I gather from our fantasy movies that are roughly Medieval in setting that people think the Medievals were inclined to nothing but roasted meat -- spiced with salt if anything -- bread and beer. Fancy people preferred wine, but otherwise just ate better versions of the same thing: salt and pepper, white bread instead of brown. It was a simple time, rustic and basic.
Yet in fact:
...it is certainly quite odd by modern culinary lights to cook a capon in red wine, cut it up, and then fry the pieces before serving them with the cooking broth reduced to a sauce flavored with spices, thickened with the liver and white meat pounded into a paste and with powdered almonds. Like other similar dishes, this one (Brouet of Capon, recipe 35) is a harmonious composition, where the flavor and texture of the meat itself are mingled with the aroma and savor of a vivid sauce, making a unified impression as the dish gives the tongue a momentary surprise with its supple crispness.... We confess that we have lost both the desire for such culinary intricacy and the very notion of it, and that it is no longer of interest. Yet as historians... it is our job to highlight the gap between today's gastronomic system and that which informed medieval culinary practices.
-Redon, Sabban & Serventi, trans. Edward Schneider, The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 22.
The use of advanced pre-cooking techniques to create flavor and differentiate texture is not wholly lost. When describing how to create a venison braise, for example, I advised browning the meat, then the vegetables in the grease used to brown the meat, then assembling them together and braising them to get a richer flavor than you would get from just putting it all in the pot with liquid alone. There are still some modern recipes with pre-cooking stages, some of which use fire as did the Medieval ones.
It is much less common, though. We tend to give our recipes variety by changing the ingredients instead: for lunch we will have venison, last night roast beef, perhaps chicken for dinner. At a time when there was less variety of ingredients and more time to devote to the exercise of cooking in the kitchen, these more sophisticated approaches made more sense.
In any case our ancestors were much different from how we often imagine them as a culture. They were smarter, more sophisticated, and rather wiser than we often give them credit for having been.
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This was something I really enjoyed about the BBC series Tudor Monastery Farm, as well as their Secrets of the Castle to a lesser degree. Ruth Goodman is a historian who specializes in Tudor domestic life and she prepares a number of recipes, including preparing the boar's head for the Christmas feast. She also shows the process of brewing ale during that time as well.
In my Italian class, we are reading a brief chapter on the Italian Medieval kitchen. Fruits, soups, blancmange (including milk and cheese dishes), red meats, sweets; herbs and spices, imported and local; bread and wine (straight or flavored with fruits and/or spices). Plus the use of fish, rich vegetables, and almond milk on the fast days. A far cry from the image of a table which features just hunks of meat and flagons of ale.
They were smarter, more sophisticated, and rather wiser than we often give them credit for having been.
There you go, destroying the Myth of "Progress" again.
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