Food History

The Carnival of the Recipes this week is all about people who hate to cook or can’t cook. It doesn’t matter how much you hate cooking, you still need to eat, so when I saw the topic, it made me think.

It struck me that some common assumptions about food history are a tad unfair to those who genuinely lack an affinity for cooking. The rich might have had servants, but what did an ordinary person do? Cooking could be hard labour prior to modern equipment and it’s frightening to think of hours of daily effort to produce something you really didn’t enjoy creating or care about eating.

There have always been alternatives to cooking in the big cities. We know this about societies from Medieval Londons to Ancient Rome.

There’s a heap of evidence for takeaway pies sold round London Bridge (I think we’re talking about the bridge in Arizona and its predecessors, not any of the bridges currently spanning the Thames - I don’t know if the tourist services there sell meat pies or just give rides on red doubledeckers) and for food joints that flirted with the fire authorities in the Middle Ages. Think of it, the need for no-cook meals led to great fires of London.

Paris was as well off as Rome and London from at least the twelfth century. A function of big cities has always been a population that didn’t have a household fire (due to poverty or sub-renting), or couldn’t cook, or was itinerant. You can still buy full meals at the Paris street markets, and there is a lovely set of Paris street cries from the thirteenth century.

You can read about the street cries here. They’re in a poem by Guillaume de la Villeneuve, with a modern French translation. No modern English translation. Some of the foods mentioned as having their own street cries are waffles, salted meat, honey, hot pureed peas, lots of lovely salad vegetables all fresh and crispy, cheese from Champagne and Brie, butter, deliciously ripe fruit, pate, dried fruit and nuts, cake, hot Breton pancakes, bread, good strong wine. Enough for a feast. Enough to save a non-cook with money from any kind of hunger.

In the home, there were failproof recipes too. The famous Sephardic baked egg may have originated as completely foolproof food for the religiously compliant non-cook.

Baked egg

Just place an egg (with its shell still on) in warm ashes and go away and do other things. The resulting egg has a gorgeous texture and the only skill required is cracking it open once it has sat long enough and maybe finding some salt to eat with it.