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2 Responses to What was it like to work inside a medieval kitchen?

1. Busy! Noisy, big, crowded and workplace for a huge staff all day. The castles main meal each day was the main daily affair for the nobles, who ate like well, kings. But for a banquet all the stops would be pulled out as nobles tried to out do each other, show their generosity and wealth.
   Here’s a part menu of a banquet King Charles of France was giving in the 1300’s…..The king ordered 3 courses of 10 pairs of dishes each, for each diner. Thirty pairs of dishes for each person….roast capon and partridge, roast rabbit and fish aspics, lark pastries and rissoles of beef, black pudding and sausage, eel and savory rice, swan and peacock, bitterns and heron, pasties of venison and small bird, fresh fish and gravy of shad, leeks and plovers, duck and roast chitterlings, stuffed pigs with eels reversed, frizzled beans…..fruit wafers, pears, comfits, medlars, peeled nuts, lots of different spiced wine. There were 800 guests and 400 torch bearers (who stood there all night as human lamps).
   Every banquet wouldn’t be so big (some were bigger) but you get the idea, and the kitchen would have to prepare all this, plus more common things like daily fresh baked bread and muffins, and when there was no banquet feed the common soldiers of the castle garrison too.
   It required ovens both outdoors and indoors, long heavy tables, all sorts of cooking equipment/ knives etc., tons of water and wood, huge garbage bins, a staff of 100 (or 100’s), dish washers, cooks, bakers, butchers, bird plucker’s, water boys, deliverymen, and food prepares for fish, fowl, swans, deer, rabbit, beef, pig, etc. etc. Other staff had to organize it all, manage it, supervise, account for it all. There needed to be storerooms for flour, grain, wine etc., pools to keep live fish in, hen houses for eggs etc. etc.
   Some special banquets had food gilded with gold (powdered egg yolk, saffron, flour, and real gold leaf), others had giant pastries that took 4 servants to carry, that when cut open live birds/ doves flew from to entertain the guests or be food their hawks and falcons.
   Basically think of the kitchen of a large hotel with 4 star restaurant today, take away the modern appliances, electricity, refrigeration, increase the human workers by 5 times or 10 times and you get the idea. Kitchen workers got to eat the leftovers for themselves and family (which given a banquets menu would be quite a feast). In normal times their ‘pay’ was in common food (bread, flour, porridge, eggs, meat scraps etc.). Work was long and hard but perhaps not as long, hard, uncertain as being a peasant farmer, and people vied with each other for jobs there.

   

   lwhhow
   January 4, 2013 at 1:49 am
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2. In Life in a Medieval Castle, Frances and Joseph Gies write:

   In the thirteenth century the castle kitchen was still generally of timber, with a central hearth or several fireplaces where met could be spitted or stewed in a cauldron. utensils were washed in a sculleru outside. Poultry and animals for slaughter were trussed and tethered nearby. Temporary estra kitchens were set up for feasts, as for the coronation of Edward I in 1273, when a contemporary described the ‘inumerable kitchens built’ at Westminster Palace, and ‘numberless lead cauldrons placed outside them, for the cooking of meat.’ The kitchen did not normally become padt of the domestic hall until the fifteenth century.

   There were service rooms, a buttery, for serving beverages, and a pantry, for bread. These sevice rooms were equipped with shelves and benches on which food brought from the kitchen could be arranged for serving.

   ‘in the kitchen the cook and his staff turned the meat – pork, beef, mutton, poultry, game – on a sit, and prepared stews and soups in great iron cauldrons hung over the fire on a hook and chain that could be raised and lowered to regulate the temperature. Boiled meat was lifted out of the pot with an iron hook, a long fork with a wooden handle and pronge attached to one side. Soup was stirred with a long-handled slotted spoon.

   In addition to roasting and stewing, meat might be pounded to a paste, mixed with other ingredients, and served as a kind of custard. A dish of this kind was blankmanger, consisting of a paste of chicken blended with rice boiled in almond milk, seasoned with sugar, cooked until very thick, and garnished with fried almonds and anise. another was a mortrews, of fish or meat that was pounded, mixed with breadcrumbs, stock, and eggs, and poached, producing a kindof quenelle, or dumpling. Both meat and fish were also made into pies, pasties, and fritters.

   Sauces were made from herbs from the castle garden that were ground to a paste, mixed with wine, verjuice (the juice of unripe grapes), vinegar, onions, ginger, pepper, saffron, cloves and cinnamon. mustard, a favourite ingredient, was used by the gallon.

   In Lent or on fast days fish was served fresh from the castle’s own pond, from a nearby river, from the sea, nearly always with a highly seasoned sauce. Fresh herring, flavoured with ginger, pepper, and cinammon, might be made into a pie. Other popular fish included mullet, shad,sole, flounder,plaice, ray, mackerel, salmon and trout. Pike, crab, crayfish, oysters, and eels were also popular.

   The most common vegetables, besides onions and garlic, were peas and beans. Staples of the diet of the poor, for the rich they might be served with onions and saffron. Honey, commonly used for sweetening, came ffom castle bees, fruit from the castle orchard – apples, pears, plums, and peaches – was supplemented by wild fruits from the lord’s wood. In addition to these local produce there were imported luxuries such as sugar, rice, almonds, figs, dates raisins, oranges and pomegranates. Ordinary sugar was bought by the loaf and had to be pounded; powdered white sugar was more expensive.

   

   Louise C
   January 4, 2013 at 2:20 am
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