If You Think Your Mama Can Cook

Memories of the day after Thanksgiving always fade by Christmas. You forget that horrible feeling that comes when your stomach reels under loads of ungodly amounts of food. Maybe its some primeval instinct to stock up for the long cold winter, but by Christmas we're all ready to go at it again. The key word remains 'gluttony.'

But no modern excess can match the monumental efforts of our forbears. I probably wouldn't be hard for most of us to put ourselves out for the court by doing mortal damage to a couple of geese or an eighth of a cow, but even our Victorian friends would turn their noses up at such paltry quantities of grub. And to get a true idea of the real spirit of Christmas, (or any holiday for that matter) you've got to go further back, back to times when eating was a full time occupation.

"On this day in 1387, Richard II will taste:

The First Course:

A Potage called Viardbruse

Hedes of Bores

Grete Flessh

Swannes roasted

Pigges rosted

Crustade Lumbarde in paste

and a Sotellte."

For two more courses, both larger than the first Richard's feast continued. It included delicacies likes cranes and pheasants, larks and an almond soup. It took all day to eat as dish after dish was scooped up with spoons and fingers. By sunset, the last goblets of wine were brought in and the guests left to make their peace with God and stomach.

Fiction has always made use of monumental festive gorgings to patch over any gaps in the plot. Chaucer sneaks them in in his prologue to the Canterbury Tales writing of a house where it "seemed to snow food and drink and every kind of delicacy one can think of." And in Dickens' Christmas Carol, the crusty Scrooge's transformation begins when he supplies a complete spread, including goose, for his new friend Tiny Tim.

But literary consumption cannot match real life. The medieval feasts, especially on the holy days and the state occasions, were more monumental efforts from production to the final apoplexy than any novelist's depiction. No mere modern could ever dream of doing justice to such spreads.

Everything took on a grander scale then. At one feast, the Archbishop of York laid in 300 quarters of wheat, 300 tuns of ale, 100 tuns of wine, 104 oxen, 6 wild bulls, 1000 sheep, 304 calves, 304 piglets, 400 swans, 2000 geese, 1000 capons, 2000 pigs, 104 peacocks, over 13,000 other birds, 12 porpoises and seals and 13,000 dishes of jelly and all this was only for part of the meal.

While it may have taken the Eighth Armored Division to cook (and eat) this grotesque quantity of food, preparation could be quite simple. Take, for example, your average recipe for porpoise pudding.

"Thake the blood of him and the grease of himself and oatmeal and salt and peper and ginger, and mix these well together, and then put this in the gut of the porpoise and let it seethe easily, and not hard, a good while. Then take him up and broil him a little, and then serve forth."

But for those occasions, like Christmas, that required some thing a little more festive, the medieval kitchen changed from geing a simple blast furnace for the roasting of large animals into a combination P-3 lab and hardhat-only construction site.

Aside from the roasts and baked pies, nearly every dish was what my grandmother used to call hassenpfeffer--a mess, tossed together from mangled remnants of carcasses hidden underneath a spicy sauce that would ideally completely obscure the bastard origins (or incipient rot) of the ingredients heaped on the platter. The feast, rather than the ordinary run of the mill pigout, required hundreds of these "made" dishes, for which most valued praise the cook could receive was if the satisfied diner could not tell what had gone into the original concoction. At a feast given by Henry VIII in 1519, 260 such delightful melanges were served.

The awesome complexity of producing these early attempts to recombine genetically disparate elements aside, the medieval entertainer forever put the seal on his claim to the ultimate glutton's prize with works of construction that were nothing short of awesome. Moderns who contemplate eating themselves to death should consider that all the revelers at Philip Good's holiday celebration survived. It was 1453, and the renaiscance was still just a twinkle in a Florentine's eye:

There were three tables in the hall. On the chief table was a well built ship with sails spread, and before it sway a silver swan drawing the ship with a silver chair. At one end of the ship was richly built castle. Among the numerous ornaments was a church with cross, chimes and four singers. There was besides a beautiful fountain surrounded with cliffs of sapphire and other rare stones. Twenty living musicians played inside a huge pastry--a castle in the form of that of Lusignan. In an uninhabited desert a lifelike tiger fought with a great serpant. The third table showed a forest in India with rare beasts that moved about."

At another celebration--this one a marriage--thirty gold-flecked trees filled with fruits and baked meats stood strough the nine day exercise in forced-draft obesity.

Even though the market is a little short on swans this year, and seals are out of season, there are some people out there desperately striving to recapture the idyllic existence of iron age humanity.

Boston's own Medieval Manor caters to the unreconstructed Viking in all of us, emphasizing the use of fingers to deal with its almost appropriately scaled repasts. But for those who want to make some attempt to recreast a Plantegenet's Christmas dinner, the past few years have brought more and more cookbooks featuring the recipes, and the dedication to excess, of our more steadfast ancestors. This year's big seller was The Medieval Cookbook by Madelaine Cosman.

These books are somewhat scaled down--after all not many kitchens feature ovens large enough to roast whole oxen, nor do many now wish to nosh on "gizzards, livers, and heart of swan." But one can always seek the true spirit of Christmas in an eleven course meal, featuring, as one author suggested, "Friters of Parsnips, Funges, Aquapatys (boiled garlic) and the like, finishing of course with as much Hippocras (spiced wine) as the body could tolerate."

In any case, when, (if) any snow ever falls, and this year's model December 25th rolls around, the sins of past debauches will be long buried. And as people gather to celebate the birthday of a two thousand year gone heretical Jew, we can easily salve any conscience recoiling from yet another helping of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. After all, at least we're avoiding that spirit of Christmas' past that would demand the consumption of "broke broune, longe flouteurs and payne puff" as but one tenth of our Christmas cheer.

Bon Appetit.