Manners, Customs, and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period · Chapter 5Food and Cookery
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History of Bread.--Vegetables and Plants used in Cooking.--Fruits.--Butchers' Meat.--Poultry, Game.--Milk, Butter, Cheese, and Eggs.--Fish and Shellfish.--Beverages, Beer, Cider, Wine, Sweet Wine, Refreshing Drinks, Brandy.--Cookery.--Soups, Boiled Food, Pies, Stews, Salads, Roasts, Grills.--Seasoning, Truffles, Sugar, Verjuice.--Sweets, Desserts, Pastry.--Meals and Feasts.--Rules of Serving at Table from the Fifteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries.
he private life of a people," says Legrand d'Aussy, who had studied that of the French from a gastronomic point of view only, "from the foundation of monarchy down to the eighteenth century, must, like that of mankind generally, commence with obtaining the first and most pressing of its requirements. Not satisfied with providing food for his support, man has endeavoured to add to his food something which pleased his taste. He does not wait to be hungry, but he anticipates that feeling, and aggravates it by condiments and seasonings. In a word his greediness has created on this score a very complicated and wide-spread science, which, amongst nations which are considered civilised, has become most important, and is designated the culinary art."
At all times the people of every country have strained the nature of the soil on which they lived by forcing it to produce that which it seemed destined ever to refuse them. Such food as human industry was unable to obtain from any particular soil or from any particular climate, commerce undertook to bring from the country which produced it. This caused Rabelais to say that the stomach was the father and master of industry.
We will rapidly glance over the alimentary matters which our forefathers obtained from the animal and vegetable kingdom, and then trace the progress of culinary art, and examine the rules of feasts and such matters as belong to the epicurean customs of the Middle Ages.