highly specialized functions in the kitchen and hall, such as concocting sauces or carving
the master’s meats.
By the late Middle Ages, the Menagier de Paris and Chiquart’s Du fait de cuisine
show that the sequence of dishes in a formal meal on a meat day (jour gras) was more or
less fixed as follows: boiled meats (with sauce), preserved meats (with sauce), a puree of
greens, pottages (broths or stews), an entremets or diversionary preparation (possibly a
figure molded out of meat- or pea-paste, possibly a tour de force involving a fire-
breathing animal or fowl), roast meats and roast fowl (with sauce), wheat porridge
(fromentee) with venison, pasties, more stews, a rice dish (blanc mangier), another
entremets, cold dishes (jellied meats, galantine), fruit, mulled wine (hippocras or claret),
and spiced candies (dragees).
To some extent, the sequence of dishes in a meal was determined by medical doctrines
on the digestibility of different foodstuffs and their faculty for opening or closing the
stomach. Principles in this doctrine held that those foods that were readily digested
should be eaten first in a meal in order not to block the passage out of the stomach and so
cause a corruption of the food already digested there; and further that those foods
functioning as aperitives of the stomach or as digestives should be taken at the most
suitable times. Boiled meats, having the warm and moist quality of the human body,
should be served in the initial course; roasts and venison, both being relatively drier in
nature, should be consumed later in a meal; hippocras and candies were universal
digestives, considered central to any dessert.
The relative importance of the two regular meals might vary depending upon the
events of the day. In particular, the exertions of a tournament made it advisable that the
midday meal be somewhat less heavy than normal, and that souper be correspondingly
more substantial.
The church’s rules on fasting during penitential seasons and on certain days of the
week (usually Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday) led to the development of menus from
which the meat of four-footed animals, and their products (such as milk and grease), were
absent. Such lean meals, with their dependence upon peas, poultry, fish, and almonds (the
latter, like modern American peanuts, ground, substituting for milk and butter), came to
occupy a large place in the diet of the period. Because meat was the dominant foodstuff
in the meal in an aristocratic or wealthy bourgeois household, professional cooks had to
maintain two distinct sets of menus in their repertoire, a meat menu and its lean
counterpart.
Terence Scully
[See also: BANQUETING; BEVERAGES; BREAD; COOKING; DIET AND
NUTRITION; FOOD TRADES]
MEAUX
. Originally an oppidum of the Gallic Meldi tribe, Meaux (Seine-et-Marne) was made a
bishopric in the 4th century; capital of Brie, it lay within the jurisdiction of the counts of
Champagne, who granted it a charter in 1179. Along with the rest of Champagne, Meaux
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