Gone Medieval - How to Cook Like a Medieval Chef

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

Preparing, serving and sharing food has always played a critical role in human history. But what did people in the Middle Ages like to eat and what did their food say about their social status? What was the haute cuisine of medieval Bagdad or Moorish Spain? Victoria Flexner and Jay Reifel have recreated classic dishes for their book, A History of the World in 10 Dinners: 2,000 Years, 100 Recipes, allowing modern-day cooks of all abilities to try out meals that were created and enjoyed hundreds of years ago. So if you fancy blending spices from the Silk Road, juggling indigenous ingredients of the Americas, or sewing together a terrifying cockentrice - half pig, half chicken - then this episode, in which Matt Lewis finds out more from Victoria and Jay, will have you salivating and eager to try out the recipes for yourself.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. It's no secret that I like my food. So the chance to combine stories from history with stories of food was just too good for me to pass up. A history of the world in 10 dinners, 2,000 years and 100 recipes is the fantastic and delicious looking book by Victoria Flexner and Jay Rifle. It mixes stop-offs at key moments from history that took place at dinner tables with authentic recipes that you can recreate,

bringing the sights and smells of history to your dinner table, and fortunately, only the nice ones. I'm delighted to be joined by Victoria and Jay to explore some of the connections between high politics and the dinner table a little bit further. Welcome to Gone Medieval. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you for having us. It's a pleasure to have you here.

I mean, talking about food is one of my favourite things in the world, so combining talking about food with history, I'm 100% here for this. To start off with, what inspired you? to approach the stories from history through the medium of food. How did this book come about? I think for Jay and I, the study of history is often about this question of representation. So many people have been left out of the historical narrative writ large. And for the large part, we really only have the voices and the experiences of the elite and the winners.

So Jay and I have always been focused on this question. how do we access the lived experiences of people who left nothing behind? And food is really this sensorial way of accessing the past, to eat what was eaten 500 years ago, a thousand years ago by someone to experience the same flavors and smells and even to go through the same cooking preparation. It allows you for a moment to inhabit this sort of shared metaphysical experience with the past. You can be with someone in a very specific moment from a very long time.

ago. And I think that builds connection and understanding. Yeah, I think when you try to connect people with history, when you try to teach history, even when you read history, one of the most difficult things to achieve is that actual sense of immediacy. And there is, I would argue, almost no medium, except maybe music that has the immediacy of sitting down and eating a piece of food. And I think we try to create in a strange way stories with food, an actual narrative surrounding the food that connects you to a moment and a period in the past? And I guess then in that way, history and food complement each other because you're telling stories of moments and the food and the smells and the processes of the food are a part of that story of history as well. Yeah, I think it's precisely that.

The way Victoria and I work, there's a huge amount of back and forth where we actually create these menus together and we think about this in such a way that what is the story of the period that we're trying to tell and then how can you illustrate that with the various dishes? Obviously there's a huge amount of material to work for that we sort through and it's very important sometimes when you're trying to tell the story of people to think what are the various parts that are incredibly important to them, what specific flavors, what grain illustrates a moment in history. I wrote this down as a question and realized that looking at it, it looks like a stupid question. I was going to ask whether food has always been central to history, but given that humans have always eaten, I mean,

that seems like a stupid question now I say it out loud. But from feasts at the top tables from history, right down to everyday street food, to some extent food is what is greasing the wheels of life and of diplomacy and of some of the great moments that we do know about, but also the everyday stuff that we know less well. It's not a stupid question, but food is central to our lives. To some extent, no matter if you're really into food or not, your day is structured around the meals of the day. And so food, these banquets or feasts that you're referencing, perhaps in this bigger sense, a marriage alliance between two different royal houses celebrated with a giant feast or bread broken together to acknowledge a truce at the end of a war,

they provide the sort of backdrop to a lot of huge historical moments all over the world. And I think what's really exciting about some of the recipes that Jay and I have been able to uncover in this period is also to look at some of the more quiet moments of history. What was the average Roman worker perhaps getting for dinner from a food stall on his way home from work? Or what was Lucrezia Borgia eating as she poured over some manuscripts when she was in charge while her father was on a tour of the pap. states. And so we can recognize in food history huge, pivotal moments, but also just everyday life and give a little bit more color and forgive the pun, a little bit more flavor to everyday life as well. I think it's actually more of a brilliant question than you even may realize. When you ask whether food is central to history, you have to think about the fact that something

like black pepper, which is a food stuff, was this incredible economic engine. throughout history, whether it was during the medieval period when it was being brought over land along the Silk Road, or later when you have whole economies, you have whole periods of exploration, like Henry the Navigator from Portugal trying to get to India to get Black Pepper, or something like The Potato, which not just changed workers' lives and people across Europe, but was this massive military innovation because it gave armies too much. more hours of marching per day. So food is central to history and all these other ways you may not immediately think, not just meals, but actually as part of the technology of any period.

I like guests who tell me I'm accidentally brilliant, so you can come again anytime, Jay. I structure my day very much around food in the Hobbit style, I think, and I'm all for second breakfast and elevensies and all of those kinds of things. So the book kind of spans the whole of history, how did you pick the times and the locations and the recipes that you explore in the book in particular? Did they leap out at you or was it a case of having far too many to choose from? Some of them absolutely leaped out of me and I'll say most of those did make it into the book, particularly the more spectacular ones. Yet the real initial limitation is because Victoria and I have always tried to work from actual source materials, from primary source materials,

So actual cookbooks, actual documentation, you're to some extent limited by what is available and what is in translation. Because I think there's 11 languages referenced in the book, and I certainly don't speak most of them. But what you choose is incredibly important. And Victoria and I talked very carefully about being inclusive in what we felt were the most important stories that define history from the past till now. Some are easy. You want to start with the Roman Empire because Episius, first century BCE is your first real cookbook that has a lot of material to work from. Also, the Roman Empire is incredibly important to Europe. But there was other places we felt that was incredibly important to experience something from the African continent. The Ethiopian chapter comes out of that. It was actually one of the more difficult ones to write because there was more limited source material. But if you dig hard enough, you can often find a lot of things you don't know they're there. And you mentioned Baghdad there, that's the area I'd like to focus on. So there are several medieval elements in the book that gone medieval listeners can find out more about and find amazing looking recipes from.

But how did the city of Baghdad emerge as a center of power? And how did that relate to the food that was available in that region? Baghdad was established by the Caliph al-Mansur in the 8th century, after the Umayyad Caliphate, which was based in Damascus, was overthrown by the Abbasid, during the Abbasid Revolution, and Al-Menzor wanted to create a new city for his dynasty. So he chose the location for Baghdad, where actually there was already a small kind of town or village in this location of the Euphrates River. The land was very fertile.

It was well placed on the Euphrates, so it was good for trade and access to surrounding regions. And what was built was really one of the most incredible cities of the medieval world. Baghdad was an epicenter, truly of this sort of geographic region of the world, not just because it was the center of power for the Islamic Caliphate, which of course emerged forth from the deserts of Arabia and conquered huge swaths of the Middle East and Asia and pushing all the way into parts of Europe and North Africa, but also because of its location on this Silk Road, Baghdad was very well placed to be connected to all the trade roots of the Eurasian continent and North Africa and well into Europe as well.

And so as a result, there were products from food products as well as goods from around the known world that were either coming to Baghdad or making their way through Baghdad to somewhere else. And because Baghdad was so diverse, of course, when a diverse group of people settles in one place together, you see that kind of diversity represented in the culinary identity and culture of that city. It was just this perfect storm of well-placed, the seat of a massive empire, and incredibly fertile land, which meant that food grew well, and there was quite an amazing food culture that appeared in Baghdad at this time. Yeah, because I guess having that fertile land and that being part of the reason that it's founded there means they have their own food supply, but they also have a plentiful food supply,

which means you, to some extent, you can have fun with food. It's not just about staples and filling your belly with what's there. It enables a kind of flourishing idea of recipes and culinary expertise and fun with food. Exactly. If there is an abundance of food and different sort of conceptions of food and different flavors, that absolutely creates the atmosphere that would have allowed a degree of creativity in the kitchen, which I'm sure Jay could speak to in more detail. Yeah, I mean, Jay, talk us through some of the food that we might experience in early medieval Baghdad.

Absolutely. First, I would like to underline your point about where Baghdad was in relation to the rest of the world and in relation to medieval Europe. You have to think of the book that a lot of these recipes are drawn from, which is Annals of the Caliph's Kitchen, which is 10th century. And there will be nothing like this book in Europe for at least 500 years, say. I used to like to illustrate this point by actually bringing out this book and saying, hey, there's this book, and dropping it on the table. because this is, even in a modern translation, like a mighty tone, it's a big piece of work. It's hundreds of recipes divided into rational segments with instructions and weights and measures. And this is a period where even two or three hundred years later in Europe, a European cookbook is going to be,

take this and this and cook it and serve it forth. Not the most helpful. No, not at all. Because this was a moment of Baghdad of incredible literacy and science. This is where algebra is being invented. This is where the Greeks are being translated. These recipes are incredibly sophisticated and they're incredibly varied. And the book is actually divided up into segments of sauces and fish and desserts.

They had an amazing sweet culture. When you think of the kind of food that they're eating, it's incredibly diverse. but I would say some of the things that characterized it are, like, every culture has a sauce or a flavor profile that defines it, whether that's ginger and garlic and soy and many Asian cuisines. Medieval Baghdadi cuisine was largely centered on various degrees of sourness, often from dairy products, the juice of unright grapes, so many different vinegars, so many complex vinegar preparations, and a condiment called Muri, which is like a thick soy sauce that is a fermented barley paste that takes months to create, which gave all these dishes that are kind of umami punch, like what I call a bottom note.

Beyond that, it was just incredibly varied and sophisticated. For an example of the level of sophistication, there's an incredible recipe in the book, which is a single fish simultaneously cooked three ways. And this is achieved by, you take a quite large fish, and you wrap the center section of the fish in oil-soaked fabric, and then you place a thin piece of fabric with more oil over the tail. And you put the entire fish in an oven, so the head is roasted, and the center part of the fish is poached, and the tail is fried, all simultaneously. And there are even a much more sophisticated and intense version where actually the fish is stuffed. And this is stuffed in the medieval fashion where that word is often translated as stuffed. But even in Europe, what they usually mean is it's more of a force meat.

You're actually grinding up the whole fish with spices and other things and eggs and this and that. And then you reassemble the entire fish in its skin that's held together by reeds. and then you put the whole thing in the oven with the various wrapping. So it's an incredibly sophisticated design of a recipe. And I guess that plays into the big medieval thing of food as display, isn't it? You're not just eating food here, you're eating it with your eyes, and it's making a statement about the people that are serving it to you as well. Yeah, it's a demonstration of wealth.

Also, there's a lot of similarities here to oak cuisine that you see in restaurants today with test tubes and foams and making something look like something. else that it's not. It's this sort of tombloy cuisine tricks of the eye. And I think that that's quite well represented throughout the book. Certainly in the Tudor chapter, there's a recipe for a cock and thrice, which is the front end of a suckling pig, sewn to the back end of a capen, to create a new mythical beast because Henry VIII was bored of just regular old roast animals being served him. He wanted something new. But yeah, that recipe emerges about 500 years later. So, what was occurring in Baghdad was incredibly advanced in that sense.

And imagine a source like the Annals of the Caliph's Kitchen. If it's that detailed and that rich, it really helps to get us close to an authentic experience of what these people were really tasting and smelling and eating at the time. Yeah, I believe it really does because this was like a fairly prosperous society. So it wasn't just the absolute elites that had access to this. And a lot of the dishes in this are actually incredible. popular dishes. In fact, one of my favorites is a vinegered stew called Sikpajat, which I'm probably mispronouncing, that was just absolutely beloved and was something that could be eaten by

common people and basically anyone. It was so beloved that there's a famous story that when the Caliph had a cooking competition and he said, hey, everyone, cook your favorite dish, the best thing you cook, everybody cooked sick Bajat. And the funny thing is, the punchline, essentially is that no one was surprised that everyone cooked the same thing. Probably my equivalent to that is cheese on toast. I cook cheese on toast all of the time. That's like my go-toe recipe. It's nowhere near as posh or as interesting as that.

But I have my go-toe recipe. Cheese on toast is still very good. I love cheese on toast. Gentlemen, don't get me started on cheese on toast. How easy then is it to genuinely reconstruct a thousand-year-old recipe? Are those ingredients still available? Can we get through the processes with sauces like the annals of the Caliph's kitchen? to really recreate that recipe.

I would say it varies. Of all the thousand-year-old periods, 10th century Baghdad is the easiest, and that is because the book that I'm working from is just so extraordinary. Doing medieval Europe is much harder. There's a ton of scholarship about this, and you can actually reach out to scholars

and read the literature. The most difficult aspect of 10th century Baghdad was actually recreating muri, because I did not have time. to actually, or maybe even the expertise, I know a lot of fermentation nerds, to create the sauce. So I actually worked with a food scientist to theorize what the flavor profile of that condiment would be. And weirdly enough, I actually ended up using as a workaround preparation based around marmite and soy sauce, which is funny in the U.S. because nobody knows what marmite is,

but because it is actually left over from beer leaves, it is a pasty barley flour. ferment, so it's actually quite close to what they would be working with at that period. But beyond that, because the descriptions are so good and the recipes are so clear, you can be pretty sure that what you're eating is actually quite close to what was being eaten in the period. It's incredible. And I love the idea that there's an army of fermentation nerds out there supporting you to recreate these things.

Oh, there are. And part of the Baghdad story as well revolves around some of the poetry of the era. How does that help to demonstrate the relationship that people had with food at the time? The poetry in the analysis of the Caleb's Kitchen is just wonderful. We have a little sidebar in the book that talks about some of the poetry. But also, like, how wonderful to have poetry interspersed throughout recipes in a cookbook. Jay, you have a favorite one about asparagus, and there's quite a few about eggplant as well, right? Yeah, it goes again to just the level of what this cookbook is.

Maybe in the last century you start to see cookbooks and they have little stories of them and they have fun little intros and our book has fun little intros to the recipe. But I think poetry is still actually much more valued in the Islamic world today than it is in the West. To return to a dish like Sikpajat, which was this incredibly popular vinegar stew, this was usually served surrounded by many garnishes and sub-dishes and it could be one single meal that just took up a whole feast taste. It was huge. And instead of saying, it's a giant sprawling thing, it is described as a jeweled scabbard, which is like what you would not see in anything in the West for ages. And it was something like eggplant, which is interesting because people originally thought it was poisonous, and then they came around on it. And the recipe is followed by a poem that describes it as like a lover whose love I won with a taste, like saliva, a generous lover.

freely offers, a pearl in black gown with an emerald set from which a stem extends. That's just amazing that you get to experience that. I don't know. I think it's so cool. And what then does each chapter of the medieval sections of the book say, as you mentioned, it covers Baghdad, the Silk Grove, Renaissance Italy and Al-Andalus. What does all of that tell us about medieval food? Because I think we still have this image that it was quite bland and meagre. Everyone's eating bowls of potage and turning their noses up at it. But these recipes are anything but bland and plain. Would most of the stuff that's in the book have been the kind of food that normal people were eating? Or are we really looking at top table fair here? These are recipes of the elite. And because these are drawn from

cookbooks, particularly the European ones, you have to ask yourself for a moment where these cookbooks came from and who are they for? Because often they're quite short. They may have 50 recipes, the European ones, not the incredible Baghdadi ones. and in an age of very low literacy, and when a book was incredibly expensive to produce and was a high status object, who is a book of 50 European medieval recipes for? Because if you're the chef, you probably started as an apprentice and have been doing this your entire life. And if the recipe is simply take this and this and this and this and these spices and this and this and cook it and serve it forth, you certainly don't need that. You're not going to forget.

I think a very compelling argument, particularly for European cookbooks, is that these books actually represent a time when noble ladies were expected to take more control over the day-to-day running and the economics of their household. And they would need to know what was in recipes and whether the cook was using appropriate amounts of stuff, particularly spices in an age when spices were unbelievably expensive. but I think it is important to consider that these are the foods of the elite and they are very sophisticated I think we're also often conditioned by older films for example to think of these as people with terrible table manners and just a melee at the table where in Europe especially in England especially people would have been horrified at that sort of rough and humble eating thing people were eating with real grace And I guess those kinds of stories of spices and things as well are a great reminder of both how sophisticated medieval palates and cookery could be and just how connected the medieval world was.

They were fetching this stuff from all along the Silk Road. They may not have understood exactly where it came from, but goods were travelling a vast distance to wind up on European medieval tables. So the medieval world was far more connected than we sometimes think it was. Yeah, I think the flavour profile of medieval Europe is actually. probably closest to modern Persian cuisine. It's a real balance of sweet and sour and aromatic spices. I think it's important to remember also that this was an age when people thought of spices as medicine and that health could be maintained by balancing your bodily humors. This is a humoral medicine that goes back to Galen and the Greeks, and that all

people were either wet or dry or hot or cold and you could tell a person's balance of humors by their temperament, which is, you know, where we get these words like phlegmatic, which means you had too much phlegm, and therefore you had a certain kind of temperament. Therefore, you would want to balance that temperament by eating the appropriate spices. It's also incredibly important to remember when you think of spices, particularly in Europe, that one of the most powerful and important spices was sugar. And we may not think of sugar as a spice, but in that period it really was. Sugar is indigenous to India, who had it thousands of years before anyone else from sugarcane,

and then it wasn't until that sugar traveled to the Middle East that the science of the Arabs and the folks on distillation actually allowed them to make refined white sugar, which then once again like pepper had to travel all the way to Europe where it was this incredibly prized and almost magical thing and particularly today when we think of refined white sugar as the devil basically there was an era in humeral medicine where that refined white sugar was like the one thing that was healthy all across the board for everyone which i just find kind of spectacular yeah absolutely and i guess to end on can i ask you both what your favorite medieval recipe was in the book?

I do really love Sikaijat, the vinegared stew that Jay mentioned, that was so popular in 10th century Baghdad. But I also love the turmeric colored tendons from Mongolian China. They're delicious and crispy and unusual. And the savages, actually, the indigenous savages from the Great Circulation chapter are also just really spectacular and fresh and light. So yeah, there's a nice mix. If you're looking for something really hearty and heavy and meaty, there's something in there.

I think there's also some really wonderful recipes that are a bit lighter. And yeah, the savages are just really fascinating because we think of saviche today as limes are completely crucial to the construction of the dish because the acid sort of cooks the raw fish. But of course, citrus fruit is actually from the Middle East and not native to the Americas. So prior to European contact, the Inca were making saviche with fermented passion fruit juice or sometimes even human spit. So there were different preparations and it's just amazing that in one dish that existed before 1492 and it's incredibly popular today still, you can see this kind of timeline of progression

and also this illustration of all these different plants moving around the world as a consequence of the actions of 1492. I think when you ask a chef what his favorite recipe is, there's this funny dichotomy. Is it the favorite recipe to eat or the favorite recipe to make? And I think in this case, I think I'm going to lean into my favorite one to make, but also it's one that's close to my heart and close to Victoria and I, which is the coccanthrice that we talked about. There's several recipes.

The one I used was a variation on one from 1380. So a cockatrice, again, is half of a suckling pig sewn to half of a capon, which is an emasculated rooster, and stuffed with spices and dried fruits and more meat, and then roasted. And often it was then painted green with vegetable dyes. But the other thing is, when Victoria and I first met, we had this absolute connection and meeting of the minds about what we wanted to do with historical cuisine. And one of the first things were like, someday we're going to make a cock and thrice. And now I've made a great many of them, but it was an achievement for the two of us to create this thing that is horrifying and spectacular and quite delicious. So at the end of the day, that one is probably closest to my heart. Fantastic.

And what would you say was your favorite story that's in the book, the historical story that goes alongside a recipe? I really love the Alandalus chapter, which is Muslim-ruled. Spain. And when Abdal Rahman, the young prince who established the Umayyad caliphate in Spain after the Abbasid revolution when most of his family was killed, of course, when he established that in Spain, he brought lots of plants and fruits and animals and cooking styles from the Middle East to mainland Europe. That story itself is just spectacular. We don't know for sure if George Martin got his inspiration for the red wedding scene, but essentially the Abbasid family after they'd conquered the Umayyad caliphate invited the 80 surviving members of the Umayyad family

over for conciliatory dinner. And once dinner was done, everyone thought that they'd made peace. This was a truce. Instead, guards emerged and they killed every single member of the Umayyad family. Or so they thought, because Abd al-Raman, who was the grandson of the former caliph, escaped, he disappears from the records for about seven years, and then he pops up in North Africa seven years later, where his mother was from originally. So he builds an army there, and then he goes on to conquer Spain

and establish this whole new world. Instead of retreating into a life of quiet solitude somewhere and staying and hiding, he builds a new caliphate. And the palm trees, the citrus fruits, the oranges that were introduced to Spain, as a result of his actions is just incredible. It transformed the landscape of Spain.

It transformed the food culture of Spain at the time and even now up to the present day. So I think that's a really interesting turning point that we don't think of as much. We also don't think of there being a caliphate in mainland Europe for almost 800 years, but there was. And this sort of feeds into a lot of what Jay and I like to do with our history.

What is the story we want to tell about a time period? People might think traditionally that it is this, but through the kind of the history of food, perhaps we can illuminate slightly different ways of seeing a period or a time. I would say my favorite story referred to in the book is actually lifted directly from another book. And that is, again, talking about Sikbrijat. I like to say there's a famous story about Sikbushat, but the truth is there's like tons of famous stories about Sikbushat.

It was that beloved. But there's a story that when a group of men had the weekly chess game and they invited the cook from the Cali's kitchen to join them playing chess and drinking tea and they asked him, oh, powerful chef, cook us something amazing. And the chef asks them, what's your favorite thing to eat? And they say, Sick Bichot. And he said, who normally cooks it? And they say, well, a little servant boy cooks it. So he says to the servant boy, okay, bring me the cooking vessel that you cook this to do it. And he smells it.

He says, okay, now take it away and wash it really well. And the boy does, and the boy brings it back. And he smells it and looks at it. And he says, now, wash it again with clay and with sweet herbs and bring it back to me. And they do this a couple of times until he is satisfied with the cooking vessel. He says, now, go and cook the dish as you normally would. And the boy does, and he brings it back. And everyone declares it the greatest sick but a diet they've ever had.

And the funny thing to me about this story is true or not, this is just exactly the same kind of story you get in Michelin Kitchens today. So it feels very timely and present, even though it's a solid thousand years old. That's incredible. That's wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Victoria and Jay. It's been great to talk to you. It's been fun to talk about all of the food and the recipes. I recommend the book to anyone. It really is a stunning looking book and a wonderful journey.

through some history, some recipes and some ideas that people can try and recreate for themselves at home. So thank you very, very much for joining us. Thank you so much for having us. It was a pleasure. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Victoria and Jay's beautiful book, A History of the World in 10 dinners, 2,000 years, 100 recipes, is out now if you'd like to find out more. If you do create any of the recipes, please be sure to let me know how it goes. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts from

and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you have a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts. It really does help new listeners to find us out. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.