English gets browet and brewis. What is interesting in the recipe for
Garbage is that the term brothe
is used over browet or brewis. The majority
of the other recipes from the Two
Fifteenth Century Cookery Books also use the term broth(e). The word brew was only a verb in OE and was not used as a noun until the beginning of the 16th
Century. If at this point there was
competition between broth and brew as nouns, brew ultimately lost its meaning as the juice of boiled meat
(OED, cf. BROWET, n.), as its current meaning generally refers to beverages
such as teas, or ales (OED, cf. BREW, n.).
The importance of boiling
In early Middle English (ME), the
most common cooking verb was séošan, meaning to boil or make an infusion or decoction of
something through boiling (OED, cf. SEETHE, v.). The verb is originally derived from the now obscure noun seath (OED cf.
SEATH) the fire pit on which a bed of stones were
placed for cooking without fireproof utensils.
The sense of séošan
was repeated in various synonyms: sode (to boil the salt out of), zeož (to simmer or boil), and boillam (to
boil). Sode and zeož are both derivatives of the OE strong
verb séašan.
In Middle English, the verb became weak and conjugates according to the
OE past tense, seeth. Boil
was borrowed from Old French into early Middle
English. French synonyms were often
considered more prestigious than their English counterparts,
and so in Present-Day English, we no longer describe bubbling, hot water as seething. It is important to recognize that in the above recipe for Garbage, the term boyle is used, not seethe, indicating that by the 15th
century, the French loanwords were in frequent use.
Aside from boiling meat, two other important methods were baking and roasting. Bake comes from OE bacan originally meant to cook something by dry heat, primarily used of preparing bread, then of potatoes, apples, the flesh of animals (OED, cf. BAKE, v.). Roast entered English later on as a loanword from the Old French rostir. It was originally semantically the same as bake, but they diverged with the prestigious French word applied generally to meat, while bake is now more often used for non-meat items, such as breads, cakes, or maybe potatoes. Perhaps this is why we now eat roast beef and not bake beef.
Conclusion: Not quite vegetarian, but not entirely carnivorous
Meat was forbidden on over half of the days of
the year for religious purposes, and thus there were a whole other set of
recipes for those days. Primary staples
included fish, dried fruits, and many, many almonds (of the 258 recipes in Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books,
Mead found that over thirty percent contained almonds). Another popular dish was mustard served with
herring, eaten often during Lent.
The medieval diet is often stereotyped as being
unhealthy due to an excessive amount of meat.
Contrary to this belief, the consumption of large quantities of meat was reserved for feasts, and cooks were quite aware of
balancing a meal out with seasonal vegetables and salads. It should be noted that there are rarely recipes for vegetables because
it was assumed that the cook knew how to prepare them and in what manner, and
that they would be served with every meal.
In fact, the
medieval diet is not so dissimilar from the modern-day
diner, with the exception of vegetarians, who might strongly disagree!
For Further
Austin, Thomas. Two Fifteenth Century Cookery-Books.
Gode Cookery. Glossary of Medieval Cooking Terms. James L. Matterer. http://www.godecookery.com/glossary/glossary.htm. 1997- 2001.
Hagen, Ann. A Handbook of
Anglo-Saxon Food: Processing & Consumption. Middlesex:
Anglo-Saxon Books, 1994.
Hammond, P.W. Food and Feast in Medieval
Hieatt, Constance B. and Sharon Butler, eds. Curye
on Inglysch: English Culinary Manuscripts of the
Fourteenth Century.
Hieatt, Constance B., Brenda Hosington, and Sharon
Butler, eds. Pleyn Delit:
Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks, 2nd ed.
Mead, William Edward. The English Medieval Feast.
Scully,
Terence. The
Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages.