Meat and Status. an Historical Look at Meat in the English Diet
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Meat and status. An historical look at meat in the English diet. R. Fitch. Historic Royal Palaces Apt. 57 Hampton Court Palace. East Molesey. Surrey. KT8 9AU Page 1 of 26 Abstract. Rarely does a subject strike a chord with the general public in the way that the study of food history has. This extremely popular topic has the advantage of including themes and subjects as common to us today as they were to people in the past; food, kitchens, cookery and recipes all resonate through the ages and now more people are looking to the past in order to guide them in their food consumption today. Yet it would also be true to say that few subjects have as many persistently held myths attached to them as food history seems to, whether it is the assumption that our forebears used spices to cover the taste of rotting meat or that Henry VIII’s meals were a veritable food fight, people are happy that they know the ‘facts’ and are often shocked to find out the actual truth of our culinary history. Popular culture, such as poorly researched television programmes and movies, repeat these myths over and over, but just as frequently we find the accepted works on the subject adding their own myths to the popular mix; meat was the preserve of the wealthy whilst vegetables were the foodstuff of the poor and that surviving recipes are representative of the foods served on a regular basis to the higher levels of society, but are they actually true? They are often presented with little or no corroborating evidence and given the current vogue for the presentation of live historic cookery demonstrations across the country, these facts are being passed on to thousands of people all of whom are keen to see if they can learn something about the food that they eat by looking at food from the past. At a time when the consumption of meat is considered in some circles to be unfashionable, this paper aims to present a balanced view of meat on the historical table. Throughout, I shall concentrate on evidence from the late medieval and early post medieval periods as these are the periods most associated both with the origins of ‘English’ food and many of these food myths. Wages and costs are expressed in their pre decimal form of pounds, shillings and pence as there is no simple relationship between the two currency systems which would enable the conversion to modern decimal amounts. Page 2 of 26 The study and presentation of food history has blossomed over the last twenty years or so, moving from small scale amateur studies in private kitchens resulting in intense publications scrutinised by a handful of people, to large scale live interpretations of historically re- presented kitchens enjoyed by thousands. Along the way, the academic scrutiny applied in the study of food history has improved and encompassed many other academic and scientific disciplines, leading to a wealth of publications suitable for all levels of public consumption from casually interested amateur, through professional chefs to leading academics. Throughout the studies of food there are, in my view, three main resources available from which to obtain information which in turn can lead to a fourth more practical application which itself feeds back into the research loop; these are: The study of surviving period recipes, either in their manuscript form as is the case with the history of early medieval English food, or in the later printed books that start to emerge from the start of the sixteenth century and rapidly increase in numbers as we get closer to the present day. The study of other food related documentation that is not specifically recipe related such as account books from domestic, college, monastic or Royal households, customs accounts detailing levels of import and export, letters and diary entries that refer to meals or food stuffs etc. The study of food in art. These three main areas can lead to the practical reconstruction of dishes from the past, the cooking and consumption of which can open more avenues of research, clarify confusion in texts or explain what is actually being shown in art from the period. It is, however, my contentions that these three research areas have in the past been treated completely separately and in fact are treated as the preserves of three disparate groups of academics; Food Historians, Economic Historians and Art Historians, each working rigorously in their own fields but with scant reference to the other two! I believe that in order to gain an accurate view of the place that meat has had in the English diet we need to treat the sources in a much more holistic way than has been the case in the past, this is most especially true as a Food Historian in terms of the use of historic recipes as evidence for food in our past. Recipes as evidence. Food Historians have for many years concentrated on surviving recipes, almost to the exclusion of all other evidence with the reasoning for this focus being that recipes surviving from a given period are the best evidence for the food that was known about at that time. I believe that this recipe centred research is faulty and clouds our view of food from the past for four main reasons. Firstly, using recipes as evidence for commonly prepared foods is an extremely over simplified argument and one that is the equivalent of saying that modern recipe books are representative of the food consumed in Britain today. This argument is made more tenuous when we learn that when looking at the beginnings of English cookery from the mid fourteenth to mid sixteenth centuries no more than a dozen Page 3 of 26 English language recipe collections survive, with only two of those in the form of books published in the period and in one of those cases only a single copy is known to exist. That, in my opinion, is akin to stating that Delia Smith’s “Complete Cookery Course” represents British cuisine for the whole of the twentieth century; something that is patently untrue. Secondly, some Food Historians are happy to use a recipe collection published at a known date to be representative of recipes commonly in use for earlier periods, specifically when discussing the earliest periods of English cookery. The reasoning used to justify this is that unlike today when recipe book authors who are also cooks tend to write and publish whilst still practicing their chosen craft, in the past books tended to be written by cooks who had reached the end of their active career. The logic goes that the recipes published were those used by the cooks during their working life and are therefore representative of a period earlier than the publication date, in one case this argument has been used to retrospectively extend the use of period recipes by over a hundred years as the cookery book author would have been “trained under those who had learned in an earlier tradition therefore it is likely that a number of his recipes came from that earlier period”! Whilst there is undoubtedly evidence of a traditional and evolutionary aspect to some recipes, this argument is, I believe, simply based on the convenience of having surviving recipes from later periods and applying them to periods where little information survives. Whilst it is possible to show that recipe collections that span large periods in time contain ostensibly similar looking recipes, this broad similarity is not an excuse to assume that all of the recipes must simply date from the earlier period. The third problem connected with the study of surviving recipes is the extremely scholarly nature of the published interpretations that we already have to work with. Given any other academic field, publications on a historical document would be read and critiqued and if need be rebuttals published and possibly a healthy academic dialogue entered into, this has not been the case with the major works on early English food. The published ‘standards’ are held, rightly in high esteem, yet this esteem seems to go one stage further with an implicit assumption that these studies are all that is required and any other work on the subject of food need not look at the recipes again. This attitude is, I believe, due to the nature of the origins of the studies into food history, which began as an amateur affair based on the actual cooking of recipes from the past in peoples home kitchens. It is only recently that these amateur attempts at creating dishes from the past simply for the sake of interest have started to be shaped into a more academic field. The prominent works that study early recipes were published primarily in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were much more studies into the linguistics of the recipes than the actual food they represented. These works have then been used as the basis of the majority of study in food history simply because they happen to be collections of early recipes and it is, I believe, the amateur origins of this field that have lead to these recipe collections becoming considered above criticism, rather than treating them for what they actually are. These amateur origins are, I believe, to blame for much of the mythology that surrounds the early English diet, a mythology based on misunderstanding of the sources used and a lack of corroborative or substantiating work that could have also been done on other evidence associated with food but not directly recipe based.