Over the centuries both dried and smoked fish became entrenched in Scandinavian food culture. Comparisons made between kitchen equipment that was buried with a woman entombed in Oseberg in Norway in AD 834 and the household recommendations of 1585 by the Swedish count Per Brahe for his wife, show how remarkably little had changed – both in the food eaten and how it was prepared – over the course of seven centuries. The Vikings might have bullied their illiterate way around northern Europe, but without them would you be able to seek respite in a plate of smoked herring in an IKEA food court today?
circa 1070
AUTHOR: Unknown, FROM: The Bayeux Tapestry
Here meat is cooked. And here servants serve the food. Here they dined. And here the Bishop blesses the food and wine.
No written recipes for bread survive from the Middle Ages. So one is left clutching, rather desperately, at some thin and disintegrated ancient straws. One such straw is the (rather well-preserved) Bayeux Tapestry, commissioned, most probably, by the Bishop of Bayeux, William the Conqueror’s half-brother.
At nearly 70 metres long and created in around 1070, it tells the story of the Norman invasion of England which climaxed with the Battle of Hastings in 1066. William, the Duke of Normandy, invaded the country after Saxon lord Harold took the throne on Edward the Confessor’s death. William, meanwhile, reckoned the throne had been promised to him so gathered his army and set sail to lay claim to it.
Musée de la Tapisserie, Bayeux, France / With special authorisation of the city of Bayeux / Giraudon
Detail from the Bayeux Tapestry illustrating William the Conqueror’s first meal on landing in England. A man takes freshly baked bread from the oven in preparation for the feast.
His first meal on landing in England is recorded on the embroidered cloth, which is still stored and preserved in the town of Bayeux in Normandy. The Latin captions which accompany the embroidered images state that meat is cooked and that servants bring in food and wine which are then blessed by William before he and his top men get stuck in. The detail of the meal and its preparation isn’t conveyed in written form, however, but in the images themselves.
Taking a closer look, you can see how the stewards use shields as table tops in their makeshift field kitchen. There’s a portable oven – you can see the flames licking at its base and what might be some steaks cooking on top. And you can also make out some bread, freshly baked, or toasted and clearly too hot to handle. A man uses tongs to take it from the oven, doing this with his right hand and placing it on a tray with his left.
To the left of the oven, soup is being heated in a large cauldron held between two stakes, propped up by a couple of servants. The food then gets passed down the line to William himself, who sits in the middle of the table holding a bowl. A man to his right blows some kind of horn – a little music to help the feast go with a swing – while some small birds, quails possibly, roasted on skewers, are also on their way to the top table.
Wine is served too and that freshly cooked bread. As well as what could be griddle cakes – in the earliest recorded recipe for them, from the fifteenth century, these are flavoured with saffron, rolled out thinly and shaped into crescents before being cooked on a hot griddle – there are thicker loaves which could well be manchet bread (leavened loaves made with refined stoneground flour).
Another reason why we are pausing in food history to muse over what type of bread might be recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry is because 1066 was a crucial year in the development of the loaf.
The familiar story of bread goes a bit like this. Man, back in the vague mists of time, discovers that flour and water when mixed makes a dough that once baked makes bread. At some point yeast gets added, possibly naturally or by chance. At some point, too, cereals begin to be cultivated for bread and the resulting grains harvested and ground. The grinding of grain is mechanised around 2,500 years ago when hand-rotating querns appear in Spain. Then the Romans start building mills, driven by wind and water, and by 1086 there are around 6,000 in Britain, as recorded in the Domesday Book.
By the seventeenth century, the baking industry is booming but, in London, it suffers a setback when a fire that starts in a bakery in Pudding Lane destroys much of the city and virtually its entire baking industry. The bread story then goes relatively quiet until 1912 when the prototype for a bread-slicing machine is created by an inventor in Iowa, USA. A gap of several decades then ensues before the next big event, in 1961 – a moment that makes bread purists shudder – when a production process that both sped up and lowered the cost of the bread-making is developed, known as the Chorleywood Bread Process.
This version of the story, however, misses out a key development, that of the hair sieve. It seems that the device – a sieve with a mesh of woven hair (usually a horse’s) – had been around for some time but didn’t make its way into general use in England until 1066, after which it is frequently mentioned. Previously and subsequently too, some people sifted, or ‘bolted’, their flour through woollen or linen cloth instead, but it was the hair sieve that, together with the Battle of Hastings, helped bring the country out of the Dark Ages. Just as the seizing of the English throne by William of Normandy marked a significant period in English history, so the proliferation of the hair sieve marked a significant moment in its own way, one that you could call WFL, or White Fluffy Loaf. Hence there is the period BWFL (Before White Fluffy Loaf) and AWFL (After White Fluffy Loaf).
Flour shaken through the sieve, sifting out the bran, could then be used to make what was regarded as a purer, cleaner, lighter – sacramental, even – loaf. Some ascribed to it almost magical properties. The hair sieve was a giant leap forward, both culinarily and socially, for it meant that bread could become a status symbol. In Tudor times the kind of bread you ate reflected your class. The nobility ate white manchets, tradesmen tucked into wheaten cobs and the poor consumed loaves of bran. The Tudor aristocrat could thus impress visitors with his white loaf in much the same way that his social equivalent today might brandish an iPad.
In monasteries the canons (the religious elite) ate white bread, while the lower orders and servants got small brown loaves, for white bread was accorded religious as well as social status. Loaves used in holy communion were stamped with a cross and called ‘pandemains’, from panis domini (the sacramental bread or ‘bread of the Lord’), and even today the bread of the sacrament, or communion wafer, is white.
Although the poor were never meant to get their grubby hands on the stuff, they would have managed to get a taste of it. Perhaps a few hung around the back doors of manor-house kitchens, hoping for scraps. We can imagine a humble peasant grabbing a morsel of white bread and stuffing it into his mouth. Imagine how it would have tasted – the gently risen and baked dough, soft on the tongue, almost melting in the mouth – and how that would have compared to the usual tooth-breaking (if you had any teeth) brown stuff.
But as the elite showed the way, so the rest followed. The making of white loaves in the eleventh century increased steadily and continued progressively over the centuries that followed. Bakeries tended to split into those who provided bread for the poor – brown, coarse, crunchy – and those who baked white loaves - airy, fluffy, melt-in-the-mouth. By the late sixteenth century there were twice the number of white-than brown-bread bakers. And it is from this latter period that one of the first printed recipies for manchet bread dates, published in The Goode Huswife’s Handmaide for the Kitchin of 1588:
Take half a bushel of fine flower twise boulted [sifted], and a gallon of faire luke warm water, almost a handful of white salt, and almost a pinte of yest, then temper