Teaching Medieval Food
Last night was the Food History class.
We had a fine time. I thought it was just me who thought so, but one of my students is a blogger and is all kinds of starry-eyed about it.
Last night was all about the Middle Ages. I had them classify ingredients for quite a chunk of the time. They tasted spices (long pepper and sumac and cubebs and grains of paradise) and looked at recipe collections and worked out what spices went into what sort of recipes (using the sachets of spices I use for such purposes, so they could see the basic spice mixes laid out on the table). Then we talked about the implications of these ingredients and others for trade and for culture and of society. We discussed the impact of the Crusades (and I got to tell my Richard I sugar cane story and make rude comments about Godefroi de Bouillon, who I tend to call Mr Soup) and how ships travelled and where the major international ports were. We talked about Charlemagne and how many of what sort of surviving recipe books there are and what the implications of those books are for our knowledge of food. Oh, and archaeology and how it can really, really improve our knowledge of foodways. We discussed the relationship of diet with culture and what records preserve it and what limitations these records have.
Two students brought in dishes from our course manual so that everyone could taste a bit of Medieval food. We looked at medlars (of course) and sorted out our June excursion. And next week we get to do it all again!!
food hsitory, teaching Medieval food, Middle Ages, grains of paradise, sumac, sugarcane, Godefroi de Bouillon, cubebs, long pepper
June 12th, 2007 at 6:35 am
[...] is that we have two perspectives on the same class. Professor Gillian Polack writes about Teaching Medieval Food and one of her students blogs Tonight I went to Food School. Turns out they both adored the [...]
June 12th, 2007 at 6:37 am
I’m happy to say your post was featured in today’s edition of the Simply Delightful! Carnival! http://treehousejukebox.wordpress.com/2007/06/12/simply-delightful-carnival-2/
November 13th, 2007 at 7:11 am
[...] teaching about food in London in the Middle Ages. It’s the first time in a while. Last time I taught Medieval food it was during my food history course, and I ranged a lot further than [...]