One recipe for custard begins: ‘Take Vele and smyte hit in litull peces, and wass it clene.’ The rinsed and chopped-up veal is then boiled with herbs, including parsley and sage, and wine is added. The mixture is then left to cool and strained egg whites and yolks are added to thicken the broth. The mixture is then poured into a pastry case (that’s right, a coffin) along with chopped dates and prunes and powdered ginger scattered on top.
A recipe for ‘custard lumbarde’ (Lombardy custard), meanwhile, more resembles a fruity custard tart, again baked in a large pie. It’s made with cream, egg yolk, herbs and dates. Almond cream and sugar are then poured on top before serving. This type of dish was also known as ‘crustarde’, which, given that it refers to pastry, might suggest where the word ‘crust’ comes from.
If these custard recipes do little for you, then one for another concoction is no less offputting, beginning as it does: ‘Take some garbage …’ This was not an instruction to the servants to put the bins out, however, but a reference to giblets or offal. No doubt the word ‘garbage’ then developed as a response to those who felt these parts of the animal should be discarded.
Critics of the Boke on Kokery have said that it works more as a reference book for servants, indicating which ingredients they should have ready for the kitchen and how to chop particular kinds of meat. There is also a section advising kitchen staff on storing food properly, although this is less to do with preserving it and more with putting it somewhere where it wouldn’t be stolen. After all, meat, herbs and spices were still the domain of the rich.
But since most servants would not have had the benefit of an education, it seems unlikely that they would have been able to read such instructions. Furthermore, given the luxury that possession of this book would have involved, the tome was probably a cherished volume kept well away from the splashes and mess of a kitchen. But wherever it was stored, and there were no oily stains or flour marks on the copy I saw, what the book does have is an excellent recipe for mussels, hence their being championed here.
What a pleasure it is to see them cooked unadulterated, without lashings of cream, but prepared simply and quickly. Aside from the addition of vinegar and the lack of garlic, you can’t go wrong. The author should also be congratulated for the last line of the recipe. After all, how many times have you eaten in a restaurant and felt irritated because you were not given ‘a diss al hote’. Serving hot food on hot dishes is vital and for that reason alone, the Boke of Kokery deserves its place in history.
circa 1450
AUTHOR: Unknown, FROM: Harleian Manuscript 4016, British Museum
Take nessh chese, and pare it clene, and grinde hit in a morter small, and drawe yolkes and white of egges thorgh streynour, and cast there-to, and grinde hem togidre; then cast thereto Sugur, butter and salt, and put al togidre in a coffin of faire past, And lete bake ynowe, and serue it forthe.
Don’t get too hung up on what might or might not constitute ‘nessh’ cheese – your idea of a nice cheese possibly being rather different to mine. The author of this recipe for a cheese tart is in fact instructing you to use a ‘mild’ cheese. So, if attempting it today, you might try Gouda, for example. And while I’m at it, you’ll then need to ‘pare it clene’ (take off any rind or mouldy bits), ‘grinde hem togidre’ (whizz the ingredients up in a blender), ‘then cast … al togidre in a coffyn of faire paast’ (pour it into a pre-baked pastry case) and bake ‘ynowe’ (enough) or at any rate for 35 minutes in an oven preheated to 200°C (400°F).
Straightforward and delicious, this recipe comes from a fifteenth-century manuscript that rests today in the British Museum. It is one of a number of recipes from manuscripts owned at various points by Elizabeth I and the Earl of Oxford, collected together and published for the first time in 1888 as Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery-Books. Although it appears that the editor of the book, one Thomas Austin, did not quite have the stomach for what he was transcribing. ‘Many of the recipes which are given here would astonish a modern cook,’ he wrote. ‘Our forefathers, possibly from having stronger stomachs, fortified by outdoor life, evidently liked their dishes strongly seasoned and piquant.’
Austin clearly recoiled from the endless tossing of large quantities of pepper, ginger, cloves, garlic, cinnamon and vinegar into almost everything. Not to mention lashings of wine and ale. ‘Such ingredients,’ he wrote, ‘appear constantly where we should little expect them.’ Then again he was living in the Victorian age when, the extravagance of flavour was frowned upon.
The cheese tart recipe, however, would have seemed less outrageous and it is one of many that uses milk or a derivative of it. (It is worth noting, however, that nothing is employed more constantly than almond milk – made by steeping ground almonds in hot water then straining – which was used in cooking everything from salmon to pork.)
Milk was a common ingredient for most during the medieval period, with your average peasant keeping a couple of cows on common land. Healthy, flavoursome and versatile, it would have helped to bridge the hunger gap as stores from the previous year’s harvest diminished and the first crops of the new year were still to appear. Of course the downside of milk is that it goes off very quickly, particularly in the warmer months. So milk’s separation, on heating, into solid curds, which could provide a staple part of a poor man’s diet, and whey – a refreshing drink – gave it valuable longevity. The curds themselves could then be turned into a simple cheese by being wrapped in a cloth and then hung up to allow any remaining liquid to drain away.
But by the fifteenth century, cheese-making had become considerably more advanced, right across Europe. While the cheese mentioned in early English manuscripts isn’t brand specific, we do know that there was a wide range. English pasture was excellent and the cheeses were delicious and highly varied – there was even one a bit like Parmesan.
This we know because of one man: a cheese-obsessed physician from Italy called Pantaleone da Confienza. Pantaleone travelled around Europe tasting and thinking about cheese and then he wrote a book about it. The reason we know that he took his mission seriously lies in the book’s name. He didn’t just call it ‘A Guide to Cheese’. Summa Lacticiniorum means ‘Compendium of Milk Products’ – not a very sexy title, but it harks back to another Summa book, the heavy-weight Summa Theologica (‘Compendium of Theology’) by Thomas Aquinas.
Many people reckon that Aquinas’s book is one of the most influential pieces of Western literature, a classic in the history of philosophy. Even during Pantaleone’s time it was regarded as the seminal work on the subject. Many just called it Summa. But then, 200 years later, came another Summa, except this one wasn’t about the existence of God, or man’s purpose; it was about cheese.
Now I’ll leave it to others to discuss which is more important, eternal law or where to find a nice Cheddar, but Summa Lacticiniorum was undoubtedly ground-breaking in its own way. Until its publication in 1477 there had been recipe books, a growing number of them – some more useful than others, as we have discovered. Cooking methods were described, ingredients were championed in passing, but no one had ever written a whole book about one single foodstuff.
No one, that is, until Pantaleone travelled across Europe on a serious cheesy mission. As