FOOD IN MEDIEVAL TIMES
uncommon for their grocery bills to double or triple during Lent. For
the lower classes there was not much alternative to the protein and fat
they usually got from eggs, dairy products, pork fat, and side meat.
Legumes, above all broad beans, were the classic Lenten food for the
poor.
One way for Arab and southern European foodstuffs and dishes to
become known in Germany was through the medical community.
Many German physicians received their medical training at the famous
medical schools of Salerno, Montpellier, or Bologna, where they ex-
perienced firsthand the Mediterranean cuisine influenced by the
Arabs. Moreover, their medical textbooks were Latin translations of
works written and compiled by such Arab authors as Avicenna,
Rhazes, and Averroës, who not only included foodstuffs used in Arab
cooking but also a variety of Arab dishes, especially those that were be-
lieved to be beneficial for the preservation of health. Two German
physicians who in the fourteenth century compiled regimens of their
own from the works of Avicenna, Rhazes, and Averroës were Konrad
von Eichstätt and Arnold von Bamberg.169 Konrad attributes the Ger-
man love for—not to say addiction to—alcohol to the northern cli-
mate. The warming quality of the wine allows people to drink more,
he argues, which is why one German consumes more than twice as
much alcohol as people in southern Europe. Konrad’s regimen con-
tains a handful of simple culinary recipes; half of them he seems to
have copied from his Arab health books, while the other ones he may
have remembered from his student days in Montpellier. Most of the
recipes are for sauces or preparing fish, and feature verjuice, almonds,
and almond milk.
Arnold von Bamberg’s regimen contains an impressive 40 recipes,
and like the recipes provided by Konrad, they tell us little about Ger-
man cuisine at the time, but a lot about the places Arnold visited and
the textbooks he used for his studies.170 What he propagates is primar-
ily French and Italian cuisine. His preferred method of preparing meat
is boiling it and combining it with verjuice, vinegar, or sauces. He also
approves of turning it into aspics, pies, or blanc manger. For fish he
recommends boiling it in water or wine, roasting it on a grill, frying it
in a pan, covering it with dough and baking it in an oven, or prepar-
ing it in aspic. His sauces are the standard sauces found in French
cookbooks, namely white, red, and green sauce. Blanc manger must
have been a fairly common dish in Germany by the fourteenth cen-
tury, because he claims every cook knows how to prepare it. In the
chapter on cheese he lists three dishes that are contained in many Ital-
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