And thus another great tome appears, listing colossal feasts in all their vulgar detail. Except this one was different. Chiquart was a party planner: he doesn’t just say ‘fetch 400 oxen and serve them with a parsley sauce’. He tells you how; he is big on logistics. While it’s true to say, on the minutiae of recipes, we’re not yet into the era of providing cooking times and temperatures, he does actually give quantities – 6 pounds of this herb, 8 pounds of that. Which is a revolution when you consider the vagaries of what went before. He was a more practical recipe writer than his predecessors and had an eye for the bigger picture.
Meanwhile, his boss the Duke of Savoy, also known as Amadeus VIII, was a serial schmoozer. He mixed in the highest social and religious circles and had married the daughter of the Duke of Burgundy, said to be the wealthiest and most powerful man in Europe. It was Chiquart’s job to feed Amadeus’s friends and contacts and feed them well, which he did. Indeed, so impressed was his employer that (as with previous master cooks across the world) he persuaded him to record his knowledge of cooking, and the planning of it, for posterity.
Chiquart dictated the work and it has lasted in its long, lugubrious, detailed and fabulously un-subbed entirety. There is, for example, a recipe for Parma tarts. It’s a big dish. The recipe itself consists of one long paragraph of 1,415 words. One can almost picture Chiquart, the ageing, self-glorifying and rather vain chef, reclining on his chaise-longue dictating the recipe to a cowering minion. ‘Again, Parma tarts,’ he starts with an air of nonchalance, ‘for the said Parma tarts which are ordered to be made, to give you understanding, take three or four large pigs and, if the feast should be larger than I think, let one take more.’
This is a recipe that you should definitely not try at home. The ingredients, in addition to the four large pigs, include 300 pigeons, 200 baby chickens, 100 capons and 600 small birds, although the object of the exercise is actually a very large quantity of small tarts filled with a spicy, herby mixture of the above animals and birds. The presentation of the dish ends with a flourish: ‘And when one serves it,’ declares Chiquart, ‘let on each tart be put a little banner with the arms of each lord who is served these Parma tarts.’
Before Chiquart gets stuck into delivering his party-planning advice, he devotes some time to flattering his boss. This must be one of the most oleaginous genuflections in history. He prostrates himself in front of his patron. ‘To you, the very high, very renowned, and very powerful prince and lord, Monseigneur Ayme, first duke of Savoy, honour and reverence, with the prompt desire to obey your commands, I offer my very humble and devoted respects,’ he begins, before uttering that he is ‘no more than the least of your humble subjects’. He continues: ‘I have a low standing and know and have learned too little because through ignorance and negligence I have never sufficiently improved my understanding.’ This, then, is the introduction to a work that was written onto 236 folio pages, including recipes totalling around 35,000 words – some were, as with his Parma tarts, long, overbearing, unwieldy and rambling.
As humble as he was to his master, he was surely harsh to those who worked for him in order to achieve such spectacular results. And his false modesty cannot disguise his formidable talent for organisation. A feast lasting for two days needs four months of planning, he says. Having detailed, at great length, exactly the dishes to be presented for a wedding party, he then considers what might happen if the event has to take place during a religious period – if, for example, there are limitations on what fish, meat or dairy products you can serve. He then goes through the entire menu substituting ingredients with those that would be acceptable. He provides detailed lists of exactly the number of utensils needed for catering a big do; he says how much firewood and charcoal might be needed, and he reminds the reader to make sure there’s plenty of money to pay for everything:
And so that the workers are not idle, and so that they do not lack for anything, there should be delivered funds in great abundance to the said kitchen masters to get salt, pot-vegetables and other necessary things which might be needed, which do not occur to me at present.
Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal Paris / Kharbine-Tapabor / Coll. Jean Vigne
Medieval banquets were large and sumptuous affairs, sometimes lasting for a couple of days.
He reminds cooks to invest in enough candles and how to prepare a meal in a kitchen other than your own. He was more than able to plan a Chiquart Amiczo pop-up supper club at the castle of a friend of the duke, for instance. He was mindful too of how visiting nobles brought their own servants. They were not just to be welcomed but afforded every bit of help: ‘quickly, amply, in great abundance and promptly [supply] everything for which he asks’.
As for the crockery and cutlery (part of the instructions that constitutes this chapter’s ‘recipe’), 4,000 plates of gold, silver, pewter and wood suggests there was quite a party planned, not to mention a record-breaking amount of washing up. Today’s party planners to the rich and famous don’t know they’re born …
1440
AUTHOR: Unknown, FROM: Boke of Kokery
Take and pike faire musculis, And cast hem in a potte; and caste hem to, myced oynons, And a good quantite of peper and wyne, And a lite vynegre; And assone as thei bigynnet to gape, take hem from þe fire, and serue hit forthe with the same brot in a diss al hote.
The year 1440. Work begins on the Pazzi Chapel in Florence designed by the Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi. German craftsman Johann Gutenberg of Mainz develops a method of printing using movable metal type. Itzcoatl, Aztec ruler of Tenochtitlan, dies and is succeeded by Montezuma I. In England, Eton College is founded by Henry VI and a Boke of Kokery is published with a recipe for custard.
Actually there are two recipes for custard in this boke, and yes, whoever wrote it – and the author is not known – was into a kind of free-spelling vibe. After all, this was a time when spelling had yet to be standardised and as long as one was consistent – give or take the odd word within an actual document – that was OK. Owning a book was impressive enough, so any strange spelling was small beer.
Most chefs still cooked from memory and that cookery books were so rare indicates that recipes must have been a jealously guarded secret. This particular Boke of Kokery includes 182 of them. They’re all handwritten of course – the first printed book in English didn’t appear until 1473 – and the script takes quite a bit of getting used to. When you look at it, the language seems pretty obscure. In addition to the freestyle spelling of otherwise familiar English words, there are colloquial forms of French: the word ‘let’ is used in place of lait for ‘milk’, for instance, and ‘fryit’ for froid, meaning ‘cold’. But when read out loud, the sentences start to make sense. You can almost hear the strange accent they must have been uttered in. A recipe for green sauce – ‘sauce verte’ – instructs you to take some herbs and ‘grinde hem smale; And take faire brede, and stepe it in vinegre, and draw it thoug a stregnour’. Recite the words in an affected, effete voice and you can almost picture the fellow wafting a handkerchief and demanding that you draw the mixture through a strainer.
(MS 4016 f.5 verso)
Cookery books were rare in 1440 as most chefs cooked from memory but the Boke of Kokery contains 182 handwritten recipes, including one for custard.
This doesn’t, however, prepare you for the shock of what the author