After being forced to scroll past dozens of nearly identical, overly sappy stories on various food blogs in order to reach anything relevant about the recipe, I decided to go old school and instead picked up a cookbook from the fourteenth century. Well, that’s not the real reason I decided to read The Forme of Cury, considered the first English language cookbook and written in Middle English for the court of Richard II, but the amusing part is how little anyone who knows me would be surprised if it were true. In reality, this book was referenced in The History of English podcast, and I was intrigued enough to find a copy and wade through mostly untranslated Middle English grammar and vocabulary.
Though I read it straight through, this falls into the same esoteric category of ancient works as Kaogong Ji and Pythagoras’s golden verses. It’s more interesting from historical and research perspectives than it is from a reading perspective, since it is almost entirely a book of barebones recipes, without the narrative trappings of more modern incarnations of the genre. Stroud explores it quite extensively from linguistic and cultural perspectives in his episodes on the subject, so I will not be rehashing those insights here, save to say it adds an additional level of understanding to validate another scholar’s conclusions by direct assessment of the source material.
Another text I found to be in conversation with this one (it may even have been referenced in it) is The Healing Hand. The line between cuisine and medicine is often a difficult one to draw throughout history, and especially in this region while the theory of the humors dominated, assuming it can or should be drawn at all. Since medicine was so dependent upon the balancing of the humors, the humors associated with a dish were considered central to treatment of various ailments. Nor is the theory of humors the only ancient medical practice which emphasized diet; the Greeks and Romans both had several unique theories of medicine which leveraged diet as both cause and cure for various ailments, as did the ancient Indians, Chinese…I could probably save time by attempting to list the cultures which didn’t have a strong observed connection between cuisine and cures. This should not be surprising, considering the intimate relationship which is known through today to exist between our health and what we consume. Today we disguise such knowledge behind semiscientific* claims about the gut microbiome and the neurodigestive connection, but the tradition of health manipulation through food remains robust.
*By semiscientific, I do not mean to cast my skepticism on the robust body of peer reviewed scientific research on the importance and impact of the human microbiome, the strong biochemical connections between the brain and the digestive system, or the compelling evidence for the high holistic impact of diet on health. Rather, that “semi” modifier is for the largely untested and unproven claims made by most food or drink products which are marketed as “probiotic,” “metabolism boosting,” etc. It’s not that there’s nothing to such claims, but they are usually overstated, sometimes nonsensical, and never properly validated in an experimental setting against a placebo standard.
The Forme of Cury‘s recipes are akin to my recipes in that they are reluctant to provide anything like a definite, measurable quantity of any ingredient. Occasionally it provides measurements like “handful,” but usually it will simply say to add a “large” amount or some similar, subjective description. Nor are there times, detailed instructions, or other amplifying information we might associate with more recent recipes, or even with the recipes captured in some older cookbooks, like the famous Roman Apicius. Rather, the book reads more like a reference book for someone already somewhat familiar with the cooking style and techniques involved. You probably won’t be able to exactly replicate any of the recipes, but they might still provide some inspiration for your own cooking.
I thought a lot about Impressions while I was reading this book. Food forms a key element throughout the story, and I made a deliberate effort when I wrote it to ensure the foods I presented used ingredients appropriate to the biomes I showed, and to employ techniques appropriate to the roughly equivalent time period. However, the cuisine presented in The Forme of Cury is decidedly less complex (and, for the most part, less appetizing) than the cuisine Raven and his family share, or the general culinary expectations of the society in which they live. Almost everything in The Forme of Cury is a soup, stew, pottage, porridge, or other mostly liquid form of food. Now, I eat plenty soups and stews myself – I make some kind of vegetable soup or stew almost every week during the cooler months – but it’s hardly the height of culinary experience. So, in my historically adjacent fantasy novel in which I make a conscious effort to be somewhat true to the equivalent Earth historical contexts, do I need to make an adjustment to the food? I’m leaning towards no, but I’ll continue thinking about it.
That this text is in Middle English does not make for easy reading, though I found it more approachable than I expected, thanks in no small part to what I’ve learned from The History of English podcast. Middle English is not quite an entirely different language, but it is also not simply another dialect of English or an older style of the language. Scholars aren’t certain of the meaning of all the terms in The Forme of Cury because they’ve fallen out of use and have no translation into modern English. Reading it is somewhere between reading an older style of modern English and trying to read French based only on an English knowledge of Greek and Latin root words. The best trick I’ve found for successfully interpreting Middle English is to attempt to read it aloud (either actually aloud, or phonetically pronouncing the words in your head). Since spelling was almost entirely phonetic, that should get you close, although the drifting of pronunciations over time complicates matters.
You probably shouldn’t just sit down and read The Forme of Cury, as I did, and it probably won’t mean much to you out of context even if you happen to be fluent in Middle English. However, if you have an interest in the history of food or the history of language, whether that interest is born from a story you’re writing, scholarship you’re pursuing, or general polymathic tendencies, it’s worth finding a copy. You can read a version with a forward and some footnotes by Pagge from the eighteenth century for free on Project Gutenberg.
IGC Publishing 