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16

Green porray

1392

AUTHOR: Unknown,

FROM: Le Ménagier de Paris (The Householder of Paris)

Green porray on a fish day. Let it [a cabbage] have the outer leaves removed and be cut up and then washed in cold water without parboiling it and then cooked with verjuice and a little water, and put some salt therein, and let it be served boiling and very thick, not clear; and put at the bottom of the bowl, underneath the porray, salt butter, or fresh if you will, or cheese, or old verjuice.

Sooner or later we have to turn to pottage. Eaten throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, pottage was a dish that united our ancient nations and is so called because it was cooked in a pot. Hence it could be a simple gruel on the one hand, or a rich and elaborate stew. Pottage was eaten by rich and poor alike and there were many kinds, of which one version was porray.

Where most pottage contained some kind of cereal and some onions, porray had greenery – usually cabbage, as in the above recipe. So we’re talking soup here: it could be thin and not have very much in it, if you were poor; or it could have meat, breadcrumbs, eggs and more, if you were a noble. These were the days when you could tell the class of man by the type of soup he ate. Meat was enjoyed by the better-off nobles and rarely eaten by peasants, and for very practical reasons. Animals were worth much more alive than they were as food.

Cows, sheep and goats could provide a constant supply of milk, not to mention wool in the case of sheep. Chickens, ducks and geese gave you eggs and they would only be eaten when they finally stopped laying, while oxen would pull your plough. And if you needed blood for cooking or making black pudding, you didn’t slaughter your beast, you just made a careful incision on an upper leg and drained some blood.

It’s a habit still practised by the Masai people of Kenya. The idea may make you shudder, as might the method in Colombia of procuring iguana eggs. Hunters will capture a slow-moving, pregnant iguana, slit open her abdomen, gently remove her eggs, rub wood ash into the wound, sew her back up and let her waddle back into the underbrush, dazed and confused, no doubt, but alive. It’s a practice that goes back centuries, like pottage cooking. Of which, think of a big pot, boiling away for much of the day, cooking the hell out of any vegetables that at the time people thought were very dangerous to eat if raw. The Romans put barley in it and different pulses; they added leafy vegetables and fish sauce, throwing in cabbage leaves near the end.

Pottage is the ancestor of steamed puddings, a second-cousin of porridge and a precursor to soup. Confusingly, the word soup comes from ‘sop’. Sop was the piece of bread that you poured the pottage onto. Bread also served as a poor man’s plate, the working man’s eating habits still being a few steps away from fine dining. Then, over time, what was the solid part of the mixture became the name for the liquid part. After all, once bowls and plates had been invented, it made more sense to put the bread into the soup rather than the other way round. Next time you have a bowl of soup with croûtons in it, you can bore your friends with this piece of reverse evolutionary epicurean theorising.

But why, in the history of pottage, stop at 1392? Well, that’s because there is an early recipe for porray in a famous French work called Le Ménagier de Paris. Published that year, it is by turns creepy, sexist and unusually insightful and valuable.

The author is unknown and we can’t be sure whether the narrator is real or fictitious. Although judging by the views and behaviour of men today in Saudi Arabia, he could well have been real. But whatever he was, he was Parisian and elderly. He was a gentleman who had recently procured for himself a young wife – only fifteen years old. And the volume is a manual produced by him for her guidance as she went about her daily life.

Think of it as a sexist bumper version of Cosmo magazine. The title translates as ‘The Householder of Paris’ (or The Goodman of Paris in a translation from 1928) and it offers a spectrum of lifestyle advice. There are recipes, fashion advice and housekeeping tips, as well as prayers and poems. The advice spans the practical to the spiritual.

Here are some highlights:

Protect him [your husband] from holes in the roof and smoky fires, and do not quarrel with him, but be sweet, pleasant and peaceful with him.

Make certain that in winter he has a good fire without smoke and let him slumber, warmly wrapped, cosy between your breasts, and in this way bewitch him.

In summer take care that there are no fleas in your bedroom or bed.

As soon as you arrive home … feed the dogs. Have them put in front of the fire if they are wet or muddy. Let them always be held subject to the whip. If you act this way, they will not pester people at the table or sideboard and they will not get into the beds.

Women, says the author, should also never introduce new fashions, should walk down the street ‘head upright, eyes downcast’. Only the worst wives ‘go with open eyes, head appallingly lifted like a lion, their hair in disarray spilling from their coifs’. And no woman questions her husband’s judgement as ‘it rests on him alone to know all’.

And knowing it all he professes to be when it comes to cooking and preparing for meals. The book offers a truly exhaustive list of instructions for every possible culinary episode. There are menus for all kinds of meals – from three- and four-course dinners to intimate his ’n’ her suppers, plans for massive weddings and endless miscellaneous pieces of advice. Numbers of staff needed and what they will cost are mentioned, such as the security required for a large banquet, for example: ‘item: big strong sergeants to guard the door’. As if she would forget to hire the bouncers.

The meals themselves are highly elaborate. After the starter for one big dinner of ‘grapes and peaches in little pies’, a course of soups, then endless roast dishes – ‘five pigs … twenty starlings’ – there’s a jelly course the ingredients for which include ‘ten young chickens, ten young rabbits, a pig and a crayfish’. Doubtless he was trying to emulate Richard II’s example on a more domestic scale.

Then, for one of the quieter moments, there’s his recipe for porray. The verjuice he mentions was a popular condiment during the Middle Ages – the acidic juice from unripened grapes or crab apples. It’s used as a sharpener for the dish. Perhaps his thick version of pottage was meant as a side dish for some fish – as mentioned in the first part of the recipe. A cabbage broth to go with the fish for which there is tonne of recipes from eel, to bream, turbot and beyond.

Finally, there is also a brief ‘recipe’: ‘To write on paper a letter that no one can see until the paper is heated.’ ‘Dear XXXX, I’m married to an insane and elderly foodie control freak,’ his young wife might have wished to write. But one fears little consolation would have been forthcoming.

(IB.41688, Riii verso)

A cook in the Middle Ages savours the aroma of pottage.