FOUR
If you had the choice between the somewhat harsh climate of Germany and the balmy air of Sicily, wouldn’t you choose the latter? That’s exactly what some of Charlemagne’s successors did when the Mediterranean island became part of the Holy Roman Empire. What a luxury to have all that fruit growing at your doorstep! The imperial palace was surrounded by citrus and mulberry orchards, pistachio plantations, groves of date palms and fields in which cotton and melons grew. Like apricot and peaches, they were Arab introductions, their cultivation made possible through elaborate irrigation systems.
But even back home in Germany, as we have seen, oriental spices and the dishes in which they were included were certainly known and available. Goods from the trade between Christian Italian merchants from Venice, Genoa and Pisa with the Muslim cities of the eastern Mediterranean started to cross the Alps into southern Germany on a more regular base, and the Crusades reinforced this exchange through continuous contact with the East by diverse social groups over a long period of time, including the occupation of various eastern Mediterranean ports.
Among the select few in Germany with access to aromatic spices and other imported luxuries were the local rulers. Many of them resided in the proverbial castles, Burgen, which had often developed out of former Roman border fortifications (burgi), or were purpose-built solid houses on raised locations that included a keep. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries most of them evolved into small fortified stone-built towns that issued their own coinage, exercised local jurisdiction and collected their own taxes. In times of war enemies would try to starve out these settlements after laying waste to the surrounding area necessary for their subsistence. Castles therefore tended to be permanently well stocked against sieges.
Just as the castle towered over the rest of the surrounding settlements, their lords demonstrated their superiority by indulging in conspicuous consumption of the kind of food indicated by their social status: banquets with enormous roasts in the vast halls of their imposing abodes. According to the somewhat over-romanticized popular view of these times, the aristocracy in their castles practised a chivalric code centred on weapon skills and the mastery of horses; the world of knights, damsels and Minne singers. Aristocratic etiquette required hosts to wine and dine visitors graciously, as depicted by singers and poets such as Walther von der Vogelweide, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg and Wolfram von Eschenbach. Meals were an occasion for hosts to demonstrate power and superiority, along with music and other entertainment, followed by tournaments, which were watched by ladies from the windows above.
The palas, the main building where guests were entertained, consisted mostly of a large hall with a fireplace or open chimney on the ground floor. Furniture was simple, sparse and flexible. For banquets, walls would be covered with tapestries and carpets laid out, and long tables would be set up with loose planks on trestles (an important change from the Roman tradition of eating food in a reclining position), so that at the end of the meal the table would literally be lifted, in German die Tafel aufheben. The table was covered with a cloth which could also serve as a communal napkin. Before and after the meal handwashing was a ritual with special water jugs and basins. Beakers and bowls were often shared, whereas (at least in noble households) everybody had their personal spoon. Plates were rare and consisted of flat wooden boards, though trenchers made of stale bread cut in thick slices were more usual. These weren’t necessarily eaten, or at least not by those who used them as plates, but were frequently passed on to the lower folks in the servant quarters or as alms to the poor. In these elite circles grain consumption took the form of bread or dainty rolls made with white flour that were freshly baked every day. The oldest German manual on table manners from the mid-thirteenth century confirmed that a good meal wasn’t complete without good bread and wine.1
Not only the tableware but the composition and extensiveness of meals depended on social rank and means. The Church ate well. When in 1303 a bishop visited the town of Weissenfels near Leipzig for a church inauguration, he did not go hungry. The menu he enjoyed was festive, luxurious and well spiced:
Egg soup with saffron, peppercorns and honey – mutton with onions – roast chicken with plums – stockfish with oil and raisins – bream baked in oil – boiled eel with pepper – smoked herring (bückling), roasted, with Leipzig mustard – boiled fish, made sour – a baked barbel – small birds fried in lard – a pig’s leg with cucumbers.2
Around the same time as the bishop’s feast, the menu served to the canons of the Hildesheim convent was somewhat more sober but still not exactly a pauper’s meal, with plenty of meat.
They were seated at three long tables, provided with two bowls with warm or cold water according to the season and towels, and a bell was rung three times. The Bishop’s vicar said the Benedictate and each of them was presented with a bread roll of which they each cut a two finger thick slice for alms and put them on one heap. A pupil handed each one cup of wine and one of beer. The meat dishes consisted of a roast, lamb meat, Magenwurst [stomach stuffed like a sausage] and headcheese. If pork was served, a bowl of mustard was set between every two covers, and for mutton, a salt cellar. Cabbage was usually served for vegetables, and the leftovers were distributed among the pupils and servants.3
It is something of a literary cliché that the aspirations of richer peasants were symbolized by their lust for chicken and white bread instead of their forefathers’ gruel. When the son in the late thirteenth-century poem Helmbrecht declared that he would eat nothing but bread made from fine white flour and leave the father to eat oats, he was revolting against the ordo, the God-given social order which applied to all; the reader understands that he will come to grief. Many of our modern prejudices about crude medieval table manners might indeed be based on those derogatory stories in which culinary (and therefore social) transgressions were ridiculed or severely punished.
Until the middle of the twelfth century, serving enormous amounts of food and entertaining large groups was an indication of elevated social rank. Thereafter, possibly because the lower classes could increasingly afford enough to satisfy their hunger, overly hearty eating was frowned upon by the aristocracy as suitable only for the common man. An educational epic from around 1300 urged to avoid ‘herr frass und herr schlund’, Sir Greedy and Sir Gulp.4 What might possibly be the first attempt in the Western world to deal with the effects of gluttony with the help of a surgeon’s knife took place at the end of the twelfth century, though the unfortunate object of medical intervention, the Markgraf Dedo of Wettin, did not survive the procedure.5 In a countertrend many a merry folk song praised gluttony as an alternative to the restrained Minnesang ideal, naming individual dishes and including peasant food such as offal and garlic sausages.
For the aristocracy more refined means of social distinction were needed than ostentatious consumption. Among these were table manners; meals became more regulated and ritualized. In Wolfram von Eschenbach’s early thirteenth-century romance Parzival, the hero’s bad table manners and inability to control his appetite had to be slowly tamed, symbolizing his lack of education. In time Parzival learned to share food and distribute it evenly in a more civilized manner. Besides a sumptuous and highly ritualized table setting, the ceremonial meal in front of the Grail was depicted as including many beautiful maidens, precious stones and metals, with scribes assigned to prevent their theft by checking quantities.
Plates and beakers made from precious metals were a vital part of a rich castle’s equipment and were displayed on buffet tables as status symbols. The oldest German inventory of such tableware dates from the twelfth century and had the Neuenburg castle boasting of ‘six silver gobelets with lids and five silver tumblers without lids, three cups with lids and four without, a silver knife and two silver spoons. Altogether there were sixteen silver containers.’6
So what was served from these sumptuous vessels placed ‘before the Grail’? ‘I will be quick in brevity,’ the poet said, much to the food historian’s frustration, ‘with courtesy they took from before the Grail dishes wild and tame, this man his mead, that man his wine, as his custom would have it – mulberry wine, sinopel, claret.’7 With the sum total of the information delivered, it is worth noting that Sinôpel and klâret were white and red spiced wine and the ‘dishes’ (spîse) have been interpreted as meat from both domesticated and wild animals (Chrétien de Troyes, on whose unfinished earlier Perceval Wolfram undoubtedly based his work, had those present eating a peppered leg of venison).8
From the thirteenth century onwards personal knives were carried as ‘cutlery’, but a trancheur or carver would cut up the larger meat pieces following a highly elaborate technique, working within view of the guests at the table. The trancheur was also in charge of passing special bread or pastries around on a flat, square knife. The service of food developed into an increasingly complex procedure, with servants sometimes kneeling or even working from horseback, and guests seated only on one side of the long table. Service was overseen by the Truchsess (senechal or master of ceremonies), himself a high-ranking noble who entered bearing a mace, followed by the highest steward and the highest Mundschenk, or cupbearer, who in turn each commanded a whole regiment of servants. This order of precedence (the rigmarole of which lives on in high-class restaurants up to the present day) was mirrored behind the scenes by the Küchenmeister, kitchen master, a position established at the imperial German court around 1200, a century and a half after its first appearance in France.9 In castles the kitchen was often located opposite the great hall, making food service one long procession across the courtyard.
One of the earliest European recipe collections from the twelfth century in northern Germany implies that cooking (baking and brewing were usually done in a separate building) generally involved a griddle, gridiron, pots and pans. The kitchen equipment, besides dishes, further included cloths, casks for storage, mortar and pestle, knives, spoons and a spit. In the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries pokers, wooden tongs, bellows, tripods, kettle hooks and large cooking vessels made from bronze, brass and copper tin were added, as well as iron frying pans and earthen hoods to cover embers during the night as a precaution against fire. Most dishes and pots for storing, serving and cooking directly on embers, as well as in ovens, were of earthenware. This could lend an earthen taste to food, which new studies suggest might have been considered desirable and actively sought after. Glazed stoneware was produced in Germany from the beginning of the fourteenth century. It required much higher temperatures for kiln firing and hence more wood to produce, making it more expensive.
Manuals on how to behave at table were first directed at children but soon became popular among adults as well. Many of the rules were concerned with basic hygiene. Here is the poet Tannhäuser in Germany’s oldest such manual: do not drink too much, don’t complain about the food, don’t make any noise while eating, don’t put the bones back into the serving bowl, don’t use your fingers for the mustard or sauce, don’t blow your nose into the tablecloth or your hand, don’t blow into a hot drink and don’t throw yourself over the table during the meal.10 The necessity of such advice seems to reinforce the prejudice that medieval Germans lacked refinement. But it is worth remembering that forks did not yet exist, that knives and spoons were mostly used for serving and that bowls and beakers were often shared. The elaborate table rituals could also be extremely confusing for ambitious social climbers, since there was much more for them to keep in mind. It was considered important to arrange tables and chairs in the appropriate way, just as the seating plan had to reflect the guests’ social rank. This was particularly difficult to achieve, as several criteria had to be balanced. The round table of King Arthur was a tactical decision designed to avoid what could easily be the cause of feuding. Some accounts of the time describe men and women as seated separately; others in pairs. At some point small tables were considered more elegant than large ones: Parzival, for instance, mentioned 100 small tables, each accommodating four knights. A work from the mid-thirteenth century listed thirteen guidelines for a successful table arrangement (all perfectly reasonable from a contemporary point of view), of which only three are concerned with food, advising diversity and tastiness, with no fatty or ordinary dishes but something choice, light and delicious. There should also be a good variety of wines. Besides this, the location, the time and length of the meal, the servants’ manners, the abundance of candles and the musicians’ accomplishment were considered decisive. Additional advice made clear that it was unacceptable to ask one’s guests for a financial contribution to the banquet and declared it the host’s duty to show a smiling face throughout the occasion.11
It is tempting to imagine that a peasant’s meal was in complete contrast to the splendours enjoyed by the wealthy. The diet of the peasantry would certainly have been based on cereals – indeed, in some regions our Neolithic gruel would remain a staple dish until well into the twentieth century. But besides that, it now involved a stew, with mainly cabbage, occasionally a little meat, turnips and kumpost – salt-cured vegetables, usually sauerkraut. Depending on the region, millet might have been included, along with sour beer, hemp, lentils and beans. Coarse dark bread made from oats, barley or rye might have been on the table as well. The exact composition is uncertain, since written evidence is sparse and what there is has to be taken with a good pinch of salt, as food in poems and songs of the time often served to define social standing and the associated prejudices towards the lower classes. Aristocrats were stereotypically presented as enjoying dainty feasts of game, fish and white bread with imported, expensive delicacies such as rice, spices and/or sugar, while peasants ate whatever there was – the rough fuel-food of the field worker. But just as nobles were a very complex social group, peasants could be rich or poor, free or bonded. On top of that, it is easy to forget that rural life was strongly dependent on the natural cycle of the seasons as well as logistic and economic constraints. On farms and in villages, rain and sunshine, ploughing and harvesting made for fasting and feasting, quite apart from dietary rules instigated by the Church. Sunday was not only for churchgoing but was as much for catching up with urgent tasks as it was for socializing or merrymaking.
Throughout the high Middle Ages, as the economy in general prospered, regional food preferences began to emerge much more clearly. While rye was favoured in the north and east, the west was dominated by wheat growing and the southwest specialized in spelt, also harvested green and dried as Grünkern (which has currently seen a revival). Field crops and fruits came into more extensive cultivation and vineyards crept up hillsides, especially along the Rhine and the Neckar. Different forms and levels of cultivation could be found within short distances according to natural conditions. One example from around 1300 is a very basic form of slash-and-burn agriculture surviving in the higher Eifel region, whereas not far down in the Rhine valley, the Rheingau produced fruit, grain, grapes and nuts with ‘wondrous fertility and speed’.12 But even the Eifel region was not a uniformally structured landscape. The abbot of Prüm in the Eifel chronicled conditions in his region in 1222: ‘329 years have passed . . . many woods have been cleared, many villages been built, the tithes been increased . . . many mills have been erected, many vineyards been installed as well as endless lands cultivated.’13
Wolf Helmhardt von Hohberg, Georgica Curiosa (Nuremberg, 1682–1716), Book 7: Agriculture. Fenced cabbage gardens beyond the city walls.
Besides structural organization, many other factors combined to make agricultural food production more efficient. The amount of iron used for agricultural equipment vastly increased, particularly iron parts on ploughs and shoes for horses. The harness, generally used from the eleventh century onwards, was a vital innovation since it allowed the use of horsepower. A single horse had the same strength as a pair of oxen, although a horse was more expensive both to acquire and keep, requiring oats for feed. In addition, when too old to work, oxen were prized as a source of food. They were less liable to diseases and less temperamental than horses. They were yoked up in pairs, up to four in front of one plough. However, for small farmers and in areas where dairy farming, pastoral agriculture and husbandry were mixed, the harnessed horse was more versatile, being used for traction as well as personal travel. Horses also fetched a good price from the army in times of war.
By 1300 in some water-rich regions almost every village had its own water mill. This also influenced freshwater fish supplies. Contrary to common belief, aquaculture in Germany was not a Roman legacy and there is no evidence for fish culture in the early Middle Ages, even in monasteries. But mills regulated streams with dammed-in lakes as power reservoirs and this created new habitats of warm, standing water, often with high nutrient-content because of the disposal of human and animal waste. As Christian fasting laws combined with population growth, fish was in strong demand. With no refrigeration, fresh marine fish could only be transported up to 150 km inland. This led to an important market for salted herring and stockfish, dried cod, but both were regarded as less desirable than fresh fish. Prices for local wild fish rose and they became an elite foodstuff – in fifteenth-century towns fish was three to five times more expensive than beef. Artificial fishponds (instead of just holding tanks) were built from 1150, with lay landowners following the monastic example. In particular the common carp, though not a native, was very well suited to the newly created habitat. An omnivore and bottom-feeder, it prospered in warm, turbid, slow or still waters, growing faster than the native bream, tolerating low oxygen levels and capable of surviving for a few days out of water if kept cool and damp during transport. From then on aquaculture in ponds steadily moved west and north, and with it the carp. It is still traditionally served on Good Friday or New Year’s Eve.14
It is estimated that the German population grew from eight to fourteen million between 1200 and 1320 (reflecting the general development in Europe). This was made possible by the significant land area under cultivation, with all the best soils cleared by about 1200.15 Along the coast, marshes were drained to create new land. In 1106 the archbishop of Hamburg brought in Dutch settlers for this purpose, just as Dutch engineers in the seventeenth century in Bordeaux would expand the region’s vineyards. The newcomers were promised land in return for one-eleventh of all field crops raised and one-tenth of the sheep, pigs, goats and geese, as well as honey and flax. They were, however, required to pay a sum on St Martin’s day for keeping a foal and a calf.16
So-called ‘blue’ carp (prepared with vinegar), a popular dish to the present day, from the gdr cookbook Kochen (Leipzig, 1983).
In the Slavic east of Germany colonialization was undertaken by Cistercian monks and the peasantry, mostly from the Rhineland, followed by craftsmen and merchants. Among the first of these new Christian peasants were Franks who established themselves near Merseburg in 1104.17Many Slavic rulers converted to Christianity, often intermarrying with the German nobility and adopting their culture, whereas the Lausitz region near Cottbus remains a Slavic enclave to this day. Assarting – clearing forest land for cultivation – was hard work and the cultural leap from the Rhineland to Slavic surroundings certainly not without problems, but the attraction was great since it offered peasants the chance to work their own land. As on the coast, the new settlers were given privileges to encourage loyalty. They were also rewarded by the initial fertility and ensuing high yields of the new land, thanks to the ‘virgin’ soils enriched by ashes from burned woodland. Spandau, today a district of Berlin, together with Brandenburg represented the most important Slavic strongholds before and after the German conquest in the tenth century, situated at an intersection of important waterways and trade routes. In the twelfth century Spandau came under German rule, the Slavic upper class east of the Elbe was partly assimilated and the eastern regions rapidly incorporated into international trade networks, with rye from the Berlin region becoming available in Hamburg and Flanders (although at the start volumes were not very high).
Slavic influences added another facet to the landscape of German food. In contrast to the generous attention given to French and Italian culinary influences, these have often been neglected. Buckwheat, a fast-growing pseudocereal used for making pancakes and gruel rather than bread (since it lacks gluten), was probably introduced by the Slavs. First mentioned in Germany in the late fourteenth century, buckwheat is thought to have travelled west from its central Asian origins with the Mongols in the thirteenth century along with another modest member of the knotweed family, rhubarb, whose root was highly valued in classical medicine and traded from China. Buckwheat’s virtues are that it does well on poor, acidic soils and is useful for bees as a source of nectar. Once established in the Slavic regions, it spread west through lower Saxony, Westphalia and into the Eifel region. The Alsace physician Melchior Sebizius in his major dietary work De Alimentorum facultatibus, published in 1650, mentioned buckwheat 150 times, testament to its widespread popularity at the time (in the eighteenth century it would be largely replaced by the equally undemanding but more productive and nourishing potato).18 The Slavic influence is also noticeable linguistically in words such as Bemme, bread spread with butter; Graupen, pearl barley; Gurke, cucumber; and Jause, snack, all going back to the fifteenth or sixteenth century.
As the population grew rapidly, towns multiplied in the patchwork of sovereign princely states of various size and structure. Being aristocratic and living in a castle made for more sumptuous meals, and urban folks also generally tended to live better than country people. But just as not everybody who lived in a castle was sitting at the high table with the knights, social differences among the urban population were considerable. In many cases a few prominent and wealthy families came to dominate urban societies in a patriarchy with distinct privileges and responsibilities. Just like castles, towns were continually under threat from invaders. Local rulers were responsible for keeping the peace within their own territories, but it was considered both normal and morally acceptable to wage war on each other. Whoever had the will, the weaponry and the power was entitled to proclaim war against another for the flimsiest of reasons, mostly for personal gain in wealth and power. Against this background large towns surrounded by walls and fortifications represented places of safety in potentially hostile surroundings. As a result, townsfolk built up substantial food reserves. Underground wooden pipes outside the city’s walls were used for water supplies, their exact location kept strictly secret for security reasons. Many households dug their own wells; others shared them.
Contaminated drinking water was a serious health hazard. The problem was mainly inadequate garbage disposal, a duty devolved to each individual household according to strict principles: rubbish had to be dealt with without irritating the neighbours and, if at all possible, on the household’s own land. Most houses had their own latrines and rubbish pits. These had to be emptied regularly by specialized workmen and the contents removed into rivers, preferably during the cold months. At the time this was thought to be a perfectly good solution, since it was believed that illness was transferred through the air in the form of what was known as miasma, a theory dating back to classical times. Latrines were insulated but mostly situated at the same level as the wells. From the late twelfth century on, public disposal trenches for used waters (excluding human waste) were managed by city employees. Two centuries later, as more and more city streets were paved and water provision and garbage disposal had to function on limited space, councils started to organize refuse disposal at separate sites.19
Vegetable gardens played an important role in adding to a town’s supplies. Lübeck’s Vergartung was first mentioned in the thirteenth century, likewise Hamburg and the Altes Land, Cologne, Bonn and the Vorgebirge, Breslau and the Kräuterei. As trade between towns increased, urban dwellers tended to be less self-sufficient. However, the Ackerbürger, citizens who made their living working fields just outside the town walls, were still active until the eighteenth century, and urban gardeners included the young Goethe’s grandparents in Frankfurt.
Open fireplaces were gradually being replaced by ovens, adding to general comfort. An increasingly common innovation was an early central heating system in the form of a Kachelofen, tiled stove, often with green glazed bowl-shaped tiles that spread the heat more efficiently through the room. But the fire risk in towns was still high due to the building density. Houses were commonly built from wood and were often half-timbered, with wooden shingles for roofs. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, town councils increasingly issued decrees that any houses not built entirely of stone should at least have the ground floors made of stone. Firewood was mostly of lesser quality, emitting quite a lot of smoke, which herbs such as thyme were supposed to counteract. In urban houses the simple hearths that served as light and heat sources as well as for cooking tended to disappear around 1200, whereas in rural areas multifunctional central fireplaces were common until about 1500. In these the smoke escaped through a skylight in the roof, which often served the dual purpose of smoking meat and other food (although kitchen design and equipment varied regionally, and archaeological finds are often difficult to interpret).
As the infrastucture improved, long-distance travel became easier, encouraging business activities (followed inevitably by taxes, customs and tolls). Bridges and supporting walls on steep slopes were built, roads were mended and surfaces were improved with wood, gravel or paving. Shoed horses could draw four-wheeled carts as well as barges along cleared riverbanks. The concentrated demand of towns and cities for food led in time to networks of market-driven agricultural production and trade in the surrounding country, systems which were in a constant state of expansion or contraction, not least in response to changes in climate. This explains the proliferation of intense pasture zones on the Marschen, the marshlands on the North Sea, and on the foothills of the Alps in the south of Germany where in the twelfth and thirteenth century numerous Schwaigen (an old term for dairy estates) were established. Market rights were usually granted to towns within half a day’s travel of each other. While larger fairs were held only on special occasions (the first such trade fair was recorded in 1240 in Frankfurt am Main), more regular markets were held weekly. On market day towns were packed with traffic, with vendors and buyers streaming in from the countryside on foot and with hand carts, pack animals or oxen-drawn carts as well as on horseback, overwhelming the town centre with noises, smells and the cries of hawkers selling their wares. The peasantry generally confined themselves to short journeys to market by cart or on foot, with two days’ travel the greatest distance covered, while hawkers were prepared to travel much greater distances. For accomodation everybody stuck to their own social group: merchants often stayed with their business partners, although Herbergen or public inns became more common, with certain trade guilds establishing their own inns.23
A culinary place in time: Wurstkuchl and Bratwurstglöcklein
In towns street food was common. The Wurstkuchl in Regensburg, directly on the Danube, competes with the Bratwurstglöcklein in Nuremberg for the title of the oldest bratwurst eatery. The Wurstkuchl (www.wurstkuchl.de) goes back to the 1130s. During the building of the city’s old stone bridge, a Garküche or hot food stall was attached to the city’s wall to provide food for the workers. After the bridge was finished, the stall stayed on to serve the dock workers around the big riverbank crane, as well as the stone masons and their colleagues who were building the Regensburg cathedral (started in the 1260s). Back then it probably served all kinds of simmered and boiled dishes, with its specialization on bratwurst being documented only at the end of the eighteenth century.
However, roasted sausages were very popular during the Middle Ages. A council decree in Regensburg in 1406 had meat inspectors checking on sausage making; only fresh and cleaned casings were to be used, and only pork, mixed with chopped pork fat, for the filling.20 It appears that at the time, as today, sausages were less expensive than fresh meat. Although sausage makers formed a separate guild, butchers seem to have produced sausages too, and on special occasions immense ones were proudly presented to the public. A report from Königsberg from 1650 described one made from 81 pork hams for Christmas 1601 (with numerous beer barrels emptied by the butchers involved in its making).21
Although the slim homemade sausages roasted on a charcoal grill and served on homemade sauerkraut at the Wurstkuchl are delicious, ‘Regensburger’ designates a scalded pork sausage the locals call Knacker, which is much thicker and can be traced back to the nineteenth century. The term ‘Rostbratwurst’, sausage roasted on a griddle, is mostly associated with Nuremberg, where the Bratwurstglöcklein claims the year 1313 as its origin (die-nuernberger-bratwurst.de). A publication from 1754 declared that the best bratwurst was to be had in Nuremberg, Franconia and Swabia, because elsewhere too much meat from old animals was used. The author recommended that suckling pigs destined for sausages should be fed with sour milk for twelve to sixteen weeks.22
Postcard from 1933 showing a fantasy of the historic Bratwurstglöcklein stall. The card was part of a promotional series issued by the gingerbread company Haeberlein-Metzger, an early example of marketing regional products.
Another legitimate claim to a considerable historical past in terms of sausages comes from Thuringia. Larger than both those from Nuremberg or Regensburg, Thüringer sausages were first mentioned in a monastery bill in 1404, and the oldest recipe for them dates back to 1613.
Peasant woman and market crier selling milk, butter milk and butter fat in Nuremberg. Undated, probably late 18th century.
The Christian Crusades certainly weren’t a holiday trip, even for those nobles leading them in full attire with flags flying. It is amazing how many people this international project, which went on for two centuries starting in the 1090s, attracted and from how wide a social spectrum. Provisions were scant and plundering was regarded as a lifesaving necessity. There are reports of famines in the army which obliged Christians to eat ‘the putrid bodies of the Saracens’. There is much discussion among historians on cannibalism, which crept up again and again in reports on the hardships endured during the Crusades – was it just a literary hyperbole or could it actually have happened?24 Just to add a footnote, the terms heidnisch (literally pagan) and Saracen in Germany, as in other countries, were applied to food with the meaning ‘exotic’ or ‘foreign’. However, the dishes they denominated often had little in common with the originals, but acquired their titles through the inclusion of ingredients imported from the Islamic world or because they were for some reason considered foreign.
The most tangible target of the Crusaders’ religious zealotry even before distant shores were reached were the Jews, perceived forever as ‘the others’ and heretics, in spite of all the convenience they offered through moneylending. Whereas Christian food laws centred on lean and fast days, the more general Jewish kashrut laws were about right and wrong foods. Instead of the Christian Eucharist, Jews went on to celebrate Pessach, remembering the liberation and exodus from Egypt. This ran against the deep symbolism of communal meals and offered excuses enough to persecute this minority. Cologne, Worms and Mainz saw especially heinous behaviour in spite of well-documented attempts by local bishops to protect their own populations of Jews. In 1074 the Church Council of Rouen extended the prohibition of communal meals to Jewish wet nurses in Christian households, although the bishop of Speyer, obviously either a much more tolerant or perhaps just a more realistic man, explicitly allowed this in his 1090 declaration of privileges for the Jewish community of his town. During the following centuries, official church doctrine ruled against Christian wet nurses in Jewish households, and Jews were not allowed to run food stalls, nor to sell food to Christians.
Hildegard von Bingen, Book of Divine Works, Part One, Vision Four: Symmetries: World, Body and Soul, 1165.
Medieval texts often use the Latin verb reficere for eating (which explains the use of the word Refektorium, refectory, for the monks’ dining hall): eating was considered a restorative act. Religious and medical ideas at the time were intricately linked and it is almost impossible to underestimate the influence medical thinking of the time had on what and how people ate. One of the key figures in early medicine was Hildegard von Bingen, the most influential German nun of the Middle Ages. A twelfth-century Benedictine abbess and mystic from a noble family in Bermersheim near Alzey, she lived in a convent from an early age and went on to found two monasteries on the Rhine and Nahe. Her books, letters and sermons were based on intensely spiritual visions inspired by a profound knowledge of religious, medical, botanical, musical and cosmological matters. She corresponded with many of the leading figures of her time and took several long trips along the Rhine to preach in public, thereby disseminating her strong convictions on spirituality, politics, ethics and medicine. In all her works Hildegard addressed many of the everyday questions women asked, touching on little-discussed subjects such as sexuality and illness. Her medical works Physica and Causae et Curae represent the high point of what is known as Klostermedizin or monastic medicine, setting the important precedent of describing plants by using their vernacular names. Hildegard’s approach combined popular medical knowledge with the humoral theory spread by the medical teachings in Salerno, Paris, Bologna, Montpellier and Perugia.
The ideas of humoral theory are not only essential in order to understand medieval cuisine but can be traced in Germans’ foodways right up to the present day. In this system the microcosm was held to mirror the macrocosm. The four humours – melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic and choleric – matched the four elements: fire (hot and dry), water (cold and wet), earth (cold and dry) and air (hot and wet). These in turn corresponded to the four bodily fluids: yellow bile, phlegm, black bile and blood. With these elements and humours being present in all things to varying degrees, human well-being (spiritual and bodily) depended on a balanced, temperate state roughly defined as warm and moist. Any imbalance could lead to illness. As with Ayurvedic medicine, the system focused almost entirely on the prevention of imbalance and the belief that an excessive ‘temperament’ could be tempered through diet. While chopping or puréeing guaranteed a good blend and digestibility, it was understood that cooking changed the nature of a foodstuff, with colouring an additional option to render something more suitable for a certain person or occasion. Some ingredients were inherently imbalanced and needed tempering. If this sounds absurdly superstitious to contemporary ears, it suddenly turns into perfectly familiar culinary wisdom when we hear Hildegard’s advice on lettuce, which was considered excessively ‘cold’ but was tempered – that is, rendered more wholesome – by a vinegar dressing.
Pregnant women, wet nurses and infants were considered as belonging to the same category as the elderly and convalescents. All were considered ‘neutral’, by which is meant that they were between health and illness, a condition which required the strengthening, appetizing foods thought to increase the substance of the body without altering its humoral composition. Thus light and delicate, ‘tempered’ food was recommended during pregnancy, such as kid, chicken, partridge or soft-boiled eggs, while bitter or pungent foods, such as capers, lupins (a legume) or sesame seeds, were to be avoided. Pregnant women should not eat too much at a time, and were instructed to drink only a little white wine diluted with water, or clear red wine. Wet nurses, it was written, should avoid sharp, constipating or pungent foods such as onions, garlic, vinegar and pepper, and were likewise instructed not to drink strong, undiluted wine. Their diet should be moderate in quantity, but of good-quality ingredients, such as lamb, capon, hen, chicken, partridge, pheasant and veal, mixed with egg yolk, warm goat’s milk and sugar. Children of half a year to a year old should be given mild food such as rice cooked in milk, breadcrumbs soaked in chicken broth or the soft breast meat of birds and chicken. Children, it was instructed, were not to be breastfed for longer than two years and were to be weaned slowly when they began walking. Between the ages of six and ten, children were considered mature enough to progress to coarser food.25
Hildegard recommended fasting and the eating of green things, viriditas, for vitality. Her favoured grain was spelt, and she strongly advised against the consumption of pork, eel, duck, eggs, plums and strawberries (on the grounds that these last fruits grow too low and capture too much harmful morning dew – something that admittedly does not sound too plausible to modern readers). Although Hildegard didn’t write what might be described as an actual cookbook, she included many preparations for numerous ingredients in her works, such as the one on lettuce. Some were copied and thus further disseminated in following centuries by compilers such as Meister Eberhard, a court chef in fifteenth-century Bavaria, who incorporated long passages from Hildegard’s Physica into his own popular cookbook.26
Thus the first written recipes in German appear in medical texts, Regimen sanitatis, and to this day, as mentioned earlier, the word Rezept is used in German for a culinary instruction as well as a medical prescription. Besides Hildegard, one of the earliest dietetic manuals in German is the twelfth-century Breslauer Arzneibuch, which relied heavily on Constantin Africanus’ Salerno translations and contained several culinary recipes for lentils, bean soup and poached eggs. Konrad von Eichstätt and Arnold von Bamberg wrote two other very influential Regimen, both published first in Latin and circulated widely for 200 years among members of the medical profession as well as an educated lay audience. They exerted a Mediterranean influence on the culinary ideas of upper-class Germans. Arnold von Bamberg’s work was probably written in 1317 near Avignon and was certainly heavily influenced by his time spent in Italy and France. He provided 40 somewhat international recipes, but interestingly enough listed fried or boiled apples, grapes boiled in almond milk and figs boiled in water or almond milk as popular German dishes, claiming that a cheese soup (actually cheese cooked in water and eaten with bread) was a dish ‘frequently used in Germany’. Konrad von Eichstätt, a southern German physician trained in either France or northern Italy, clearly intended to address his own countrymen, explaining among other things that the truth of the statement ‘one German drinks more than two Latins’ could be attributed to the German love of alcohol caused by the harsh northern climate.27 He included eleven recipes for Mediterranean dishes adjusted to the requirements of northern palates and cooking habits, and, in a similar manner to Hildegard von Bingen, gave a lengthy classification of foodstuffs according to their suitability for certain sensitivities in order to achieve a harmonious balance of both body and spirit.
Although remaining closely connected to dietetics and medicine, written recipes began to take on a life of their own. Finally we get a more thorough idea of what people were eating – or at least which preparations they thought important enough to keep a precise record of. The early material in this field is rare, as those who cooked were mostly illiterate and in any case many kinds of knowledge, including culinary knowhow, were usually transmitted orally. But as paper became more widely available and affordable, it was also used for recording recipes. They reinforce our earlier impressions and assumptions: whereas gluttony was one of the Seven Deadly Sins, fine cooking emerged as a means to social distinction.
Daz Buoch von guoter Spise (The Book of Good Food, long considered the oldest known German cookbook), written around 1350, was undoubtedly too precious to be used in the kitchen, living instead in the library of its owner, Michael de Leone. Leone was a patrician lawyer who served as the highest notary to the bishop of Würzburg and can thus be assumed to be a man of considerable wealth and status. The book gives a glimpse as to how the urban upper classes of Würzburg preferred to present themselves: the art of getting ‘great meals from many small things’ is the book’s central message, with thrift praised as a virtue and the use of offal promoted; at the same time, the inclusion of such luxurious goods as white bread, saffron, rice and almonds demonstrated considerable wealth, with local vegetables such as beetroot, beans, cabbage, peas, leeks and turnips playing only a minor role. Frequent mention of chicken not only pointed to a comfortable social situation, but also to an urban setting in which barnyard fowl could be easily kept as a reliable source of fresh meat. Leone’s recipes include a sophisticated well-spiced sweet-sour chicken dish with pears:
Roast a chicken, and fry the crust of buns. Fry this in lard until it turns golden, and cut bite-sized pieces as you do for bread pudding. Cut the chicken up small, and roast six pears. Make a sauce of wine and honey, then grind spices in it, pepper and anise, and make a crêpe of five eggs. Break them into a pan, then place each one in it separately, and fold the crêpe. Cover the pan with a bowl, then turn the pan upside down, cut through the top of the dough, pour in the sauce, and don’t spill any on the dough. These are called Chickens à la Rheingau. And serve.28
Early recipes such as this one often assumed a lot of technical knowledge, making their logic somewhat difficult to disentangle for twenty-first-century cooks. But even if we are not completely able to imagine the dish in its finished form, it sounds intriguing and delicious. It also confirms that the Rheingau stood for sweet fruit and wine. Another noteworthy practice is the medieval habit of thickening sauces and dishes with bread (something worth experimenting with in one’s own cooking!). This is before the introduction of either the potato or corn (maize), later on much used sources of starch, and dairy products like cream were highly perishable due to the lack of refrigeration.
An alternative to dairy, and a real fad of the time since it was also suitable for essentially vegan fast days, was ‘milk’ made from ground almonds soaked in water. This preparation had the additional advantage that it kept much better than animal milk and could also be turned into a butter that did not need salt to preserve it. As with certain spices and early imports of sugar, almonds were first seen in a medicinal context before they could be accepted in the kitchen, and Konrad von Eichstätt may have played an important part in introducing almonds and almond milk to Germany by including them in his dietary advice. By the middle of the fourteenth century, almonds and almond milk had become an integral part of upper-class cuisine in Germany and Daz Buoch gives nineteen recipes involving almond milk. Arnold von Bamberg was the first German writer to mention blancmanger, one of the most frequently recurring medieval dishes. It was usually white, hence its name – literally white food. According to humoral theory, white was a colour that was particularly suited to infants and invalids, but sometimes could be coloured with saffron or violets. It always involved almond milk and rice, but the variations were endless, using chicken on feast days and fish, especially pike, on fast days. Blancmanger’s exact definition is the subject of endless discussions among food historians, throwing a light on the difficulty of their often painstaking toil to reconstruct food accurately. Medieval recipes were often copied by scribes who were ignorant of culinary matters and misread and subsequently misspelled dishes’ names or ingredients. Arnold called it alba comestio sive blantmaser; in Daz Buoch it appeared as blamensir. Historians debate whether the brouet d’Allemagne in Taillevent’s Le Viandier and the brouès d’Allemaigne in the Ménagier de Paris (from c. 1300 and the late fourteenth century respectively) were, in spite of their differences, actually based on the blamensir in Daz Buoch, or whether they represent imaginative linguistic deviations.29
The question becomes even more complex in the context of one of the oldest known collections of European culinary recipes written in a vernacular language. The small collection of about 35 recipes survived in four slightly different versions, of which two are in Danish, one in Icelandic and one in Low German. It clearly goes back to an ‘original’, the Libellus de arte coquinaria, which may have been written down in Middle Low German as early as the twelfth century.30 It could be the very earliest record of the recipes and culinary themes that were to flourish throughout the late Middle Ages. The recipes are certainly not by a single author but, as was usual at the time, a compilation or adaptation. The lost original has been reconstructed from surviving manuscripts, of which the German version resurfaced as part of the Mittelniederdeutsches Kochbuch, dated to the fifteenth century.31 These recipes in many ways are further confirmation of international influences at the top of the social pyramid. Obviously meant for someone with substantial means, they are all northern European adaptations of recipes originating in the south. Although the list of ingredients includes neither rice, olive oil, chickpeas nor delicate vegetables such as chard or spinach, it includes various almond preparations, the majority of which were later to be found all over Europe. The exciting thing about the Libellus is the fact that it confirms German cuisine’s link to the north, an essential, but often neglected perspective: the Icelandic version of the manuscript includes a recipe for almond milk curdled with wine or vinegar, pronounced to be ‘as good as skyr’. Skyr is popular in Iceland up to the present day and is very similar to German quark, the lac concretum mentioned by Tacitus.32
Reading these recipes and getting excited about their intricacies, it is easy to forget how small the readership they were aimed at was. Even under regular circumstances, such recipes, with their long lists of luxurious ingredients, were unimaginably distant from the reality of most people’s lives, which at best could be called precarious, with hardship and famine always lurking around the next corner. Hunger is closely woven into Germans’ culinary DNA. For medieval chroniclers fames, or famines, were virtually interchangeable with mortalitas, mortality, or the subsequent epidemics. In addition to natural causes, wars could severely interrupt food production and distribution, as military strategy often involved devastating the agricultural production of the enemy. Periods of famine generally extended over two to three years, since the economy needed longer than a single year to recover, not least because grain production was interrupted as a result of total or partial consumption of seed grain. From 1100 onwards, during the so-called medieval warm period, the climate in Central Europe generally turned milder. Summers were warmer, sometimes extremely warm, and winters were occasionally very much colder than we experience them today. In very hot summers flour – hence bread – was very expensive because mills had no water.33 At the same time, with the wage-earning labour force on the increase, particularly because of the expansion of mining, more and more people were buying their food instead of producing it. The result, in years of poor harvests and other adverse conditions, was a rapid inflation of prices followed by famine.
Though most famines were localized, from 1315 to 1320 a catastrophic subsistence crisis known as the Great Famine affected the whole of northern Europe, creating a situation so protracted and extensive that it was still invoked in chronicles more than a century later. Its impact was especially harsh because the disaster struck when Germany had only just achieved a certain balance of agricultural production and demand after a period of intense population growth.34 The causes of the Great Famine were various. Severe local flooding occurred in 1312 and 1313, and the latter winter was exceptionally cold, leading to regional shortages. By 1314, when Bavaria went to war with Austria, armies were so hungry that a chronicler of the time reported that knights were selling their mounts in exchange for food and drink: ‘And what a wonder! Some knights who were sitting on a magnificently outfitted horse gave the horse and their weapons away for cheap wine; and they did this because they were so terribly hungry.’ The following year saw the start of one of the worst and most sustained periods of bad weather in the entire Middle Ages, a situation scarcely to be anticipated given the overall mildness of the period. Torrential rains and the ensuing floods meant that seedbeds were sodden, crops and pastures went under water, grain rotted, meadows were too wet to be mown, turf was too soggy to be cut, quarries were inundated, buildings and walls were undermined and transport was severely hindered. In regions with light soils severe erosion led to an ‘unheard-of barrenness’. The rain, in addition, leeched nitrates from the soil, triggering plant diseases. A succession of severe winters which caused the Baltic to freeze over were followed by heavy rains in spring, summer and autumn. Skies were recorded as abnormally overcast and the weather unusually cool and windy. Malnutrition led to weakness and a general loss of energy and will: as early as 1316 a Bremen chronicler mentioned a great lethargy afflicting many of his countrymen. In 1317 in western Germany, torrential rains were followed by the harshest winter ever experienced. Thereafter a slight improvement set in, but the winter of 1321 was once again bitterly cold, with the Baltic and parts of the North Sea frozen over. Murrains affected draft and food animals, especially the highly contagious rinderpest. Because of the persistent dampness, hay wouldn’t dry. Salt production, vital for the conservation of meat and fish, was hindered by insufficient sunshine and excessive dampness. Food prices – volatile at best, especially for grain and salt – soared throughout Europe. Wages failed to keep up. Apart from those few who profited from the salt and grain trades or speculated in property, people struggled to make a living and bankruptcies were common. An inscription on a pillar of St Catherine’s church in Oppenheim on the Rhine reminded future generations that when the church was built in 1317, bread had cost four Heller, presumably a very high price.35 Lords with small estates often retreated from direct exploitation and leased farms to richer peasants, a situation that was later reversed when it became obvious that only direct management could secure enough seed grain. There were reports of desperate people feeding on diseased cattle (normally a hygienic taboo) and ‘grazing like cows on the growing grasses of the fields’. Even cannibalism was mentioned, and although this might be the chronicler’s literary device to convey the events’ enormity, we are almost inclined to take his word for it.
Monasteries tried as best they could to feed and care for the growing stream of the poor, orphans, beggars and the weak, increasing alms as far as possible. Hospitals were founded, most notably the Heilig-Geist-Spital in Würzburg in 1319 by a wealthy local patrician. In the northeast the Teutonic Order distributed their grain reserves; their castles, like all garrison towns and frontier villages, were well stocked for sieges. Many towns struggled, however, and made sure to keep their gates closed as rural indigents assembled nearby. Where charity failed, theft increased and riots loomed. Cities hired labourers to gather up corpses for mass burials. Homesteads and settlements were abandoned to what came to be known as Wüstungen, deserted settlements.
In the wake of the Great Famine came the Great Plague. Many of the surviving children had suffered severe malnutrition at a critical age, which might explain the immense toll on a whole generation taken by the plague when it reached Germany in 1349. Thought to have been imported by merchants arriving from the Far East, the Black Death is said to have killed between 10 and 30 per cent of the German population, and was particularly catastrophic in densely populated larger cities such as Hamburg and Cologne. There wasn’t much one could do. Attempts at purifying the air through the use of spices and herbs were considered particularly efficient when the mix included saffron, the most precious of remedies – social status applied in hard times just as much as in good ones. The dramatic decline in the population was followed by an agricultural depression that lasted for about a century. The density of settlements and areas of cultivated land diminished by about one-quarter, with the smallest estates being hit the hardest. But unlike today, the population’s general attitude to the disaster was somewhat similar to that towards famine: miseries were sent by God and you couldn’t do much about them.