Wealthy medieval Europeans cooked with remarkable quantities of spice: ginger, cinnamon, saffron, grains of paradise and pepper. What they used, how they used it and why, with the rotten-meat myth debunked.
Overview¶
The surviving cookery books of late medieval Europe, written for royal and noble households, are strikingly spicy. Sauces were thickened with bread and sharpened with vinegar or verjuice, then heavily seasoned with ginger, cinnamon and cloves; dishes were coloured yellow with saffron, red with sandalwood, green with herbs. Sugar was treated as one more spice. Most people, of course, ate nothing like this: peasants seasoned with salt, onions, garlic, mustard and garden herbs.
The main spices¶
| Spice | Medieval use |
|---|---|
| Ginger | The most common spice in many English and French collections; in sauces, pottages and sweets |
| Cinnamon and cassia | Called canel; the base of sauce cameline and many "sweet" powders |
| Pepper | Common but by the later Middle Ages somewhat less fashionable than ginger and cinnamon |
| Long pepper | Still used, especially in hippocras and medicine |
| Grains of paradise | A West African pepper-like seed, fashionable in the 14th and 15th centuries |
| Galingale | Rhizome related to ginger, used in sauces; now almost forgotten in European cooking |
| Cloves, nutmeg, mace | Expensive; in sauces, spiced wine and sweets |
| Saffron | For colour as much as flavour; gilded dishes signalled wealth |
| Cubeb | A tailed pepper from Java, used in sauces and medicine |
The cookbooks¶
- The Forme of Cury ("the method of cooking"), compiled around 1390 by the master cooks of Richard II of England, contains around 200 recipes. Its "powder fort" (strong powder, typically ginger and pepper-heavy) and "powder douce" (sweet powder, with sugar and cinnamon) are early ready-made spice blends.
- Le Viandier, the French collection traditionally attributed to Guillaume Tirel, called Taillevent, cook to Charles V and Charles VI, though the earliest manuscript predates him.
- Le Ménagier de Paris, written around 1393 by a wealthy Parisian for his young wife, covers household management as well as cooking.
- Liber de coquina, a Latin collection from Italy or southern France around 1300.
Signature dishes¶
- Sauce cameline: bread soaked in vinegar or wine, pounded with cinnamon, ginger, cloves and grains of paradise. Served with roast meats and fish.
- Blancmange: chicken or fish pounded with rice, almond milk and sugar, the "white food" of the sick and the wealthy.
- Hippocras: wine sweetened and infused with cinnamon, ginger, long pepper and other spices, strained through a cloth bag. An ancestor of mulled wine.
- Comfits and dragées: sugar-coated seeds such as aniseed, caraway and coriander, eaten after meals to aid digestion and freshen the breath.
- Gingerbread: originally breadcrumbs, honey and spices pressed into a slab, not a baked biscuit.
Why so much spice?¶
Several reasons overlap:
- Status. Spices were expensive imports; using them lavishly displayed wealth.
- Medicine. Medieval physicians followed the Galenic theory of the four humours. Foods had qualities (hot, cold, moist, dry), and most spices were classed as hot and dry, useful for "correcting" cold, moist foods such as fish. Cooks and physicians worked with the same ideas.
- Taste. Medieval elites simply liked sweet-sour-spiced flavours, much as people in parts of North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia still do.
- Religion and romance. Spices were associated with Paradise, which many believed lay in the East; their scent was a foretaste of heaven.
⚠️ Myth: spices hid rotten meat
There is no good evidence that spices were used to disguise spoiled meat. They cost far more than the meat itself; fresh meat was available to the households that could afford spices; preservation relied on salt, smoke and drying, not pepper; and the recipes spice fish, vegetables, wine and sweets as heavily as meat. Historians including Paul Freedman (Out of the East, 2008) have examined and rejected the idea. On whether spices preserve food at all, see spices and food preservation.
Is medieval food "authentic" today?¶
Medieval recipes rarely give quantities, so modern reconstructions involve judgement. They were probably not as fiery as the lists of spices suggest: the goal was balance within the humoral scheme. A reasonable starting point for sauce cameline for four is about 1 tsp ground cinnamon, ½ tsp ground ginger, a pinch each of cloves and grains of paradise, with a slice of bread soaked in 100 ml red wine vinegar, pounded smooth.
Decline¶
From the 17th century, French cooks led a move away from heavy spicing toward butter sauces, herbs and the flavour of the main ingredient. Cheaper spices, as the Dutch and English flooded the market, also meant they no longer signalled status. In Britain the medieval taste survives in mixed spice, mince pies, gingerbread and mulling spice. See spices in Britain.