CUISINES BY REGION
boutehors or “sally forth,” that is, spiced wine and various spiced
sweetmeats believed to aid digestion.
The soup was made from ground capon and almond milk, the roast
was a combination platter of kid, duckling, and spring chickens, the
entremets crayfish in jelly, loach fish (a small European freshwater fish,
as a minnow), young rabbits, and pigs, and the dessert frumenty with
venison. The supper was for half the number of diners and contained
more luxurious dishes, among them pasty of two young hares, and two
peacocks, and a dish of minced kid with halved and glazed kid heads.
The items that were not prepared but bought ready-made were the
cinnamon-based sauce cameline, candied orange peel, rose sugar,
white comfits, that is sugar-coated aniseed and the like, hippocras, as
well as 120 flat white loaves and 36 coarse, brown loaves for trenchers
(slices of bread used as plates).
In the households of the French nobility, many of the same food-
stuffs and dishes were eaten that were served at the bourgeois wed-
ding feast. Some were probably eaten at regular meals, too, and not
just on special occasions, or expensive spices like saffron were added to
make the dishes more exclusive. Bread was a staple foodstuff for all
classes, and was commonly used as a thickener in dishes.72 The em-
phasis in the aristocratic kitchen was on local foodstuffs that often
came from the estate itself, such as lamprey, carp, chicken, or rabbit. It
is perhaps surprising to the modern reader that by the fourteenth cen-
tury most of the meat eaten in European castles came from domesti-
cated animals, and only a small percentage from wild animals. Among
the French upper class, pork and poultry were especially popular.
Cured pork in the form of bacon and ham was a staple, and lard was
the preferred cooking fat. Beef was used little in kitchens of the
wealthy, presumably because the medical community considered it
too coarse a meat for the delicate stomachs of the nobility. It does,
however, figure prominently in bourgeois cooking, as the frequent
mention of beef in the Menagier illustrates. What did appear regularly
on the dinner tables of the French upper class, however, was mutton,
of which the shoulder and the leg were favorites, as was mutton bouil-
lon. As the wedding dinner in the Menagier indicates, young animals
in general were highly regarded foodstuffs. The aristocratic counter-
parts to the kid, ducklings, and spring chickens of the bourgeois feast
were lamb, piglet, and kid. Fowl was enormously important in me-
dieval French cooking, mostly the domestic fowl hens, chickens,
capons, ducks, guinea fowl, and geese. Of the wildfowl, pheasants,
partridges, and herons are frequently mentioned in the culinary
105
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