CUISINES BY REGION
Housewives had the choice of buying their food in shops, in the
market, or from hucksters. Much like today, many foods were sold
ready prepared, by pie bakers and cookshops of various kinds that
were at times also in the catering business. Aside from geese, hens, and
capons baked in pastry or without, these cookshops sold many differ-
ent roast meats, among them thrushes, finches, plover, woodstock,
teal (short-necked river duck), pheasant, heron, and bittern (small,
shorter-necked, speckled heron), rabbit, and lamb, as well as sauces
and puddings. Prepared food could also be bought in the many tav-
erns that sold wine and often offered lodging to travelers as well. Ale
was frequently brewed by women known as “alewives” and sold by
hucksters or in alehouses. An alestake (pole in front of an alehouse)
was used as a sign to announce a new brew, which usually came in two
qualities, “double” and “single,” also known as “small ale.”31 Instead
of an alestake, taverns had a pole with leaves, called a “bush,” that pro-
jected from the building to attract customers.
Judging from the city ordinances, the sale of wine in London was
closely regulated; these laws forbade wine sellers to sell both red and
white wine, or sweet wine with any other kind. In medieval England,
as in the rest of Europe, the wine was drunk relatively new, presumably
because it deteriorated fast. Most wine consumed in the British Isles
was a strong red wine from Gascony, but Alsatian, Rhenish, Moselle,
and other German wines were also available, as were Italian, Sicilian,
and Spanish wines. Some of the names under which these imported
wines were known are Riboldi or Rybole, for wine from Rivoglio in
Italy, malvezyn, malvesie, or malvoisie for a malmsey from Crete,
romeney for an inferior malmsey, de la Rivere for a wine from Ribera in
northern Spain, bastard for a sweet Spanish wine, oseye for a sweet
French, Alsatian, or Spanish wine, and vernage or vernaccia for a sweet
wine probably from Italy. Distilled alcohol was by the fourteenth cen-
tury already added to spiced wines in England.
Even if the richer households made extensive use of high-end food-
stuffs, such as dried fruits, spices, premium meats and fish, especially
for their banquets, the meals of the average city dweller were still
rather simple, as the “Act on the Diet and Apparel of Servants” of
1363 illustrates. In it the food for servants of the nobility, artisans, and
tradesmen is described as “meat or fish once a day, the remains of
other foods, milk, cheese, and ‘other provisions’ according to the em-
ployee’s rank.”32 These provisions probably referred to bread, ale, and
some sort of vegetable soup.
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