Illusion Foods or Warners

from Food in Medieval Times by Melitta Weiss Adamson

With so much attention being paid to the color and shape of food in the Middle Ages, it should not surprise us to find that over the centuries cooks came up with an ever increasing number of dishes that pretended to be something else, dishes that are sometimes referred to as “pretend-foods” or “imitation food.” One of the possible reasons why such foods evolved may have been the periodic unavailability of foodstuffs. For consumers of the twenty-first century accustomed to buying anything their hearts desire at any time of the year, it may be hard to imagine that for most of human history seasonal cooking was the norm. If a foodstuff was not in season or could not be stored or preserved for future use, the next-best thing diners could do was to make believe they were eating it, by substituting it with something else that was made to look like the real thing. In addition to the “natural” unavailability of food in the Middle Ages, when frozen food did not yet exist, transportation was slow and cumbersome, and trade not nearly as global as it is today, there were the food restrictions imposed by the Christian church for parts of the year. After a long winter with little or no fresh food, the subsequent 40 days of Lent must have left many a believer yearning for a succulent roast. If the cook was able to conjure up a dish that at least visually resembled a roast, even if the taste of the meat substitute was not quite the same, it nevertheless meant that the burden of fasting was alleviated somewhat. Not only was the craving for meat partially met, but since no forbidden foodstuffs were used and no fasting laws broken, the pleasure derived from indulging in imitation meat was a guilt-free one.

Aside from compensating for the lack of a given foodstuff, the imitation food of the period always also displayed a strong sense of playfulness. It is fair to say that in the kitchens of late-medieval Europe the idea of playing with food was elevated to an art form. It was in the creation of a new dish whose composition and presentation contained an element of surprise that the cook could prove the mastery of his craft and demonstrate his artistic talent. As in many other professions of the time, skill, technical know-how, and virtuosity were valued highly in a cook. With an audience that was both well informed and alert, the pressures on the cook to come up with more and more complicated and dazzling creations must have been considerable, especially when the occasion was a festive dinner, or even worse, a festive dinner during Lent.

Medieval cookbooks, which for the most part reflect wealthy upperclass cooking, are full of imitation dishes for Lent, a time when the consumption of warm-blooded animals, dairy products, and eggs was forbidden to Christians. Sometimes it is just a single sentence at the end of a recipe that contains the fast-day variation of a meat dish. This is the case, for instance, with the medieval favorite known as blanc manger, or white dish, which on fast days was to be prepared with pike meat instead of chicken meat. At other times the recipes for imitation dishes are quite elaborate. A fifteenth-century cookbook from northern Germany, written in Low German, provides two detailed recipes for imitation eggs. One uses the shells of chicken eggs to trick the diner into thinking she or he is breaking the fast. The empty shells are to be stuffed with a filling made from ground pike roe (a type of egg acceptable for Lent, one might say), parsley, pepper, saffron, and figs or raisins. The eggs are then put on skewers and grilled. The other recipe is the fast-day version of a medieval crowd-pleaser, the giant egg designed to make dinner guests wonder what fabulous animal could have produced such a marvel. Normally an animal bladder filled with a great number of egg yolks was inserted in a larger bladder filled with egg whites, and then cooked. In the case of the giant egg for lean days, the egg yolk consists of ground pike roe mixed with saffron and chopped figs, and the egg white of pike roe and almonds. Once cooked, the giant Lenten egg is cut in two and sprinkled with sugar and ginger.  In these two examples, fish roe and almonds figure prominently, but fish meat, various other nuts and seeds besides almonds, peas, and bread were also popular ingredients in imitation dishes. Ground almonds, however, were by far the most versatile of ingredients used to prepare a whole range of Lenten foods, from substitutes to cow’s milk, butter, and curds, to cheese, cottage cheese, hedgehogs in different colors, eggs, and egg dishes. Fish meat is shaped into fake roasts, ham, and game birds such as partridges, and fish roe into sausages or bacon. Mincemeat is simulated with chopped almonds and grapes, and cracklings or greaves (the sediment of melted tallow) are made from diced bread.

As the Middle Ages drew to a close, the church began to allow the consumption of eggs and dairy products on the lesser fast days of the year. This relaxing of the rules is reflected in various recipes for imitation roasts that required eggs and butter as ingredients. To give a meat substitute the appearance of roasted meat, the cook had several options. The most popular was to cover the fake roast with ground gingerbread that had first been fried or roasted. Egg white was sometimes used to simulate the barding (interlarding; inserting of fat in lean meat) of a roast that was otherwise made from fish. French cooks came up with the idea of combining salmon and pike meat for imitation ham and bacon by using salmon to represent the pink meat, and pike the fat. At times the diners were fooled by more than just the imitation meat itself. A number of recipes from the period suggest that cooks were also skilled in employing markers to make the illusion even more complete. They would use sauces and broths normally reserved for meat, and not just any meat but the most highly prized of all: venison. There are examples of fake roasts made from fish or crayfish meat, or of sausages made from dolphin meat—which along with barnacle goose and beaver tail was regarded as Lenten food in the Middle Ages—all of them served in a dark and spicy pepper broth that was the hallmark of venison dishes.

Aside from the obvious desire on the part of the diner to have his meat and eat it, too—in other words, to be a good Christian and still forego the rigors of fasting—what we observe here is a game of makebelieve that cooks and dinner guests engaged in. But the Middle Ages did not invent this game, nor were they the last to play it. From ancient Rome several examples of pretend foods have come down to us that were clearly designed to fool the diner. At Trimalchio’s Feast in Petronius’s Satyricon a boar is served that looks ungutted from the outside but when cut open turns out to be filled with delicious sausages. The fact that a number of recipes for this kind of surprise dish can be found in a Roman cookbook from the third century A.D., Apicius’s De re coquinaria (The Art of Cooking), is a strong indication that the boar in the Satyricon was not just the product of a writer’s fertile imagination, but a dish actually prepared by gourmet cooks.73 And if Trimalchio’s wonder dish consisting of a well full of fat fowl, sow’s bellies, a hare sporting Pegasus’s wings, and four figures of flute-playing satyrs pouring a spiced sauce over fishes bears any resemblance to reality, then Roman cooks could easily hold their own against the best royal cooks late-medieval Europe had to offer.

But important impulses for the evolution of pretend foods may have come from outside Europe as well. Medieval Arab cookery, which subscribed to the heavy processing, coloring, and shaping of food much earlier than European cookery, was full of sophisticated dishes that were designed to look like something else. What medieval Europe did was to make such dishes an integral part of lavish banquets. In England these entertaining dishes were known as sotelties, literally “subtleties,” and in France as entremets. The latter word, meaning “between courses,” points to the position such dishes occupied within a multicourse meal. Initially just simple dishes sent to the hall for guests to nibble on as they waited for the next course to arrive, the sotelties or entremets soon became substantially more elaborate and more playful, as cooks began to experiment with unusual colors and color combinations, edible building structures, making cooked food look raw and vice versa, live animals look dead and vice versa, making animals look and act like humans, inventing fabulous creatures, and assembling entire allegorical scenes.

If the medieval French cookbook known as Le Viandier (The Provisioner) by Taillevent is any indication, then the earliest entremets were nothing more than millet porridge, frumenty or wheat porridge, rice, or such lowly ingredients as the livers, gizzards, and feet of poultry cooked and garnished or served in a sauce. All these recipes have one thing in common, however: they contain saffron to give the dishes a golden hue. More sophisticated than these monochrome dishes was the blanc manger that was no longer only a “white” dish, as the name suggests, but was served in two contrasting colors on a plate. Jellies, too, soon became the subject of much experimentation by cooks. With jelly squares in different colors the desired checkerboard effect could be achieved. And, of course, encasing fish, crayfish, and the like in clear jelly made these animals look as if they were still immersed in water, their natural element.

It has been noted that English cooks, in particular, liked to make towers and castles out of dough. Given the strong Italian and Sicilian influence on Anglo-Norman and English cookery, this predilection for edible structures made from dough may have had Italian roots. Cases in point are the famous Parmesan Pies or Parma Pies that were covered in gold or silver leaf and shaped like towers, complete with crenelations and banners at the top. But more than buildings, it was animals that inspired imitation dishes in the Middle Ages. Ground almonds were the basis for hedgehogs that had almond slivers for quills and came in different colors. Alternatively, the meat of fish, fowl, or seafood was often heavily processed and pressed in molds, or stuffed back into the raw skin of the animal. Carrying the theme of “the raw versus the cooked” or “nature versus culture” even further was the idea of returning the prepared meat into the full plumage of a decorative bird such as a peacock or a swan, and mounting the animal on a platter in a lifelike pose. That even cows or deer were mounted in such a fashion shows that in the Middle Ages there were no limits to what an aristocratic cook and his kitchen staff would be willing to tackle in order to impress a dinner party.

When cooks no longer saw the need to return the meat of a cooked animal solely to its own skin, this opened the door for a whole new range of culinary tricks. The plumage of a peacock could be stuffed with a goose, that of a dove with some other farce, and the roasted and coated carcass of the dove placed beside it to miraculously make two doves out of one. Even entirely new animals were invented by imaginative cooks, such as the Cokagrys, a creature half cock, half piglet, found in the English cookbook known as the Forme of Cury (The [Proper] Method of Cookery). And one wonders how medieval diners felt when the sotelties appearing at the table were animals that parodied such human endeavors as going on pilgrimage or riding into battle. The edible pilgrim was either a capon or a pike that was given a roast lamprey as a pilgrim staff, and the knight a cock equipped with paper lance and paper helmet and riding on a piglet.

An even more dramatic special effect was achieved when the animal served on a platter was not only mounted and dressed in a lifelike manner, but also made noises, or breathed fire. In a fifteenth-century French recipe collection, the Vivendier (The Provisioner), we find a recipe for making a dead and roasted chicken sing as if it were alive. This is done by filling the tied neck of the bird with quicksilver and ground sulfur, and then reheating the animal. More common was the practice of having a boar’s head, swan, piglet, or fish breathe fire by combining cotton with camphor or fire-water, that is alcohol, and lighting it. For really grand occasions cooks would assemble a whole range of such edible wonders to form a complete allegorical scene, such as a “Castle of Love,” for instance. In the fifteenth century the edible sotelties and entremets were replaced more and more by inedible decorations that no longer required the skill and imagination of cooks but of artists and craftsmen such as painters, carpenters, and metalworkers. They were now the ones producing the tableaux of mythical and religious figures and scenes, among them the “Lady with the Unicorn,” the “Knight of the Swan,” or the “Lamb of God,” Agnus Dei.