Pleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks by Constance B. Hieatt, Sharon Butler

Abstract

R E V I E W S Constance B. Hieatt and Sharon Butler, Pleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1976). xx, 172. $9.95 Hieatt and Butler’s Pleyn Delit is so clear and useable a cookbook, and most of its recipes so easy for an experienced cook and edible for a conservative diner, that it could take a place on the kitchen shelf beside Fanny Farmer and Mme. Benoit. The authors have attempted to keep the recipes, all kitchen-tested, as authentic as possible, yet most are very little different from standard European fare which most of us prepare from time to time. This is not inevitable but the result of deliberate choice. The authors of this book have strong convictions about medieval cuisine which their recipes are selected to illustrate: that medieval people were mostly poor or in moderate circumstances, that therefore costly spices were used very sparingly, and that most fare was consequently quite simple and bland. The relative poverty of the people and inaccessibility of variety in ingredients of course informed all cooking until the relatively recent inven­ tions of artificial refrigeration and safe methods of canning. In antiquity, as Apicius’s cookbook shows, red meat was a rare treat, and even fish or fowl could not be guaranteed every day on every table. There is no reason to believe that economic conditions were much better for the average medieval housewife, and Hieatt and Butler have searched the literature of medieval British cuisine for the kinds of recipes they consider typical, thus avoiding the extraordinary preparations for such events as royal feasts. Whether or not they are correct in assuming that medieval food was under-spiced is and will remain controversial, especially since the spoilage of ingredients which we suspect was masked by herbs and spices in antiquity must also have bedevilled medieval cooks. The authors claim that Pleyn Delit has been tested and compiled for kit­ chen use, and it is being so used to add variety to many Canadian dinner parties; they also claim that it is unique, but this claim perhaps diminishes with the growing popularity of such cookbooks. Their views upon underE n g lish Stu d ies in C anada, v, i , Spring 1979 spicing and their emphasis upon the ordinary is unusual, but Loma Sass’s To the King’s Taste (New York, 1975), mentioned in their bibliography, and her To the Queen’s Taste (New York, 1976) also present kitchen-tested British festal fare, sometimes from the same manuscript collections used in Pleyn Delit. More extensive and much more oriented toward general social history is Madeleine Pelner Cosman’s Fabulous Feasts (New York, 1976), containing 100 kitchen-tested fifteenth-century recipes drawn from British and continental sources. Sass and Pelman offer more exotic and exciting fare, but Hieatt and Butler’s book is no doubt the most useable of the lot for the average cook, outside a major city and away from specialty food stores. The 127 recipes in Pleyn Delit are divided into the following categories: Soppes and Potages; Entremets; Fyssh; Rostes and Bake Metes of Flessh; Stewes; and Desserts. Fish and fowl are predictably commoner than other sorts of meat, breadcrumbs are a frequent thickener, and almonds are used in several ways. Among the delicacies are parsnip fritters, Brie tarts, green almond soup, fried beans, fish tarts, galantine of pike, roast pork with cara­ way sauce, chicken with rosewater sauce, fig pudding, and the renowned ypocras, or medieval spiced wine. In addition, the appendix on “Subtleties,” the medieval edible sculptures which often accompanied meals, is clear and practical, and the bibliography and glossary concise and useful. Pleyn Delit may well prove to be the ideal primer of medieval cooking: simple, useable and direct, the necessary training manual before one moves on to the sort of elaborate feasts which Sass and Cosman produce profes­ sionally in the United States. It is both practical and scholarly, drawn from manuscript sources not only properly documented but also reproduced in the original Middle English. Although there are a few extracts from Menagier de Paris, this is essentially a British book; its authors do...