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00.02.20, Dembinska, Food and Drink in Medieval Poland

00.02.20, Dembinska, Food and Drink in Medieval Poland


Short titles are rather uncommon and rare among scholarly studies, and one of those which I have admired since the beginnings of my own medieval research is "Food Consumption in Medieval Poland" by Maria Dembinska (her doctoral thesis, first published in 1963 as "Konsumpcja Zywnosciowa w Polsce Sredniowiecznej").

Whilst this important work originally was nearly inaccessible due to the exoticism of the Polish language, its English edition "is now a scholarly classic" for a world-wide audience (ix). On the one hand, this is naturally the merit of Countess Maria Dembinska herself. She neither was proletarian nor cast her study in a Marxist framework: her "main interest lay in defining social structure in terms of food consumption". For this purpose she pursued an analysis of the diet as a key to "the Polish reality" of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (ix ff.). Dembinska not only tried a totally independent conception but also worked it out successfully: despite the general lack of scholarly literature in the early 1960s and despite the unpleasant conditions which were additionally dictated by Communism, Dembinska's work represents an early example of the efficiency of combining historical sources and methods with archaeological and ethnographic ones: cross- disciplinarity exemplarily applied within a period which hardly had got to know this term yet.

On the other hand the merit also belongs to Dembinska's anglophone editor William Woys Weaver. After contacts were initiated in 1977, however, it was not granted to Dembinska (d. 1996) to experience the satisfactory finish of the project in 1999. Within this long refining process the book received "streamlining in some places but expansion in others.... In short, the book is a new work reassembled from the old one" (p. xiv, xviii). Using the professional translation into English by Magdalena Thomas (1993), the editor successfully forged a quite new text and, additionally, tried to meet "modern" interests by selecting 35 medieval Polish recipes for present- day practical attempts in historical cookery.

As there are no cookery books dating back to late medieval Poland, the recipes involved could be found by experimental cooking only. Medieval written evidence of numerous ingredients and dishes had to be confronted with recipes given in non-Polish cookery books or in Polish oral tradition. One can respectfully confirm that the accurate re-constructions appear "as archaeologically correct as possible" (142). And Weaver's recipes are "trial recipes" in a double sense--now as invitation to motivate cooking amateurs (and customers of the book, too), but originally as a scholarly method of verification to ensure a certain degree of authenticity. However, they are pure "construction".

The trial recipes represent an outstanding attainment which is reminiscent of the experimental medieval cookery as practiced earlier by Johanna Maria van Winter in the Netherlands, for example. They show that, in the field of food history, cross- disciplinarity is not completely performed if practical application is missing. Moreover, Weaver's delightful masterpiece attests also to the serious solemnity of his friendship with Dembinska, since the recipes "have been tailored to convey the peculiar Polish character" (143).

The "trial recipes" cover "everyday cookery as well as middle class and manor foods, not to mention court dishes of a non- banquet character", that is what the royal family "might eat in its privy chambers" without a standing crowd of onlookers around (144). "Court showpieces of the sort commonly treated in cookbooks dealing with food of the Middle Ages" are deliberately left out. The recipes include Kisiel (= fermented barley flour soup), "by far the oldest Polish dish in the book", first documented in A. D. 997. Another characteristic and severely romanticized Polish dish is Bigos (= game stewed with sauerkraut, pp. 164 s., 169 s.). The fundamental influence of religion is at least touched upon by examples of dishes for both Christian fasting requirements and Jewish cookery. A Beer Soup with Cheese and Eggs, "first mentioned under the Latin name caseata as part of a royal fasting menu at Korczyn in 1394, ... contains no meat products but does take advantage of spring vegetables and herbs" (p. 159). Examples like this, or Fish Aspic, or Fast Day Pancakes (p. 166, p. 177) are not such specifically Polish dishes but rather duplicate central European patterns.

The section of "trial recipes" represents more than a quarter of the book ("Medieval Recipes in the Polish Style", 141-200). To each of the single dishes are offered a title (English and Polish), a commentary to reveal the context of cultural history, the number of servings, the kinds and exact quantities of ingredients and an extensive cooking advice in the narrower sense. Like the recipes, their titles also are re- constructions, because no Polish cookery texts have survived from the medieval period. And if they had, they probably would have been written in Latin. However, extensive written information would have been most uncommon in medieval cookery: traditional dishes had "no fixed recipe, just multitudes of variations passed along orally" (187), and elaborate cooking after meager instructions, like also the ability to read, were dependent on learned erudition. To give a theoretical impression of the genuine curtness and "otherness" of medieval recipes, I leave out Weaver's additional information and repeat only his instruction for making Hydromel (a courtly beverage, cf. p. 163): "Bring water to boil and pour it over fennel and cassia in a large jar. Cover and infuse until the liquid is room temperature. Strain through a filter or fine sieve. Dissolve honey in the clear liquid. Store in a stoneware jug or wine bottle in a cool place until needed."

The edition by Weaver provides essential contextual information. The first of four respective chapters covers "A Definition of Polish National Cookery" (1-23). The next chapter generally treats the kingdom of "Poland in the Middle Ages" (25-46). A short survey of courtesy rules and table organization, a detailed list of persons associated with food consumption at the Polish Royal Court, and the equipment and operation of the medieval kitchen are introduced under the title "Dramatis Personae of the Old Polish Table" (47-70). The chapter entitled "Food and Drink in Medieval Poland" (71-135) surveys "the range of ingredients consumed in medieval Poland, as well as the manner in which many of them were prepared": wine, beer and mead; meat (beef, pork, poultry, game, organ meat and veal) and fish; grains; breads and baked goods; produce from the kitchen garden; fruits and nuts. Pork lard was the primary cooking fat. "Fat pervaded the medieval table." (143) As far as written evidence shows, pork and beef are the most frequently mentioned meats, followed not by lamb, but poultry (chickens, capons, and poussins). Meat was considered a basic food to be consumed on a daily basis in Poland, indeed not at the court only. On fast days, which amount to one third of the year in the Middle Ages, meat had to be replaced by fish, which, therefore, constitutes the second basic food product in Polish medieval cookery. Exotic fruits (raisins, almonds, figs, lemons, oranges) serve as ingredients and hardly as dessert fruits, because they were expensive luxury goods: in the early fifteenth century, in the city of Lvov three oranges "were valued at the same price as six to eight chickens" (133).

The book undoubtedly follows professional criteria and demonstrates the food historian Weaver's scholarly care towards the topic and respectful esteem for Dembinska's results. Nevertheless the English edition is adapted not only for a scholarly audience, but also for common American readers. For the following reasons, such a task means a difficult compromise: any published medieval cookery book is related to the cultural history of Europe and cannot be understood without corresponding knowledge. Medieval European cookery has very unknown, highly foreign and thus "exotic" characteristics--even for European readers. Common readers may be less familiar with the astonishing quantity of Latin terms within medieval cookery (cf. pp. 67-70), and they surely will be thankful for any explanation provided by the book. On the other hand highbrow scholars might pretend to be bored about such "trivial" details throughout the edition. Not to overestimate such an ambivalence requires just that wise composure which apparently characterizes the editor (perhaps since he himself is not a medieval specialist): it is more legitimate and appropriate to instruct a common audience by serious information about any foreign culture than to satisfy a minority which appears anyhow competent enough to know the leading principles of such a culture.

As a consequence, one could criticize some sloppy quotations of Latin words. In addition, anyone who has had to summarize any topic of cultural history will understand what occasionally occurs the editor: a documentary narrative can easily assume a precocious, antiquated or positivistic character. And thirdly, the scholarly quality of both food research and medieval cookery should have merited much more attention to medieval dietetics. This term does not even appear among the keywords of the edition's index, although it would be an essential keyword for understanding medieval cookery. Dietetics instrumentalized cookery as a medical intention, namely for the preservation of health: not only the composition of a single recipe depended on it, but also the entire consequence of dishes within a menu had to fullfill dietetic criteria. During the Middle Ages, the term cookery is a paraphrase for learned mastership and persistently includes intimate knowledge of dietetics. Or, to say it the other way round: the application of dietetics to a high degree explains the "otherness" of medieval dishes.

The rather inconspicuous pictures (= sensitive drawings by Signe Sundberg-Hall) do not restrict the value of the book, even if a lot of German examples are tacitly interspersed: since the editor is calling them "supplementary line drawings" I feel that moderate supply was selected quite deliberately and respectfully, to avoid an artificial distance between the professionally printed English edition and the "self made" Polish original. Once again in contrast with publications which endlessly repeat the standardized sample of medieval European cooking illustrations, the nice cover of the edition shows a less known coloured picture of a late medieval bakehouse (a manuscript illumination by Balthasar Behem taken from the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow, Poland).

The caption of the illustration on p. 43 ("Table fork ... from a site dating to the late fifteenth century", xxi) makes one think of the subtle distinction concerning the use and functions of forks. Until the seventeenth century and even later, forks were indeed used for cooking and serving food, but not at all for normal eating. This statement is above all derived from pictorial evidence. Cf. among many others, for instance, the illustration on p. 60 of the book: here not even one fork is represented among a company of 21 persons at table. During the Middle Ages there existed only one special alternative next to the actual eating fork: the so called "Byzantine" fork (p. 42, a precious silversmith's product, comparatively rare, bidental, shaped extra small). This type was exclusively used upon the highest social level "for eating sticky foods and cheese" and, in consequence, for self- representation. Therefore, an explicit "table fork" will rather mean the fork for serving. This fork is bidental, too. Its usual characteristics-- in comparison with the elegant "Byzantine" fork--are an oversized shape and a less precious design.

For specialists of late medieval cookery Polish food will offer many reminders of medieval European food and table habits in general. The fork is only one example. The reason for this phenomenon is comparatively simple: as far as shown at least by written evidence, manners at table, dietary knowledge and available ingredients hardly differed from nation to nation in medieval Europe. Additionally there were influences cross- running from Western or Southern to Eastern Europe as well as from Eastern Europe back. Such influences in medieval Polish cookery had either distant roots (the Near East, France or Italy) or were originating from geographical neighbourhood (Russia, Lithuania, Czechia, Moravia, Hungary, Germany and Austria). A lot of foreign terms prove such influences (Latin examples: avenata, circuli, semellae; French: verjus; Italian: torta, trippe; German: kreple, kugel). But it is necessary to take chronological differentiations into account. Even more interesting to "determine the specific character of a regional cuisine" are the differences, for example the Polish substitutes for ingredients common in Europe: they in time change the spirit of the dish, as for example "the use of sweet flag...as a flavour substitute for bay leaves, and the use of young stems of goutweed...instead of spinach to create green soups and sauces." (74) To sum up, "the story of Polish medieval cookery is a...story of creative adaption: simple things artfully reshaped to fit a Polish notion of appropriate taste." (146) In this sense the subtitle of Weaver's edition has a double meaning when it promises rediscovering "a" cuisine of the past: through the mirror of late medieval Polish cookery we also can realize the headlines of medieval European food and cookery in general.

In total, the editor's didactic conception is somewhat like a model for handling the manifold temptations which usually occur an administrator of "exotic" information: instead of simply reproducing the original, instead of exposing the considerable otherness of medieval cookery to sheer voyeurism, and even instead of ambituously stuffing the bibliography and annotations with "modern" literature or comparative sources, Weaver delivers a slim and handsome book which contains most essential details within 227 well satisfying pages. Passionate enthusiasts of antiquities may be irritated by the paradox that food and drink are the most perishable goods within material culture: the book on Food and Drink in Medieval Poland explains why that irritating paradox will persistently endure.