SC - Re: carrot pie and Spanish cheese

[Robin Carroll-Mann]

david friedman wrote:
> 
> Which raises an interesting question--was cooking seen as something that
> noblewomen wouldn't dirty their hand with in period? Or was it assumed that
> since part of their job was running a household, they ought to know how it
> was done from the ground up?

I think this is the eternal problem with all forms of upper
management...can Bill Gates actually program (it's debatable whether any
of his employees can), or can the CEO of General Motors actually build a
car? 

Certainly there are examples of middle-to-high ranking women who at
least had to supervise others in their service. Both le Menagier's wife
and the women mentioned in the Domestroi appear to be supervising cooks
at times, and then you have people like Elinor Fettiplace (the wife of a
country knight), who was familiar enough with cookery to record a book
of receipts for her progeny, even if she didn't actually do most of the
cooking, although her familiarity with the finer points suggests she may
have been an integral part of kitchen activities.

As to whether Eleanor of Aquitaine had a mean recipe for cuskynoles,
there's no evidence I'm aware of to suggest this is or isn't the case,
but I believe the involvement of very-high-ranking ladies in projects
requiring needlework, for example, even when they didn't do it alone,
suggests to me it's possible such a lady might have been familiar enough
with cookery to discuss an intelligent menu with the steward. This isn't
hard evidence, of course. It actually seems fairly likely to me that
someone like Maud/Mathilde, wife of William the Conqueror, who went from
being the wife of a bastard Duke to being Queen of England, probably
didn't forget how to make a hot posset for William in the interim after
a hard day of oppressing Saxons.
 
> So far as al-Islam is concerned, I think it is clear that high ranking men
> did take an interest in cooking, whether or not they did it themselves. At
> least, there are surviving recipes attributed to Ibrahim ibn al Mahdi, who
> was a close relative of several caliphs and himself an unsuccessful
> claimant to the caliphate at one point. And I believe one of the cookbooks
> in the 10th c. collection is attributed to one of the Barmakids, the family
> that served as viziers for al-Rashid until he turned on them.

Yes, there seems to be a class of gentleman gourmets in al-Islam. I
wonder if their legacy of cookery texts might be the result of their
literacy...not that women couldn't have written or dictated, but I'm put
in mind of the Chinese food poetry and recipes written down by men (not
always high-ranking in a political or social sense, but realtively
well-known to us). Many of them were artists of various types (Su Tung
Po, Li Po, Ni Tsan, to name a few) who either developed a taste for fine
foods in the patronage of the wealthy, in contrast to the cooking in
various cookshops, high and low, or developed some skill in cookery
because they couldn't afford to have someone else do it for them.
Fortunes change rapidly, but a good recipe for stuffed carp is eternal.
The Chinese gourmet artists seem to be rather similar to some Roman
poets like Martial and Juvenal.

Adamantius  
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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