Since the beginning of humankind, food has been a marker of cultures. So why not, thought Kristi DiClemente, use food to bring ancient civilizations alive for history students at Mississippi University for Women? That’s what the visiting assistant professor did by debuting a new class this spring called History of European Food. How much more vivid could learning be if students could actually make foods people of bygone eras enjoyed?
Through the ages, food has played a critical role in everything from religion to trade. As example, ancient and medieval Europeans loved spicy food. Ancient Romans were particularly fond of pepper, and in the Middle Ages nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves were major imports. Massive global trade networks needed to be created between Asia and Europe to meet these demands. When those trade routes broke down, European nations explored other avenues for getting spices — leading to the historic voyages of Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama, the first European to reach India by sea.
“We need to know where we came from, and many of us in the U.S. came from a European background,” said DiClemente. “Understanding how we culturally ended up where we are today is important, and by using food you can really dig into the everyday lives of people and how they lived.”
Cooking up the past
For almost a year, DiClemente, a New Jersey native with a doctorate from the University of Iowa, developed the course funded by a grant from the Kossen Center for Teaching and Learning.
“I was thinking about what I wanted to focus on and what I wanted us to eat,” said the instructor who researched and selected recipes she would be able to source ingredients for and that could be done within the given time frame.
Thirteen students signed up, not knowing they would be hands-on in a kitchen before it was over. They took part in three labs, working with recipes mined from the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, medieval and early modern periods, and from the era of Shakespeare.
In the Puckett House kitchen on campus, students made dishes like Parthian chicken, asparagus patina, chicken plum pie, rose cakes, lemony sweet potatoes with dates and herb tarts.
“We were actually putting our hands on history, handling recipes, ingredients and meals that reflected the time periods we were studying,” said Gabrielle Lestrade, 21, a rising senior from Ocean Springs.
Class participant Josh Herrick of Columbus will be a junior next semester.
“It’s one thing to read the text and try to understand, but it’s another thing to be actually in the kitchen, cooking the food, seeing it,” the 20-year-old said. “You don’t really think that much about it, but food is involved in just about everything a culture does.”
It wasn’t all cooking, of course. Students wrote papers and took exams. They researched the origin, history and impact of individual ingredients. They looked back through time, to how communal bakers stamped bread loaves for individual customers before baking, and how food-selling stalls in the marketplaces of ancient Rome were, in their way, precursors of today’ food courts.
“I’m so happy I was able to be a part of the first class of this nature,” said Lestrade. “Not just cooking, not just history, but a perfect blend of both.”
The study of food as identity, food as citizenship opens windows on who we are and where we have come from. (Consider the South’s signature sweet tea, grits and cooked greens as a modern example of identity.)
“Food really is culture,” said DiClemente. Having students experience that hands-on makes them realize tastes aren’t universal, she added. “They also realize that what we’re experiencing today is very different from what was experienced thousands of years ago.”
(Editor’s note: Recipes from the History of Food class below and at cdispatch.com are from “Shakespeare’s Kitchen: Renaissance Recipes for the Contemporary Cook,” by Francine Segan, Random House, 2003.)
LEMONY SWEET POTATOES WITH DATES
Total time: 30 minutes
Serves 6
2 large, long sweet potatoes, baked
1/2 cup lemon liqueur (such as limoncello)
1/4 teaspoon ground mace
8 pitted dates, chopped
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoons light brown sugar
(Dates, a prehistoric fruit of Arab origin, were imported into England in the 13th century. They were considered extremely healthful and were prized for their sweetness at a time when sugar was prohibitively expensive. In this recipe, dates are pureed to give a crunchy glaze to sweet potatoes flavored with lemon liqueur, a tart and sweet mix.)
CHICKEN PLUM PIE
Pie dough
1 pound cooked chicken meat, shredded
3 tablespoons beef stock
Pinch of ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground mace (or nutmeg)
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
4 purple plums; pitted, peeled and diced
Salt and freshly milled black pepper
2 plums, cut in 1/4-inch slices
2 tablespoons butter, melted
1 tablespoon light brown sugar
(This is a lovely summer picnic dish. The nobility enjoyed outdoor dining in Shakespeare’s day, harking back to the time of Queen Elizabeth I picnicking during a hunt, where a visitor observed that when she dined, her ladies in waiting “gave to each of the Guards a mouthful to eat … for Fear of any Poison.”)
1610 ROSE CAKES
Total time: 30 minutes
Makes about 36 cookies
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon ground mace
1/4 cup rose syrup (available at gourmet grocers; or use 1 teaspoon rose water mixed with 3 tablespoons honey and 1 tablespoon water)
2 tablespoons cream
2 large egg yolks
2 cups pastry flour
2 tablespoons crushed candied rose petals (optional)
(This recipe is based on one from a 1610 handwritten recipe book of Sarah Longe, intended for her personal use.)
Jan Swoope is the Lifestyles Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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