Food in Medieval Times

by Melitta Weiss Adamson

Students and other readers will learn about the common foodstuffs available, how and what they cooked, ate, and drank, what the regional cuisines were like, how the different classes entertained and celebrated, and what restrictions they followed for health and faith reasons. Fascinating information is provided, such as on imitation food, kitchen humor, and medical ideas. Many period recipes and quotations flesh out the narrative.

The book draws on a variety of period sources, including as literature, account books, cookbooks, religious texts, archaeology, and art. Food was a status symbol then, and sumptuary laws defined what a person of a certain class could eat―the ingredients and preparation of a dish and how it was eaten depended on a person's status, and most information is available on the upper crust rather than the masses. Equalizing factors might have been religious strictures and such diseases as the bubonic plague, all of which are detailed here.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Food, Reference, Medieval, Food History, Medieval History

288 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1995

Reviews

[RebL · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted this book to be better than it was. It's fascinating, but so...dry. Like an overcooked haunch of venison on spit over an open fire. Very academic, and a little repetitive at times (see, for instance, Blanc-Manger, over and over and over).
I've clearly been spoiled by Bill Bryson's histories of stuff being both fascinating and entertaining.

[Gisselle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting read. An academic text so a bit dry at times but the author has a clear affection for the subject and people she writes about. It was enjoyable learning how upper class people in that era treated food as drama and learning what that looked like in the course of an evening. And I appreciated that upper class people weren’t the sole focus of the work as well. Anyone writing about the era (fiction or nonfiction) could find something from this book to include in their own work and enhance it.

[Angel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Me resultó interesante al principio pero luego al avanzar en la lectura se tornó muy repetitivo (al punto de tener la sensación de haber leído lo mismo tres o cuatro veces).

[Darcy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up on a whim in the library and read the whole thing in one sitting. I'm now very enlightened to the eating habits of both the wealthy and poor of the Medieval era. What am I doing with my life?

[Joy Pixley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and well-researched book that covers foods, ingredients, and how people ate in the Medieval period. The only other medieval cooking book I can compare it to is "The Medieval Cookbook" by Maggie Black. Black's book focuses primarily on recipes with rather short introductions for each section (and on Britain); it mentions many of the same things that this book does, but Adamson's goes into much great detail. For instance, Black's book mentions a recipe for almond milk, and that cooks made fancy fake dishes out of almond paste, whereas Adamson's book goes into depth about how cooks dealt with Catholic fasting rules by transforming dairy and meat dishes using fish and/or almond paste, and how almond milk was used because cow-milk was forbidden on certain fasting days.

This book starts with a time line of high points in the culinary history that's covered here, which really helped to put thing in order for me. She follows with a list of foodstuffs, describing their prevalence and use. The chapters are: food preparation, cuisines by region, eating habits and food ideas, food and religion, and concepts of diet and nutrition. There's a fair amount of overlap between these chapters and the list of foodstuffs, and it might make more sense to read the chapters first, to put the information in the list of foodstuffs into better context.

I was looking for information I could use in my fiction writing, and I gleaned many ideas for world building, especially in the chapters on food preparation, regional cuisines, and eating habits. I would have liked a more sociological or otherwise theoretical take on some of these issues - e.g., why some regions adopted certain foods and not others, but her "just the facts" approach is still commendable. I definitely appreciated her emphasis on how eating differed across different groups, especially nobles versus peasants, but also the sick and elderly and the religious orders. I was really interested in the idea, explored in several places, that nobles and intellectuals had dainty constitutions and could not stomach the strong food that people who did manual labor needed to keep up their strength -- this causes obvious problems for people in intellectual occupations who could not afford the expensive delicate foods of the nobles. It was also clear that religious restrictions hit the poor much harder than the wealthy, given the work-arounds available to the wealthy.

The way in which religion affected eating and cooking and the physicians' ideas about the bodily humors and how various foods affected them were also interesting, although these sections went into much more detail than I personally needed. However, for someone writing historical fiction, this level of detail would be much more useful. And I now understand much better than before why people are so confused about modern vegetarians, offering them fish after they've just said they don't eat meat.

The book takes an academic approach that is not difficult to read but also not as fun to read as more wider-audience books I've read on history or food. There are copious footnotes and references, and she is very clear about where all her information came from. However, sometimes this leads to rather dry sections, where she lists all the foods that are mentioned in a certain cookbook, or all the types of recipes or chapters. Presumably this is for the sake of being thorough, but it was often unclear what I was supposed to be learning from this specific list (e.g. what theme, or what differences or similarities to other lists, was I supposed to be catching?). The sections are dense, and I wish it were easier to glance back and find a particular nugget I just came across. However, the index looks pretty thorough, so that's helpful.

All in all, a great book for someone interested in food in Medieval times - in Europe, that is. Given how many foods and medicines and ideas in Medieval Europe seem to have Arabic roots, I think I should have started with a book on Arabic cooking and eating in this period!

[Sylvester · Rating 4 out of 5]

Food in Medieval Times is a much needed book for history students to understand how diet played an important role in European societies. Adamson provided good descriptions for the context in which people began to eat certain food, including what scholars thought of them medically, whether they were affordable and how they would utilise each ingredient.

The writing style wasn't the most succinct one could find but it was enjoyable to read.

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Students and other readers will learn about the common foodstuffs available, how and what they cooked, ate, and drank, what the regional cuisines were like, how the different classes entertained and celebrated, and what restrictions they followed for health and faith reasons. Fascinating information is provided, such as on imitation food, kitchen humor, and medical ideas. Many period recipes and quotations flesh out the narrative. The book draws on a variety of period sources, including as literature, account books, cookbooks, religious texts, archaeology, and art. Food was a status symbol then, and sumptuary laws defined what a person of a certain class could eat--the ingredients and preparation of a dish and how it was eaten depended on a person's status, and most information is available on the upper crust rather than the masses. Equalizing factors might have been religious strictures and such diseases as the bubonic plague, all of which are detailed here.

[Jessica Knauss · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my go-to for information about medieval food. I'm working on a historical novel, and this has been invaluable. It' also fun and readable for the casually interested, and might even inspire some chefs. I found a recipe for blancmanger after reading here that this "white food" was only suitable for the nobility. Delicious! And, appropriately expensive with all the almonds, time and effort.

I appreciated learning about the origin of the "Four and Twenty Blackbirds" song among other gems. Adamson's book really took me back to former times and made me wish Medieval Times and Hollywood could have banquets without tomato soup.

[Etty Kurnianingsih]

Semenjak gw ingin tahu seperti apa saja makanan jaman medieval, setelah membaca novel2 HR, buku ini lumayan menjawab semua pertanyaan gw. Selanjutnya tinggal mencari buku tentang gaya hidupnya deh....