SC - tasteless broth

[Stefan li Rous]

Kirrily asked:

>I might be going off on a weird tangent here, but I'd like to know
>whether they held "feasts" (or, more to the point, whether there were
>any festival days or big events which would occasion a bigger-and-more-
>impressive-than-usual meal) during Lent?
>
>It seems to me as if the phrase "lenten feast" is a bit of an oxymoron.
>Sure, people would still eat communally, and large households (and
>especially the huge households attached to a royal court) would eat in a
>Great Hall with the a high table and numerous dishes and all that... but
>would they put on a big show of it, or would it be relatively austere?

I don't know how much ceremony these feasts would have used, but it 
seems clear from the menus and recipes that there was a lot of 
following the letter while violating the spirit. Keeping the fast 
wasn't just done by the pious, it was expected of everybody--so the 
not-pious routinely found ways around it. There was no Lenten 
restriction, for example, on the use of expensive imports (for 
England) such as wine, dried fruit, and almonds, and such things 
often come up in Lenten recipes.
Master Chiquart, whose 1420 cookbook describes an enormous feast (I 
don't know if it was ever actually served), gives two parallel menus, 
one for a meat day and one for a fish day out of Lent, and the 
fish-day menu is every bit as elaborate as the meat-day menu.

Elizabeth/Betty Cook