SC - Nobles and cooking?

[Laura C Minnick]

On Sat, 13 Feb 1999, 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?

Greetings Gentles all,
	Having taken a good couple of days to ponder these questions (I
must thank Your Grace for giving me something to think about that didn't
involve the V-word or silly heart-shaped food- it being my first V-day
alone since 1982, I was not in the mood to sit around and brood), I think
I am ready to at least address them in part.

	I think we are facing a question that is two-pronged: there is the
class or station issues, and then there is gender. I pulled all of my
cooking, serving and household books down, as well as lots of picture
books. Even pulled out a paper I wrote several years ago about iconography
and representation in feast scenes. I've noticed that women show up as
guests at the tables, but in the writings, it seems that it is only
merchant/middle class (or below) women that are being addressed as needing
to know certain things to run a household, be it a recipe for a caudle or
how to keep flies out of the room. I don't know of any 'domestic
management' manuals addressed to high-born women, such as the 'Goodman of
Paris' text. We also have, that I know of, no pictures of the noblewoman
in the kitchen, chopping, stirring, yelling at the spitboys. We do have
pictures of middle and lower-class women wearing aprons, with spoons in
their hands, gathering herbs in the kitchen gardens, fending off a man who
has one arm around her and the other reaching for the pot. The famous text
_De virginitate_ speaks of a very bad day, with the pots boiling over, the
servant slacking, the baby yelling, and the husband yelling at the woman-
but the scene painted is definitely of cottage life, not manorial.
	Conversely, We do see a great deal of men in the illuminations,
doing all of the jobs, and the texts such as _Ffor to Serve a Lord_ are
addressed to the well-born young man who is taking the standard road to
rank and privilege- by learning to serve the lord, to carve properly, to
lay the linen and set the table. A knight carved the King's meat, and the
higher the lord, the higher the rank of the carver, etc. That we know of,
the recipes books are written by men, and the chef's whose names we know,
are also men. There is still a bit of a bias left in the food industry- in
some places, chefs are men, women are cooks. Bit of a paradigm shift
there.
	None of this is to say that noblewomen had nothing whatsoever to
do with the kitchen, but I believe it was a supervisory function rather
than hands-on. To manage well the household is something girls learned
early. But I suspect that the middle-class housewife knew better the
stinging eyes while peeling onions and the smell of a pottage scorching
because the baby needed attention.

'Lainie
- -
Laura C. Minnick
University of Oregon
Department of English
- -
"Libraries have been the death of many great men, particularly the
Bodleian."
	Humfrey Wanley, c. 1731




============================================================================

To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".

============================================================================