Food in the days of yore

Couple more interesting tidbits from the Spice book...

In the middle ages, fruits and vegetables weren't eaten very much. Fruits were seen as "moist" and "cool", and thought not to go very well with the body's natural heat. Turner writes "Throughout the medieval period pears, apples, peaches and other moist fruits were viewed with suspicion, as 'meates that breed ill bloud'. For the same reason, long after its introduction from the Americas the juicy tomato was viewed as dangerous, ripe with the seeds of madness."

Vegetables were thought to be worthy only of the poor and animals. Meat was a sign of privilege, because the land needed to raise the meat implied wealth.

Also, "cooking was more a medical science than an art". In an era where medicine was somewhat primitive, and hygiene was nowhere near as well understood as it is today, diet played a big role in health practices. "Medical theory held that all foods diverging from the temperate ideal risked causing a humoral imbalance; that is, illness." Cooks were part physician, then.

In fact, Turner says "there is a distant echo of this past in the modern term 'recipe', which originates with the medical precepts of the Salernitan school, the most widely read medical textbooks of the Middle Ages. These were written as a series of formulae beginning with the Latin injunction 'Recipe', that is 'Take...'"