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feast of Mary Neville and Gervys Clifton (1530) serves as a model for all: 3 hogheads of wine, one white, one red, one claret, two oxen, 2 brawns, 2 swans, 9 cranes, 16 herons, 10 bitterns, 60 pair of rabbits, similar wildfowl, 16 fat capons (castrated rooster), 30 other capons, 10 pigs, 7 calves, 6 wethers, 8 quarters of barley malt, 3 quarters of wheat, four dozen chickens, as well as butter, eggs, verjuice and vinegar.4
But by the sixteenth century, it would be expected that these basic materials would be spiced with flavourings originating in the east, although the infiltration of eastern foodstuffs and technology into Europe was probably gradual and regionalized according to contact, customs and availability.
It is unclear how fully and quickly the settlers of Outremer themselves adopted eastern cuisine. Usama gives anecdotal evidence that some Franks began to live like muslims, but he says they were the exception and not typical. He tells of one such person at Antioch. This was an old knight from the first expedition, and Usama was invited to his house through a mutual friend. The man had retired from fighting and was living on the income of his property.
He displayed a fine table spread with a splendid selection of appetizing food.
Moslems of course were forbidden pork, a popular dish amongst the Franks, and at first Usama was hesitant. The knight noticed this and assured him that he did not eat any Frankish food, and that he had Egyptian cooks who ate only what they served. No pig's flesh was ever permitted in the house.
Even if the precise details of infiltration are unclear, after people returned from the First Crusades gradually many more elaborate and much sweeter dishes were possible. This was not only because of sugar - also Eastern spices became more common in the dishes of the nobility. Spices all but unknown in Europe could easily be obtained in Outremer, adding to an ever broadening culinary refinement: spices such as pepper, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, ginger and mastic (a gum used for liquor).5
Other foodstuffs common in the Holy Land which delighted the European settlers included dates, bananas, melons, water melons, gourds, lemons, oranges and pomoloes.
By the early thirteenth century, a wide variety of foodstuffs and other products generically known as "spices" were being brought to England. These included sugar, cumin, almonds, brazil (imported from East Indies), quicksilver, ginger, cetewal ( a stimulant having an aromatic, warm, bitter taste), lake(insect resin from India), liquorice, small spices such as cloves, mace, cubebs (Javanese berry) and nutmegs, vermilion, glass, figs, raisins, shumac, sulphur, ivory, cinnamon, gingerbread, turpentine, cotton, whalebone, frankincense (grown in furthest Arabia), peony, anise, dates, chestnuts, orpiment(pigment derived from arsenic) and olive oil were being imported through the port of London.6
Again, however, one should not look for a simple uniformity in the growth of the spice trade.
Table spices were not completely unknown throughout the early medieval period. The Venerable Bede, for example, bequeathed a small parcel of pepper in his will.7
But with the opening up of the barriers between East and West during the Crusades, more exotic foodstuffs were encountered, and trade routes were set up to import them. Spices from the east were never cheap, but the better off Europeans sacrificed economy for taste. Thus, amongst the household expenses of Richard de Swinfield 1289-90 are listed expensive spices such as cloves, cubebs, mace, saffron, sugar, galingale, cinammon, raw and preserved ginger, pepper, cummin, licorice, buckwheat, aniseed, gromil (a stony seeded plant) and coriander.8
In one year, Sir Thomas Cawarden spent 10 pounds on spices for his household, the same amount spent for beverages. Sugar remained prohibitively expensive: in the fifteenth century it still sold at up to 3 shillings per pound, at a time when a good wage was no more than a shilling a week. For most people, sugar was at first only used as a medicine. Not until it became relatively less dear was its used more generally, and for the great majority, it was never in daily use.9.
According to Mead, practically all ordinary meats and desserts were so loaded with cinnamon, ginger, cloves, cubebs, pepper, galingale (cypress root), mace and nutmeg as to make the constituent of the dish practically unrecognizable.10
The menus which are recorded from about the early fourteenth century on might consist of a tart, stuffed bread rolls, a fish jelly, braised mussels, spit roasted meat with sweet sauce, pigeon pie, braised fennel in ginger, a salad, cheese pastries, flavoured cream, quince sweetmeats, and date and ginger sweetmeat. Comfits were used to sweeten the breath at the end of a meal. These consisted of aromatic seeds such as fennel, each grain laboriously coated in sugar, a process taking several days.
Many dishes required the use of sugar. Rosy almond cream, for example, required 75 grams (three ounces) of sugar, and the sweet sauce 25 grams (one ounce).11
As the culmination of a feast, spices were served with wines. Richly designed gilded plates divided into comparments were loaded with spices, sugar plums and various other sweetmeats. Usually, the great spice plate was presented only to the donor of the feast and his chosen associates.12
And most obvious of the changes to the culinary arts of the nobility was the introduction of the magnificent accompaniments to the feasts, made with the aid of sugar and known as subtleties. These included castles as tall as their bearers, sailing ships, fabulous monsters, gilded and painted, and placed as the centrepoint to a feast.
But it is sugar in particular which had an impact on the lives of European women which should not be underestimated.
At the very least, the kinds of dishes made possible by sugar suggest a greater attention being paid to the finer and more delicate aspects of life within the manor and the castle. The barbarian feasts of the Dark Ages were strictly men only affairs, where eating was an accompaniment to deep drinking, boasting, and fighting, followed by unconsciousness amongst the reeds scattered on the hall floor. Food was simply the fuel for the men's sport, rather like a pie night at a football club today. The Anglo Saxon people in particular were noted for the coarseness of their eating habits, a tradition that they passed on to the Norman French:
"...they (the Saxons) were wont to eat until they surfeited and to drink until they were sick. These latter qualities they imparted to their conquerors..."13
Introduction of sugar helped initiate a major shift in manners. The food itself is to be enjoyed and savoured, as an accompaniment, granted, to the rougher entertainments favoured by the warriors, but also to refined manners, including music, dancing, juggling, and dancing and (even) flirtation (else why the need to sweeten one's breath at the end of the meal!) This is confirmed by the rise of the courts of love of Eleanor of Aquitaine, in
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