London: The Biography полностью

In the fifteenth century the main dish remained that of meat-“swan, roasted capons … venison in broth, coney, partridges and roasted cocks”- together with very sweet compound desserts such as Leche Lombarde, which was “a kind of jelly made of cream, isinglass, sugar, almonds, salt, eggs, raisins, dates, pepper and spices.” All dishes seem to have been highly spiced, with herbs for meat in particular demand. The author of London Lickpenny is assailed by merchants of Newgate-“Comes me one, cryd hot shepes feete/One cryd mackerel”-and as he wanders down into East Cheap “One Crys rybbs of befe, and many a pye.” The evidence of fifteenth-century kitchens and monastic gardens, given by an authority known simply as “Mayster Ion Gardener,” is of sage, chickweed, borage, rosemary, fennel and thyme as the staple “vegetable” diet. The other favoured vegetables were “garlike, onions and lekes,” which does not suggest much taste for green vegetables.

A change in that diet is marked by the Tudor chronicler, Harrison, who notes that “in old days”-by which he means the thirteenth century-herbs and roots were in great demand, but that they became less frequently used in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Yet “in my time their use is not only resumed among the poore comons-I mean of melons, pompines, gourds, cucumbers, radishes … carrots, marrowes, turnips, and all kind of salad herbes-but they are also looked upon as deintie dishes at the tables of delicate merchants, gentlemen.” At times of commercial success and plenty, however, meat is often required to maintain the animal spirits of Londoners. That is perhaps why there is so much emphasis in the contemporary chronicles on feasting, as a way of exemplifying the power and wealth of the city. Stow writes of one such occasion that “it would be tedious to set down all the preparation of fish, flesh and other victuals spent in this feast” but then goes on to enumerate the twenty-four oxen, the hundred sheep, the fifty-one deer, the thirty-four boars, the ninety-one pigs …

There were variations in diet according to the season, with fresh herrings at Michaelmas, pork and sprats at All Saints, veal and bacon at Easter. In the summer of 1562, a Venetian observer noticed that the native population enjoyed raw oysters with barley bread.

Other dietary habits were changed by law. After the partial relaxation of the intricate fast laws, for example, cheap meat was often substituted for fish. Alterations were also fostered by voyages of discovery; yams or sweet potatoes from Virginia and rhubarb from China became sixteenth-century commodities in a city which plucked its fruits from every known country.

In the early seventeenth century we read of the almost emblematic significance of roast beef, as well as fresh oysters, as a token of civic existence. These were invariably followed by a dessert of milk puddings or “apple pippin”; “To come in pudding time is as much as to say, to come in the most lucky moment in the world,” according to Misson de Valbourg in the early years of the century. In the houses of the more affluent citizens roast beef and pudding were sometimes exchanged for “a Piece of boil’d Beeff, and then they salt it some Days beforehand, and besiege it with five or six Heaps of Cabbage, Carrots, Turnips, or some other Herbs or Roots, well pepper’d and salted and swimming in Butter.” For more delicate fare, the London household would sit around a gridiron “roasting slices of buttered bread … This is call’d ‘toast.’”