Food History

Today was market day again and the change of seasons is already obvious. The colours of the fresh fruit and vegetables are at their brightest and most varied, but the peaches are getting fewer and the apples more numerous. Young leeks reminded me that winter means hot soups, and both my friend and I dreamed of sweating leek in butter. In my mind I added chestnut and cream. Fortunately I looked at my waistline before I bought the leeks: there will be plenty of time for wintry goodness.

It’s natural that the change of colours on the market stalls make me think of the calendar. More specifically, it makes me think of the Medieval calendar, where the march of the seasons was associated with specific cooking tasks.

From the beginning of autumn, farmers and estate manger would start their series of tasks to prepare for winter. I never remember the precise order of the tasks, because I don’t have to. All I have to do is haul out any copy of a late Medieval illuminated Book of Hours and it tells me what happened and when. There’s so much about food in these pictures: pigs fattening for later slaughter, harvest, preserving autumn crops, preserving meat, getting the fields ready for winter and getting the garden ready, too. That’s what my memory tells me.

Memory is hopelessly unreliable, however. One of the best Books of Hours of all is Les Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry. I teach with it and it comes with its own bookmark, Richard III’s signature embroidered onto gauze ribbon by my remarkable accountant. Let me see what its pictures tell me about food-related activity from September. (I know it’s February, but the weather is already telling me it’s March, and in Northern hemisphere terms, that’s September. If you think that’s bad, you should come and visit during January, when it’s stiflingly hot. )

Aha! September was grape harvest (remember, Books of Hours are as regional as their artists and owners) and we have a lovely picture of the vineyard at Saumur. In the background is the castle, but, more importantly, the kitchen.

I was wrong about harvest, at least as far as this book goes, because in October there is sowing on the Seine, right near the Louvre, in fact. The birds are eating the corn s quickly as the sower can spread it, too, despite the scarecrow’s daunting bow.

November fits my stray memories. The pigs are in the forest, fattening nicely on the acorns the peasants knock off the trees.

And that’s autumn in one particularly expensive book of hours. Not even the super rich and amazingly cosmopolitan were unaware of food production. This makes me wonder about our own rich and mighty. Would they know that the colour change on the market stalls is maybe a couple of weeks early? Would they even know that the colours change?