Culinary History

I've been reading a book on medieval food and keep coming across interesting little tidbits that warrant passing on.

In the countryside, no one much cared what you were doing in your kitchen, but in the towns, where people and houses were tight together, fire was always a real issue.

Because the cooking fires in the earlier period were wood (coal came in a bit later, generally speaking), and they didn't want to waste time and more wood in the morning getting the fire back in cooking shape again, they would bank the fire so they could star up again in the morning.

To avoid fires that could destroy a town of wooden buildings, the local town authorities would send men around ringing a bell (or ringing the local church bell if the town was big enough to have one) and checking that the fires had been not only banked but covered, usually with a crockery lid with holes in it or a one sided metal cover. The first statutes were proclaimed immediately after 1066 by William the Conqueror.

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The bells rang at 8:00 pm (in the 11th century, anyway) and signaled the time the inhabitants should covre-feu or cover their fires. The term made it into middle English as 'curfeu' and eventually curfew, and eventually had a broadened meaning referring to any time dictated ban on activity, particularly being out on the streets after a certain time, potentially causing mischief. Things are complicated in regards to terminology as a curfew bell was used to refer to both the bell rung to signal the time to cover your fire as well as the bell shaped cover you put over the fire.

And that's it for today's food trivia. For a previous example of this sort of thing, see my post on turn spits at

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=60608&p=467095&hilit=spit+jack#p467095

[Jenise]

I love stuff like this. VERY interesting!

There are a few Anglo Saxonisms, but anything related to food is largely of Norman French origin. A potager garden was a small garden near the house used for growing herbs and every day vegetables, and potage (today spelled pottage) was an old word for soup.

Another interesting one that has shifted meaning is the word 'seethe' which in the late niddle ages meant to simmer, but today has become a word used to describe an angry person doing a slow boil.

You do see 'civet' once in awhile, particularly from France, meaning a game stew.

The odd wine term has survived with the original meaning - sack as in Dry Sack for a sherry, and a stirring stick - spartle - survives in Scots use as a spurtle (as anyone who watched the old Graham Kerr shows will recall) but not in English sage.

Trencher, a type of round bread used as a plate for stew etc., has gone pretty much, but 'trencherman', while archaic, remains.

And the French 'servir' is to serve, while the word 'desservir' means to clear the table, after which you would serve dessert.

The origin of 'curfew' is very interesting. Thank, Bill.

Was thinking about hanging a curfew bell to ring at dinners, signaling impending change of courses, Jeff...

Was thinking about hanging a curfew bell to ring at dinners, signaling impending change of courses, Jeff...

I think B.F. Skinner would approve, Bill.

Has possibilities. Would need to keep the attendees in a box and see who pecked at the button when the bell rang....oh damn! Now I let the cat out of the bag, Jenise will have to be excluded from the experiment!

[Jenise]

Cat? Did someone say "cat"?

Bill

very interesting about curfew.

I think a zero got missed about the edict issued by William the Conquerer. You meant 1066 not 166.

About banking up fires overnight; my mum used to do that with the coal fire we had when I was little. As I recall she used ash from the fire. The fire lasted weeks, it didn't go out till she wanted it to

Good catch, Peter.

We used to live in an old pseudo Tudor home (come to think of it, we still do, although at another location now) with four wood burning fireplaces. For a few years, as an experiment, we bought sacks of coal to burn instead of having to split wood constantly. The coal fire, as you said, could be easily stirred into life again the next morning. We only ceased to use coal because we have a lot of silverware, both sterling and plate, and the coal would tarnish it wherever it was in the house (the sulfur content being the culprit).

Now we are fire sloths - we have four gas fireplaces that start with the touch of a button. Unfortunately the gas companies add a tracer gas to the fuel so you can detect leaks, and of course that is also a sulfur containing compound, so we still keep in shape polishing the silver.

Can you put the silverware in Tupperware?

Can you put the silverware in Tupperware?

Too much of it, many large pieces. Could put some of the flatware in I guess.

BTW, I told my wife that I wanted to use a bell to signal courses (we actually have a couple of bells used to summon diners) and she commented that it reminded her of the Black Death - "Bring out your Dead" (next dinner features old wines).

Pumpkin has been watching "The Addams Family" reruns lately. The bell used to summon Lurch should do the job nicely.

Might be overkill, but it does remind me of Young Frankenstein and the line "Nice knockers!"

Came across something else in this book that has me trying to sort out a few things. Back when I was an undergrad, Claude Levi-Strauss published a book called The Raw and the Cooked. (This French philosopher was no relation to the American pantaloon manufacturer).

I was aware of that book as it was tangentially related to some later graduate work I was doing on an English philosopher/scientist.

What I never put together was the 1980s English pop group, the Fine Young Cannibals, who took their name from the movie of the same name, starring Robert Wagner and his wife Natalie Wood in what was a loosely based biopic of the life of Chet Baker. So far so good - but then the FYC's second album was called The Raw and the Cooked, straight out of Levi-Strauss. Hmmmm.....

Anyway, back to the point if this thread - another interesting food related phenomenon was how food related to religion. The diet of the common people was bland enough and there was always much hunger about, and this was exacerbated by the dictates of the church where periods of abstinence and fasting were demanded but even more when meat was banned, because the food costs during those periods doubled or tripled for people who were just barely subsisting in normal times.

Fish was allowed on Fridays but meat wasn't. For an interesting article on just how that came about, see https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/20 ... -on-friday

Hungry clerics indulged in some interesting sophistry to expand the range of allowable foods during 'fish' times, including considering cetaceans (whales porpoises etc.) to be fish, and even went so far as to bifurcate certain animals by considering them part fish (OK) and part meat (verboten). In particular, the beaver was deemed to be part fish as their tails were almost always underwater (fish) while the rest of the was above (meat). This resulted the beavers being killed for their tails and the rest of the animal being discarded, or more likely salted for a later day.

Between this church created target on the poor beavers' chests and the demand for the product of their glands (castoreum) for perfumes, the Eurasian beaver was hunted almost to extinction ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_beaver )

Fascinating. Thanks, Bill. I am always curious about the interaction of religion and commerce, as they usually have more to do with one another than either would like to admit.

[Jenise]

So beaver tails are edible?