Food History

I promised you a second half to my thoughts on Richard III’s coronation feast, and here it is. It’s not as glamorous as the first half. Well, it is, but only in the minds of people like me, who find provisioning and planning seriously cool.

The feast menu wasn’t a menu as we know it. Rather it was guidance on what had to be cooked. Normal extras like bread, were not listed. Ale was not present in the papers either. Things like bread and ale may well have been served without being described anywhere - like vegetables, they were home-produce and staples.

We know that some people present ate bread and fruit because the pantry (p.296) bought 50 dozen loaves, and some extra. It also bought “jonkettes� and strawberries (jonkettes might be food, or they might be little baskets in which food was bought or served – I need to check that one out). The kitchens were provisioned with (pp 297-8) dates, prunes (which may simply be plums, rather than dried plums), gold leaf, oranges (a thousand of them; they were almost certainly a bitter orange, like the modern Seville orange), lemons, twelve more gallons of strawberries, three barrels of honey, figs, various types of scented water (including two types of rosewater, one a straight rosewater and the other made from the more expensive damask rose), pomegranates, and green ginger syrup. A great deal of these fruits, like the spices, were used in the cooking.

This was the kitchen, though. Even more fruits and species and scented water went to the saucery, where the sauces were made. While we are on the subject of specialist kitchens, there was also a confectioner (to make even more confectionery than that brought in) and a wafery, where wafers were made from flour and egg and saffron, sugar and a little spice. These wafers were probably to be nibbled with the hypocras, at the end of the meal.

In the documentation of the coronation is a listing of all meat bought. I love this list. It makes me feel as if I’ve never eaten meat.

There were thirty bulls, but only twelve fatted pigs and six boars (being fair, on p. 300 you then find that there were two hundred sucking pigs, so maybe size was an issue, or tenderness). Sheep were popular, with 140 of them, twelve dozen calves’ feet and six dozen ox feet (which may have been used to make the jellies), four hundred lampreys (a frightening thought - have you ever see a lamprey?), three hundred and fifty pikes, a hundred trout and so on.

Birds are even more terrifying in terms of numbers, even if they had to serve twelve hundred people as the meat list suggests (I’m a keen cook, but not that keen). Various types of chickens alone came to over eighteen hundred, plus four hundred boiling chickens thrown in for broths and stews. A thousand geese. Eight hundred rabbits. Except rabbits aren’t birds - sorry.

The chickens and rabbits help put the luxury food into perspective. There were only forty “cignettes� (which were obviously swans, but I am not prepared to commit on how old they would have been) and four dozen peacocks supplied. They were more for display and for the elite, than for the masses (even the very noble masses) to eat.

The cellar was obviously responsible for the after-dinner wine, as it noted down cloth for hypocras. This means that it had to plan to have enough cloth to step or strain spices. The cellar also listed one quarter of hypocras at 40 shillings, so they brought limited quantities of pre-made hypocras in (which reminds me, I had a rather nice recipe for hypocras on my blog, ages back. You’ll find it here).

While still in the cellar (let’s hope we emerge sober), there were four tuns of red wine. This is sixteen times the quantity of hypocras, which shows that the hypocras was for sipping, not quaffing). There was claret (two tuns), white wine (two tuns) and red wine (one tun). A tun is 2-300 gallons - I can find you an exact measurement if you like, but right now I’m more concerned in pointing out that we’re talking about serious quantities. Maybe there genuinely was no ale served. Maybe there was enough wine to flood the streets with drunkards.

The kitchens also bought wine, presumably for cooking. They bought about a sixteenth of the quantities of the cellar. They were also very specific as to grape types, bringing out from stock both bastard and malvesy. Malvesy is another name for malmesy, which was a strong sweet wine made from the Malvasia grape. Bastard refers to wine made from the Bastardo grape, which is used a lot in modern Portuguese ports.

We can’t know what herbs were used in the kitchen, or establish a complete list of vegetables, because the likelihood is that, if and when used, they would have been local produce and less liable to be documented. At least this assures us that the quantities were not enormous - either that or everyone did without until the stocks were replenished.

Spices are a very different matter. We have exact accounts (p. 297) of what spices were used, because most of them had to be imported and many of them were expensive. Quite a few sweets had to be bought from specialist confectioners, so we have details for them, too.

One big surprise to the modern eye is that the saffron was “of England�. Saffron Walden was a major centre for English saffron trade in the Middle Ages.

Not surprising at all, perhaps, is that the most used spice was pepper (28 lbs). This demonstrates in a practical fashion the absolute falsity of the modern belief that people in the Middle Ages heavily spiced their food to hide decay. If pepper was the predominant spice - and it certainly was for this banquet - then all the spices were used in reasonable proportions by modern standards. Saffron was used more heavily than we would (eight pounds!) and some spices eaten are not ones we automatically put on our spice shelf (grains of paradise, saunders - a form of sandalwood used as a food colouring, powdered aniseed, turnesall - possibly a heliotrope, or sunflower?, long pepper, alkanet - another food colouring) but some spices we associate with the Middle Ages (cubebs, spikenard) are absent.

Sugar is listed as a spice, because it was imported and used in the same way as a spice, as is rice flour, which (like breadcrumbs) was used as a thickener. One hundred and fifty pounds of almonds are also listed - they were used both as a thickening agent and a flavouring agent, with almond milk being used like coconut milk is used in Indonesian cooking today.

Another item that deceptively looks as if it’s missing from the table from its absence on the menu is dairy products. The kitchen had two hundred gallons of milk to cook with, as well as cream, cheese and butter.

Then there are vegetables. Onions made it to the kitchen’s list (p.301), even if they’re absent from the menu. Vegetables were added into dishes where they belonged, rather than being regarded as a separate category. The scullery has more vegetable and herbs vaguely mentioned, so we know that all the root vegetables around then were eaten at the banquet, as were lots of “divers herbes�.

Food at the feast was generally organised by function (ie who was getting it ready) and where it was coming from. If it didn’t need to be paid for, it got short shrift, but if it had to be paid for, then every bit counted. When you see that wine, and vinegar and fruit juices were used as well as spices and onions and herbs and root vegetables, you begin to understand why I suggested in my earlier post that the banquet menu was well-balanced in terms of flavours.

(the information from this paper is from AF Sutton and PW Hammond’s edition “The coronation of Richard III: the Extant Documents 1984. The interpretation however, is all mine.)

food history, Medieval, Richard III, feast, provisioning