Talk:Medieval cuisine/Archive 4

This is an archive of past discussions about Medieval cuisine. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

Stoves?

In the Food Preparation section, first paragraph, it states that the stove did not appear until the 18th c. It's a bit puzzling, then, to see an illustration from a late 15th c. cookbook showing a stove in use. I suspect that the illustration actually depicts not a stove but a raised hearth: you can see the coals scattered over the surface and an open flame with cauldron suspended over. I shall revise the caption accordingly, but chiefly for the coherence of the article. I can't pretend to have thorough knowledge of the evolution of stoves. I'm also changing the Stoves link to go to the Kitchen Stoves article rather than the general Stoves article. Richigi (talk) 16:53, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I agree with your correction. I'm fairly certain I wrote that caption, and I suspect it was simply a "slip of the finger", so to speak. Of course it's a hearth, because I do remember reading about how stoves weren't invented until much, much later. Thanks for pointing it out, Richigi.

Peter ^Isotalo 23:11, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Dessert edits

I have reverted recent changes to the section "Sweets and desserts" since they are based on a source that specifically discusses 18th century dessert habits. The content was re-inserted immediately with an explanation that I couldn't quite make sense of.[1]

To avoid any misunderstanding, here are the specific problems:

The voidée is an early modern (or late medieval) custom that involved taking dragées and the like in a specific setting. This is stated quite clearly in the source itself. There is no discussion of its being synonymous with "dessert".
The terms "fruit", "bourgeois" and "pastillage" are very obviously early modern in nature and have nothing to do with the Middle Ages. Which is also obvious from the source (Ivan Day).
"Customs were imitated throughout the levels of society, from royalty, nobility, wealthy merchants to commoners." Day says nothing about commoners eating dessert. And, again, he refers to the 18th century.
Adding words like "decadent" is extremely subjective and should be avoided.
None of the sources I've used for this article describe the dessert as a medieval part of a meal that involved magnificent sugarpaste showpieces. That was mostly reserved for the entremets/subtleties.

As I see it, the text I reverted confuses two different time periods and introduces hints at unnecessary subjectivity and personal conclusions that aren't even in the referenced source.

Peter ^Isotalo 07:27, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

I've reverted again. Either there's some confusion about whether the 18th century is "medieval" or not (I'm with you, Peter, it's not) or the editor hasn't read the sources too carefully. Some of the additional sources this time around don't seem to quite match up with the text either. There would also be some copyvio/close paraphrasing problems as well. Hchc2009 (talk) 08:44, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, and I wouldn't really consider the Goode Cookery[2] a reliable source. It's perfectly acceptable as a suggestion for an external link, though.

I think the anonymous user needs to have a look at the existing references before trying to fill in facts that simply don't fit the context.

Peter ^Isotalo 16:24, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Cookbooks

Should there be an annotated list of major primary sources and their availability today? A few are mentioned in the section on "Cookbooks", but I don't see "Guter Spise", or "A noble boke of cookry", or "Manuscrito anonimo", or various others that any modern scholar of the field would recognize immediately. Sbloch (talk) 00:09, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

There's the section "Cookbooks" which summarizes the topic. The article is about food in general, though, not primary sources. What you're suggesting seems more relevant in cookbook or perhaps something like list of cookbooks. Either way, this is an article, not a guide to historical sources. Mentioning all titles familiar to experts just isn't practical.

Peter ^Isotalo 21:03, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Shortened footnotes

Great article. Due to the way references are used here, it's an ideal candidate to benefit from conversion to using shortened footnotes, which would hyperlink citations to reference details without otherwise altering the way they are presented. If this idea is met with approval, I'm happy to do it myself. For an example of how it works, you can see the results of a similar conversion I undertook at The Hardy Boys. — Scott • talk 13:56, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the compliment and the offer. However, I tend to actively avoid the use of citation templates and additional code for the sake of new editors. And I prefer to have just one set of notes.

Peter ^Isotalo 11:58, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

From Narrow Sources a Narrow Article

Aloha,

At what point do we start to see when a large chunk of a category is suspiciously absent?

As historians when we discuss the Middle Ages we are referring to a period in the development of the Western world (more or less the Christian cultural sphere) from the disintegration of the Classical Greco-Roman civilization to the beginning of colonialism led by the Atlantic European states.

Contemporary European historiography was largely driven by the nationalist project of the Romantic age of the late 18th and early 19th century. Therefore we cannot expect historiography in English, French, Spanish, and German to include much about Southeastern Europe, which at that time was under Ottoman domination and technically considered a part of (that gruesome colonialist term) the Middle East. Historians from Western Europe and to some extent Russia were simply ignoring national projects outside of their immediate scope and this tradition continued to a large degree even after the countries of Southeastern Europe won their independence. But the fact that there's not enough research in English, in particular, about the culinary habits of the part of Europe whose cultural values were informed by the Byzantine civilization does not mean there is no such research at all.

With their subtle claims for geographic exhaustiveness the articles Medieval cuisine and especially Regional cuisines of medieval Europe quietly sneak into the conversation a narrow approach dressed in an inclusive title. It's like an argument from ignorance: we don't know much about the pre-Ottoman Balkans because our secondary sources are very mysterious about that part of Europe, but we'll hope for the best.

Just have a look at the scope of three of the most extensively used sources in both articles: "Food and Eating in Medieval Europe" edited by Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal, and Melitta Weiss Adamson's "Food in Medieval Times" (pp. 83 - 155) and the especially annoying "Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe." It makes you wonder if there really was anything outside of an arc beginning in Italy culminating in the British Isles and finishing in Scandinavia. The quick (and obvious) answer is: there was.

Unfortunately, i cannot provide a longer answer, as i haven't done research in that area. Perhaps we should reach out to Wiki editors from Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and former Yugoslavia and hope they can provide carefully sourced scholarly material.

But until then please don't revert small improvements like my clarification that there was wine consumption outside of the Western Mediterranean. (Does it sound silly? Perhaps. Why should we even need to clarify that there was wine in the Eastern Mediterranean? Isn't it obvious?) The current text says "Wine was consumed on a daily basis in most of France and all over the Western Mediterranean wherever grapes were cultivated." That is absolutely true and Adamson has done some solid research on that. Is it exhaustive? Certainly not. And this is why my only redaction was deleting the word "Western." Seriously: that was all. My little edit made the article more precise by expanding a small part of it to include the Eastern Mediterranean. This is correct information despite that i don't have a scholarly source to provide; i have read such sources in Bulgarian years ago, but even if i hadn't - it really is common sense. Let's not forget our mission here: we need to crowdsource accurate information for the benefit of humanity. Sometimes that means that we will be encountering true statements that exist outside of the literature we're familiar with. To assume that what we've read is all there is is bad taste at best.

And that's precisely the problem with the two reverts to my rather innocuous edit. The first one did not even deem it worthy of explanation as though it was some kind of vandalism. The second politely referred to Adamson's "Food in Medieval Times" - the text, as though it's some kind of a scripture, you see, says that wine was consumed on a daily basis in France and the Western Mediterranean and that's that. Period. You can't argue with the sources.

Yes, but you actually can. And when they are limited in scope, you absolutely should. Otherwise wiki editing is mistaking the forest for the trees: the source is rarely more "sacred" than common sense. Let's not relapse in some Kafkaesque nightmare of rigid and unimaginative formality of editing. Let's embrace creativity in our methodology.

And a Bulgarian with a US History degree and many connections with people from the wild mysterious Southeast of Europe tells you that wine making and drinking is an intrinsic part of the cultural memory and national identities of Greeks, Bulgarians/Macedonians, and Romanians/Moldovans, please consider that person a reliable source ;)

With that said, this is probably not the place for this last comment, but now that i have your attention, i might as well: the way Regional cuisines of medieval Europe is structured - obviously very closely following Adamson's 2002 compilation - is quite odd. So the categories are: Central Europe Northern Europe Northern France Western Mediterranean Byzantine Empire

Now, i don't know about you, but if i were from Northern France, i would be offended. It's not a thing on the same categorical scale as Northern Europe unless i'm missing something. If i am, please tell me. It seems much much more logical if we start with the compact geographical divisions to continue this way and have Western Europe, Southern Europe, and Eastern Europe.

Much obliged,

Pavel Stankov (talk) 01:29, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

You really need to come up with some references to support your claims. WP:V is as true here as anywhere else. I don't know why sources on medieval Slavic and Balkan food culture (except for Dembinska) are rare or non-existent, but if you know of any, please cite them instead of merely alluding to them.

Peter ^Isotalo 10:01, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

"Feast" or "Etiquette"

Recently, an anonymous user, 71.28.21.137, changed a section heading from "Etiquette" to "Feast". I disagreed with the change and to make it obvious what the section was about, I renamed it "Meal etiquette". Pepperbeast disagreed with me, saying "Feast" was better. However, feast does not describe everything in that section when etiquette does. There are entire chunks of the section that are about etiquette and not a feast, such as:

When possible, rich hosts retired with their consorts to private chambers where the meal could be enjoyed in greater exclusivity and privacy. Being invited to a lord's chambers was a great privilege and could be used as a way to reward friends and allies and to awe subordinates. It allowed lords to distance themselves further from the household and to enjoy more luxurious treats while serving inferior food to the rest of the household that still dined in the great hall.(Dining in the great hall doesn't necessarily mean they would be having a feast)

Although there are descriptions of dining etiquette on special occasions, less is known about the details of day-to-day meals of the elite or about the table manners of the common people and the destitute.

In fact, as there were usually two meals a day in medieval Europe, pretending the section is only about feasts excludes most meals, as a feast was, as the section says, "a special occasion". The section even starts with "As with almost every part of life at the time, a medieval meal was generally a communal affair." This is evidently not about a feast, so why would we pretend it was? Etiquette describes the entire section perfectly, and this article was featured with that section being "Etiquette", so evidently the reviewer agreed. I'd like to find consensus before I change it back to "etiquette" so I'll wait for comments. Thanks, SamWilson989 (talk) 07:39, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Primary contributor here. The section is clearly about behavior at meals, not feasts per se. In the context of foodways, this is commonly known as etiquette. And it's a sub-heading of "Meals". The section heading has been stable for years, so I'm changing back per WP:BRD.

Peter ^Isotalo 12:39, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Enforcement of social hierarchies?

I don't think that it can be stated as a fact that "social hierarchies were often brutally enforced". That may have been the case in parts of Europe, but mostly there was no "enforcement of social hierarchies", and in fact there was a lot of social mobility, in England for instance.Royalcourtier (talk) 18:06, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

All pre-modern societies were inherently non-egalitarian and lacking in even the most fundamental democratic concepts. The level of violent crime was extreme by modern standards and you had severe capital and corporal punishment doled out by the authorities. Different social classes were judged by different standards and were not equal before the law in any meaningful sense.

The text is aimed at modern individuals who have grown up with the idea of basic human rights, so "brutal" seems entirely appropriate, even for England.

Peter ^Isotalo 12:58, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Note about kitchens

Hello, as this is a Featured Article I'm cautious about making significant changes but how about this edit – undone temporarily in case anyone objects, but it was easier to put it straight into the article to show how it would fit. Richard Nevell (talk) 18:41, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

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Bland, unpalatable food before imports arrived

This article doesn't mention the absence of much flavor or flavoring in medieval cuisine, and how they were improved using imports of flavoring and spices from Asia, and food from the Americas. Shouldn't this be mentioned? And how did the Europeans survive eating all that unpalatable, nasty food with no flavor? The only reason why the European cuisine is better nowadays is because they took food from other places to flavor up the bland porridge, cabbage, and fatty meats they ate. Sucks to be a European when you have to take spices from India and China, and other foods from the Americas. And nowadays, Scandinavian, Eastern European and Russian food is still bland and disgusting, while the other European countries copied and took foods from other cultures to improve their nonexistent cuisine. A bit funny. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.105.192.216 (talk) 21:32, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

There's already a section on herbs, spices, and condiments. What do you think needs to be added to it? PepperBeast (talk) 23:02, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

It's a bit late to respond to the above, but since current readers may be misled by it, it's important to know that Europeans had a wide range of flavorings - salt, mustard, cumin, coriander, various herbs, garum (a fish sauce one could make locally), vinegar, honey - without Eastern imports. Never mind that they were using the latter since Roman times. But I don't know that there was ever a time when purely European food was necessarily bland. The characterizations of Nordic and Slavic food are of course insulting and off the mark. 23.113.53.110 (talk) 16:54, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

Question about regions

Why doesn't this article include Medieval Ottoman/Arab cuisine? Should there be a hatnote to another article? Seraphim System ^(talk) 23:37, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

Shit, this article hardly specifies regional differences in medieval cuisine at all. So peeps in Ireland ate the same thing as they did in Lebanon? Shit, I know its all west euro centered, but mention that shit

The Middle Ages is a specifically European periodization. It's only occasionally used for other regions and in general it's not considered relevant for the Ottoman Empire or the Arab world.

As for regional variation, see the section "Regional variation".

Peter ^Isotalo 09:59, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

WP:URFA/2020

This older FA is in quite fine shape, but there is considerable WP:OVERLINKing that could be identified with User:Evad37/duplinks-alt and addressed. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:26, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia: the overlinking should now be addressed. Aza24 (talk) 16:23, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

To come back to this, I note that the first paragraph of the Dietetics heading is uncited. The implication is that it is supported, like the following paragraph, by the source Scully (1995); the specific page range listed is not included in the Google Books preview for the text so I can't verify this but it may be possible to reference a pared-down version of it to chapter three of that source, beginning p. 40, available here. Likewise the third paragraph under Cereals is without any references. Aside from these issues I don't believe there is anything troubling here—the occasional instance of colourful prose ("a staggering 3.8 pounds", etc) are not beyond reason, the sourcing seems generally good (quality good, just the occasional instance where a citation could be added as mentioned) and the breadth of coverage is exhaustive. We're certainly at the upper limit of page size before a split would be necessitated however and it may be worth considering shifting some content to a spinout—the length of the Beer section is quite considerable given the presence of a main article at History of beer, for example. Were the citation issues not present I would consider this "satisfactory" for URFA purposes; if anyone with fuller access to the print sources in use can help with this it would be tremendously appreciated. ᵹʀᴀᴘᴘʟᴇ ꭗ 21:06, 28 November 2021 (UTC)

I agree with the suggestion to spin out some of the beer section . I have a few comments to add to this. Should the St. Augustine quote be in this article? And what does it mean Dependence on wheat remained significant throughout the medieval era, and spread northward with the rise of Christianity. Did the spread of Christianity have something to do with the dependence on wheat spreading northward? Spudlace (talk) 18:37, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

I would hope that greater use of archaeological sources could be made. Richard Nevell (talk) 18:50, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

More specifics

This article needs to specify what vegetables people ate. It's not much of an article on cuisine without that. Many people don't realize medieval Europe didn't have potatoes, tomatoes, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, and such, but I don't know what exactly they did eat. Tysto (talk) 21:22, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

TFA?

Hi all, I'm considering scheduling this at Today's Featured Article on the Main Page during the second week in October. One potential problem: there's a trend among Wikipedians to get more serious about inline citations in general ... for instance, there's a recent change requiring inline citations for Good Article nominations. This is a Featured Article, and the unreferenced passages tool is showing that a fair number of sentences at the end of paragraphs are missing citations:

The Catholic and Orthodox Churches, and their calendars, had great influence on eating habits; consumption of meat was forbidden for a full third of the year for most Christians. All animal products, including eggs and dairy products (during the strictest fasting periods also fish), were generally prohibited during Lent and fast. Additionally, it was customary for all citizens to fast before taking the Eucharist. These fasts were occasionally for a full day and required total abstinence.
Medieval society was highly stratified. In a time when famine was commonplace and social hierarchies were often brutally enforced, food was an important marker of social status. According to the ideological norm, society consisted of the three estates of the realm: commoners, that is, the working classes—by far the largest group; the clergy, and the nobility. The class relationship was strictly hierarchical, with the nobility and clergy, claiming worldly and spiritual overlordship over commoners. Within the nobility and clergy there were also a number of ranks ranging from kings and popes to dukes, bishops and their subordinates, such as priests.
Medical science of the Middle Ages had a considerable influence on what was considered healthy and nutritious among the upper classes. One's lifestyle—including diet, exercise, appropriate social behavior, and approved medical remedies—was the way to good health, and all types of food were assigned certain properties that affected a person's health. All foodstuffs were also classified on scales ranging from hot to cold and moist to dry, according to the four bodily humours theory proposed by Galen that dominated Western medical science from late Antiquity until the 17th century.
This caloric structure partly reflected the high-class status of late Medieval monasteries in England, and partly that of Westminster Abbey, which was one of the richest monasteries in the country; diets of monks in other monasteries may have been more modest.
~~and their marriage (Theodora and Domenico) took place in 1075.~~
One of the most common constituents of a medieval meal, either as part of a banquet or as a small snack, were sops, pieces of bread with which a liquid like wine, soup, broth, or sauce could be soaked up and eaten. Another common sight at the medieval dinner table was the frumenty, a thick wheat porridge often boiled in a meat broth and seasoned with spices. Porridges were also made of every type of grain and could be served as desserts or dishes for the sick, if boiled in milk (or almond milk) and sweetened with sugar. Pies filled with meats, eggs, vegetables, or fruit were common throughout Europe, as were turnovers, fritters, doughnuts, and many similar pastries. By the Late Middle Ages biscuits (cookies in the U.S.) and especially wafers, eaten for dessert, had become high-prestige foods and came in many varieties. Grain, either as bread crumbs or flour, was also the most common thickener of soups and stews, alone or in combination with almond milk.
Tea and coffee, both made from plants found in the Old World, were popular in East Asia and the Muslim world during the Middle Ages. However, neither of these non-alcoholic social drinks were consumed in Europe before the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
The repertory of housekeeping instructions laid down by manuscripts like the Ménagier de Paris also include many details of overseeing correct preparations in the kitchen. Towards the onset of the early modern period, in 1474, the Vatican librarian Bartolomeo Platina wrote De honesta voluptate et valetudine ("On honourable pleasure and health") and the physician Iodocus Willich edited Apicius in Zürich in 1563.

Probably, some of these paragraphs are covered by the cites at the end of the following paragraph. Anyone feel like working on this? - Dank (push to talk) 14:09, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

@Peter Isotalo, I see you're the FAC nominator and you've made recent edits ... no obligation, obviously, this is just a courtesy ping. This is a fantastic article and I think it would be perfect for ~~Canadian Thanksgiving and the various Columbus Day holidays~~ October ... but I don't want to head into TFA knowing that it might draw some flak for the missing citations. - Dank (push to talk) 14:15, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for pointers. All mentioned paragraphs should be fixed. Took the liberty of striking them above to clarify.

Beautiful work. Any objections to running this in October? - Dank (push to talk) 19:51, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Had no idea that previos TFAs were being rotated into the mainpage for a second time, btw. Can you refer to guidelines for how this works? Peter ^Isotalo 19:13, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Woah! I'm remembering more than I thought I would ... got it on the first click. The RfC is at the top of WT:Today's featured article/Archive 9, and that language has been reproduced at the top of WP:TFAR since then. - Dank (push to talk) 19:51, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

No objections to running it again in October. Feel free to ping me regarding the mainpage text when relevant. And thanks for the link. Simply haven't been up to date with the minutiae of TFA guidelines. Peter ^Isotalo 20:13, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Hey, me too. - Dank (push to talk) 20:18, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Locked?

Why is this article locked? Some of the English is poor. Social classes, please, not 'societal', and calorific value, not 'caloric'. 82.39.166.176 (talk) 11:27, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

Articles that appear on the main page are always locked to unregistered users. I tweaked the wording to "social" and "calorie". I guess "calorific" is correct, but just doing the noun compound seems a lot simpler.

If you have any other suggestion, feel free to mention them here. Peter ^Isotalo 15:43, 1 October 2023 (UTC)