FOOD AND RELIGION
1. Almond puree with little balls of white bread
2. Fresh fish, boiled
3. Cabbage with fried trout
4. Crayfish cooked in wine, then pureed and sprinkled with cloves
5. Figs cooked in wine with whole almonds
6. Rice cooked with almond milk and decorated with whole almonds
7. Trout boiled in wine
8. Crayfish cooked in wine
9. Shortbread with grapes covered with dough, and sprinkled with icing sugar
10. Different kinds of pears, apples, and nuts46
To increase the variety of meat sources during Lent, medieval minds
came up with some rather unusual classifications of animals. Not only
were the warm-blooded porpoise, whale, and dolphin counted as fish,
but so, more interestingly, was the tail of the beaver, on account of the
fact that it spent a large part of the time in water. According to the
thirteenth-century encyclopedist Thomas of Cantimpré, the beaver
cannot survive for long without holding its tail in water. He argued
that the tail resembles a fish, which is why Christians eat it during Lent
but consider the rest of the body meat.47 Also eaten on fast days was
the barnacle goose. It was believed that rather than laying eggs, the
bird procreated by spontaneous reproduction.48
Such ingenious reclassifications aside, most warm-blooded animals
were still banned from the medieval dinner table on fast days. To sat-
isfy their masters’ cravings for meat, cooks came up with the idea of im-
itation meat dishes. Even if these creations did not always fool the
palate, they nevertheless often did fool the eye of the diner. Found in
medieval cookbooks from across Europe, such dishes frequently used
ground seeds and nuts, especially almonds, as well as fish meat and fish
roe, peas, bread, and various fruits to simulate the shape, color, and
consistency of cooked meat. Of all the ingredients that lent themselves
well to the preparation of imitation meat dishes, ground almonds were
by far the most versatile. They were the basis for “almond milk, a sub-
stitute for cow’s milk, almond butter, curds, cheese, cottage cheese,
white, black, and red hedgehogs (colored almond paste in the shape of
hedgehogs with almond slivers as quills), eggs, and egg dishes such as
verlorene eier.”49 Pike was used for the fast-day version of blanc manger,
but also for imitation meat pies and roasts, often made to resemble
game meat and game birds like partridges. Pike roe, too, was trans-
formed into a host of imitation meat dishes. Mashed peas were a pop-
ular ingredient in simulated roasts, as were chopped grapes and figs.
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