SC - Book Query - Food and Drink in Medieval Poland

[Jenne Heise]

> Actually, I think this was discussed a while back.  I do have a copy of the
> book...bought it at Pennsic last year.  It does have recipes, but, IIRC, they are
> not documentably period.  Jadwiga, can you refresh my memory?

Here's the two reviews I've got on the web, one on my page on Food and Drink of Medieval
Poland and Rus (also not a good recipe source), and one from the Slavic Interest Group's
newsletter:

>From my handout:
"Food and Drink in Medieval Poland: Rediscovering a Cuisine of the Past. Maria Dembinska,
rev. and adapted by William Woys Weaver. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania,
1999). This is an excellent overview of Polish foodways between 1350 and 1500, but it has
several faults, including the nationalist bias and the fact that the included recipes are
re-creations, not redactions. Furthermore, it is an adaptation of a translation of Ms.
Dembinska's book, originally published in 1963 as Kosumpcja Zywonsiowa w Polsce
Sredniowiecznej (Food consumption in Medieval Poland). Using a translation by Magdalena
Thomas, Weaver edited and adapted the text, and included a number of recipes that he and
Dembinska had worked on re-creating from mentions in records and known recipes from
non-Slavic sources. Unfortunately, many of the notes and charts were removed and the 
notes for the recipes do not give sufficient source data."

>From the SIG newsletter:
"Dembinska, Maria. Food and Drink in Medieval Poland. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania, 1999.

For those who have been ravenously searching for material on medieval Polish (and Eastern
European) foodways, this volume is good news and bad news. The good news is, it's the
best resource on eating habits in Poland available in English. The bad news is, it has
several serious flaws, the biggest being that the recipes given in the text are neither
reproductions nor redactions of period recipes, but attempts to re-create dishes using
period methods, documentation from menus and purchase records, and foreign cookbooks of
the time.

The original work on which this volume is based was the 1963 thesis of Maria Dembinska,
one of the most well known Polish food historians, who died in 1996. William Woys Weaver
worked with Ms. Dembinska to adapt the translated work, removing some of the larger
sections of tables and footnotes, and adding appropriate material from her later works,
as well as adding material on Cypriot and other possible influences. Weaver does an
excellent job in the introduction of explaining which parts he added.

The body of the book is in four chapters. The first, "Toward a Definition of Polish
National Cookery", gives a good review of the underlying assumptions of the book and a
description of living conditions and foreign influences on medieval Polish foodways. But
it also exposes the main methodological weakness of the work: the emphasis on a
"national" cuisine. This work would be even more helpful if Dembinska had simply outlined
the material on cookery of related cultures at her disposal, rather than trying to
squeeze it into a definition of 'Polish' cuisine, and perhaps relied a little less on
modern Polish ethnography as well. Nonetheless, it is a helpful review of the literature
and gives some useful insights, such as the role of meat in peasant diet, the question of
standard of living rather than social class as a distinguishing feature in diet, and the
Byzantine, Italian, Hungarian, Swedish, Turkish and Russian influences on Polish cuisine.

The second chapter, "Poland in the Middle Ages", gives a tidy little history of Poland,
but includes some interesting sidelights of economic history, such as the change to
"German law" land tenure, the polyglot nature of late medieval Polish culture, and the
role of the lesser nobility. Of special interest is the analysis of the congress at
Cracow in 1364, though materials on what the assembled royals ate at their feasts are,
sadly, not available. (There's a good discussion of forks, though!)

"Dramatis Personae of the Old Polish Table", the third chapter, is a gold mine for
SCAdians. Not only does it give a detailed listing of the officials and servants (and
their titles) who were involved with food preparation in the Jagiellonian royal
entourage, but it gives vignettes of specific instances of food consumption. It's
fascinating that all but the very highest at table ate leftovers from the high table;
that at least one academic dinner was just as overpriced and underbudgeted as modern
ones, and that the legendary "highly-spiced" medieval food may have been made that way to
encourage digestion of large, heavy meals. In addition, Dembinska lists the names and
descriptions of a wide variety of kitchen tools and equipment known in the inventories of
the Polish kitchens.

The final chapter, "Food and Drink in Medieval Poland," covers each type of food and
drink in turn. We learn that the two main meals were the prandium (eaten between 9 and 10
a.m) and coena (eaten between 5 and 7 p.m.), and that they were generally similar; that
Wednesdays and Fridays, and Lent, were meatless days, but special feast days were, well
feasts. The most common drink, Dembinska says, would have been wheat beer and small beer,
followed by wine and mead. Poles ate meat on a daily basis -- bacon and pork the most,
followed by beef, poultry, and, on meatless days, a wide variety of fresh and salt fish.
Game was not common, but highly esteemed and used as gifts and rewards. The majority of
the diet was made up of grains, either in bread or cooked as gruels. Millet was the
primary grain dish either as groats or flour, oats being an 11th century innovation, and
barley a 15th century import. Bread was generally made with rye and wheat flours, and
wheaten rolls were for sale in the streets. Vegetables were common also: "the daily menu
in Poland included at least one vegetable, either as a side dish or as an ingredient in a
one-pot recipe." Dembinska lists onions, lentils, field peas, cabbage, fava beans and
bean greens (among peasants), kale, white carrots, beets, parsnips, alexanders, skirrets,
turnips, radishes, cucumbers and melons, as well as mushrooms. Curiously enough, beet
soup was not documented, but a borsht-like soup made from cow parsnips was eaten.
Sauerkraut is common, but pickled cucumbers can only be documented to the 16th century.
Neither modern bigos (game stew) or pirogi (dumplings) can be documented to the period
either. Most fruit was eaten cooked -- apples, pears, plums and cherries were the most
common, with wild strawberries and blueberries showing up in the records also. Dembinska
also highlights many of the spices used.

The second half of the book, "Medieval Recipes in the Polish Style" by Weaver, is a
fascinating yet frustrating experience. Each recipe includes wonderful information about
the ingredients and techniques, and is carefully detailed, making the recipes easy to
follow. But the sources and inspirations are not documented. Especially educational are
the notes on "Wroclaw Trencher Bread," giving details on how bread was baked, regulated,
and made into trenchers; the "Thick Beer or Sourdough Starter;" and the directions for
spit-roasting in "Hungarian-Style Spit-Roasted Shoulder of Venison"; as well as
directions for making "Saffron Wafers" over a charcoal grill! So far, I've only tried the
"Pears Stewed with Cucumbers and Figs" but, documentable or not, they are delicious
(though I keep wanting to add more spices than the recipe calls for; so much for the
overspiced food discussion!).

The multitude of illustrations -- including many of period kitchen equipment, either from
woodcuts or drawn from archaelogical finds -- greatly adds to the value of the book.
Though most of the books in the bibliography are not in Polish, it is still an excellent
resource; and the UPenn Press apparently invested well in a good index to the entire
volume.

While it would be lovely to have the excised footnotes, and to have period recipes and
documentation, this work still far outstrips the nearest competitor, Maria Lemnis's Old
Polish Traditions in the Kitchen and at the Table, which gives tantalizing sections of
information on Polish food habits interspersed with undated recipes, and which has
neither bibliography nor useful references. As a starting point for constructing a
medieval "Polish" meal, or talking about the foodways of Eastern Europe, it's excellent."

- -- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa

Stefan, please feel free to put these in the Florilegium. 
- -- 
Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at mail.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.
"The worst thing I can say of a person is, 'they couldn't be bothered'."