The history of medieval food and cookery has received a fair amount
of attention from the point of view of recipes (of which many
survive)and of the general context of feasts and feasting. It has
never, as yet, been studied with an eye to the real mechanics of
food production and service: the equipment used, the household
organisation, the architectural arrangements for kitchens,
store-rooms, pantries, larders, cellars, and domestic
administration. This new work by Peter Brears, perhaps Britains
foremost expert on the historical kitchen, looks at these important
elements of cooking and dining. He also subjects the many surviving
documents relating to food service household ordinances,
regulations and commentaries to critical study in an attempt to
reconstruct the precise rituals and customs of dinner. An
underlying intention is to rehabilitate the medieval Englishman as
someone with a nice appreciation of food and cookery, decent
manners, and a delicate sense of propriety and seemliness. To
dispel the myth, that is, of medieval feasting as an orgy of
gluttony and bad manners, usually provided with meat that has gone
slightly off, masked by liberal additions of heady spices. A series
of chapters looks at the cooking departments in large households:
the counting house, dairy, brewhouse, pastry, boiling house and
kitchen. These are illustrated by architectural perspectives of
surviving examples in castles and manor houses throughout the land.
Then there are chapters dealing with the various sorts of kitchen
equipment: fires, fuel, pots and pans. Sections are then devoted to
recipes and types of food cooked. The recipes are those which have
been used and tested by Peter Brears in hundreds of demonstrations
to the public and cooking for museum displays. Finally there are
chapters on the service of dinner (the service departments
including the buttery, pantry and ewery) and the rituals that grew
up around these. Here, Peter Brears has drawn a wonderful strip
cartoon of the serving of a great feast (the washing of hands, the
delivery of napery, the tasting for poison, etc.) which will be of
permanent utility to historical re-enactors who wish to get their
details right. Peter Brears was formerly director of the museums at
York and Leeds and has worked all his life in the field of domestic
history. He has written extensively on traditional foods and
cookery in Yorkshire, as well as a groundbreaking illustrated
catalogue of domestic and farmhouse materials in Torquay Museum. He
supervised the reconstruction of several important historical
kitchens, including those at Hampton Court, Ham House, Cowdray
Castle and Belvoir Castle
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