FOOD PREPARATION
substitute the appearance of roasted meat, the cook had several op-
tions. The most popular was to cover the fake roast with ground gin-
gerbread that had first been fried or roasted. Egg white was sometimes
used to simulate the barding (interlarding; inserting of fat in lean
meat) of a roast that was otherwise made from fish. French cooks
came up with the idea of combining salmon and pike meat for imita-
tion ham and bacon by using salmon to represent the pink meat, and
pike the fat.71 At times the diners were fooled by more than just the
imitation meat itself. A number of recipes from the period suggest that
cooks were also skilled in employing markers to make the illusion even
more complete. They would use sauces and broths normally reserved
for meat, and not just any meat but the most highly prized of all: veni-
son. There are examples of fake roasts made from fish or crayfish meat,
or of sausages made from dolphin meat—which along with barnacle
goose and beaver tail was regarded as Lenten food in the Middle
Ages—all of them served in a dark and spicy pepper broth that was the
hallmark of venison dishes.72
Aside from the obvious desire on the part of the diner to have his
meat and eat it, too—in other words, to be a good Christian and still
forego the rigors of fasting—what we observe here is a game of make-
believe that cooks and dinner guests engaged in. But the Middle Ages
did not invent this game, nor were they the last to play it. From an-
cient Rome several examples of pretend foods have come down to us
that were clearly designed to fool the diner. At Trimalchio’s Feast in
Petronius’s Satyricon a boar is served that looks ungutted from the
outside but when cut open turns out to be filled with delicious
sausages. The fact that a number of recipes for this kind of surprise
dish can be found in a Roman cookbook from the third century A.D.,
Apicius’s De re coquinaria (The Art of Cooking), is a strong indica-
tion that the boar in the Satyricon was not just the product of a
writer’s fertile imagination, but a dish actually prepared by gourmet
cooks.73 And if Trimalchio’s wonder dish consisting of a well full of fat
fowl, sow’s bellies, a hare sporting Pegasus’s wings, and four figures of
flute-playing satyrs pouring a spiced sauce over fishes bears any resem-
blance to reality, then Roman cooks could easily hold their own
against the best royal cooks late-medieval Europe had to offer.74
But important impulses for the evolution of pretend foods may have
come from outside Europe as well. Medieval Arab cookery, which
subscribed to the heavy processing, coloring, and shaping of food
much earlier than European cookery, was full of sophisticated dishes
that were designed to look like something else.75 What medieval Eu-
73
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