Tag Archives: seasonality

Living in Seasons: Mulberry Wine, or the Moral Perils of Recipes in Times of Austerity

By He Bian

April and May on the US east coast = temperature swings = confusing and sickly weather. This year especially reminds me of the sobering admonition from the ancient Chinese classic of medicine, <The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon>: “when there is damage from cold in winter, one suffers from warm diseases in spring (Dong shang yu han, chun bi bing wen)” (see Marta Hanson’s insightful book on this subject). Seasonality is well known as a central preoccupation in the Chinese medical tradition: the cosmic resonance of the body and the larger world according to the quadruple division of the solar year – the cyclic fluctuation of temperature, directionality of wind, and the loci of corporal vulnerability that furnished essential cues for a master practitioner of medicine.

But if etiology in Chinese medicine is classically understood as seasonal, surely the therapeutics should also follow a seasonal rhythm? To my surprise, a search for pre-modern monographs that contain the keyword “four seasons” (sishi) yielded few results. In addition, they tend to focus on agriculture (which of course also follows a seasonal rhythm) or popular festivities around the year. I decide to take a closer look at the latest text that featured “four seasons” in its title – a title attributed to Qu You (1341-1427), Si shi yi ji (Auspicious and Inauspicious Deeds in Four Seasons). I thought this text might teach me something about how a learned scholar approached the notion of seasonality in the early fifteenth century, and how that might align or depart from the canonical medical model of seasonality.

The book consists of twelve chapters, each describing the dos and don’ts for a specific month. I flipped to the chapter on the fourth month (which corresponded roughly to this present moment in Western calendar). I learned, to my surprise and delight, a ton of practical advice with specific recipes: how to properly dry and insulate book and painting cases before the advent of rainy season; “use eels that have been sun-dried, burn them inside the house to thwart the thirst of mosquitoes” (seems appropriate for New Jersey habitat); “wrap your battle gears along with Sichuanese peppers (huajiao) or powder of Daphne flowers (yuanhua) to prevent worm damage… wrap windshield collars and earmuffs and store them in a vat, tightly seal it up, so as the fur will not fall off.” After the first full moon this month, one “should drink mulberry wine” to prevent “wind heat” illnesses (see Shigehisa Kuriyama’s discussion of wind in classical Chinese and Greek medicines). The recipe goes as follows:

Use Mulberries, get its juice of three dou (1 dou ~ 18 liter). White Honey four ounces (liang); Butter (suyou) one ounce; raw ginger juice two ounces.

Bring mulberry juice to a boil in a pot, and reduce its volume to three sheng (1 sheng = 1/10 dou), and then add honey, butter, and ginger juice. Add three drachm (qian) of salt and keep boiling till the texture is thick.

Store in porcelain utensils. Each time, take a small cup with wine. This effectively cures various wind-induced illnesses.

Not only does this sound completely delicious and doable to me, I also realize how recipes like this are in fact completely grounded in the seasonal rhythm of biological life (I just saw a friend posting the harvest of fresh mulberries in her backyard in China).

In sum, what Qu You did in this book was to cull from a wide range of medical and non-medical sources (a rough count yielded over 60 different titles) for hints and tips on how to live according to the seasons. Some of his references were archaic almanacs that offered divinations on the most auspicious dates to travel, have sex, trim your nails, or remove grey hair, as well as dates one should abstain from such activities. Some were quasi-ethnographic accounts of “customs” (fengsu) in ancient cities that still lend to a viable reading as practical guides to festivities. Still others draw from esoteric Daoist literature on the preservation of vital essence (I have blogged on a related topic here), a decision on Qu You’s part that raised many eyebrows both during his lifetime as well as centuries later.

A Daoist talisman in Qu You, Si shi yi ji (1920 reprint of an 1836 edition).

We must remember that Qu lived through the Ming dynasty’s founder, Hongwu emperor’s reign (1368-1398) – a period known for its austere message of moral purity and simplicity. His fourth son, who usurped the throne shortly after Hongwu’s death to become the Yongle emperor (r. 1404-1424), was not exactly friend of the letters either. Those were not easy times for a literary aficionado with keen interests in morally dubious subjects, and yet Qu You continued to compose and comment on poetry, wrote short stories featuring ghosts and women, and collected esoteric recipes. He even managed to publish those works, prefacing them with loud self-defense of his moral stature. Qu eventually got into trouble, endured decades of exile in the north, and yet again outlived the Yongle emperor, who threw many a undisciplined scholars like him into jail, by three years.

Perhaps the seasonal recipes did work well for him after all?

Tales from the Archives: A November Feast in Medieval Europe

In September 2016, The Recipes Project celebrated its fourth birthday. We now have over 500 posts in our archives and over 120 pages for readers to sift through. That’s a lot of material! (And thank you so much to our contributors for sharing such a wealth of knowledge on recipes.) But with so much material on the site, it’s easy for earlier pieces to be forgotten. So, the editors have decided that, every now and then, we’ll pull something out of the archives to share with our readers anew.

While it was tempting to go with a Spring focused post (such as this wonderful one by Katherine Allen), this month I’d like to share a 2014 post by Sarah Peters Kernan, on seasonality and feasts in November.  I hope that you enjoy it! And if you have any favorites you want us to revisit, please send in your nominations
Elaine (editor).

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By Sarah Peters Kernan

November was a bountiful month for food in medieval Europe. The harvest was completed, wine and cider were quietly fermenting, and animals were nearing slaughter. The fattening of pigs is the most consistent of images in medieval illuminated Books of Hours for the monthly labor of November.

Queen Mary Psalter (England, c. 1310–1320): London, British Library, Royal 2 B VII, f. 81v. Source: British Library.
Queen Mary Psalter (England, c. 1310–1320): London, British Library, Royal 2 B VII, f. 81v. Source: British Library.

November was liturgically balanced between a long stretch of Ordinary Time and Advent’s four weeks of fasting. The month was dotted with holy days and feast days, including All Saints Day, All Souls Day, and the Feast of Saint Andrew. Le Ménagier de Paris, a guide, written in the 1390s, for the young wife of a bourgeois household, contains numerous references to these November holy days. (For more on the Ménagier, see Tovah Bender’s post about using this text as a teaching tool.) In the Ménagier, seasonality is marked by feasts: on Saint Andrew’s Day, people were instructed to preserve parsley and fennel root, sheep quarters were salted in Béziers, and the wood pigeon season which would run until Lent commenced.[1]

Martinmas—the Feast of Saint Martin of Tours—on November 11, was the official seasonal turning point. Martinmas was a continent-wide day of celebration and feasting. Like the modern American Thanksgiving, the feast day secondarily celebrated the end of the harvest. Both feasts featured a centerpiece bird; Martinmas, as well as Saint Martin himself, was closely associated with geese rather than turkey. The saint and his feast day were linked to the feast-friendly fowl as a nod to the gaggle of geese that supposedly revealed his hiding place to the people who wanted Martin to become their bishop.

While the goose was eaten in celebration of other feasts during the year, the tie between the goose and Martinmas was especially strong. Orlando di Lasso, a sixteenth-century composer, addressed the association in his lyric:

Hear the news!

The peasant from Donkeychurch,

he has a fat goo-goo-goose,

the gyri gyri goo-goo-goose,

that has a long, fat,

thick, well-fed neck;

bring the goose here!

Have at it, my dear Hans;

pluck it, pull it, boil it, roast it,

tear it up, devour it!

This is St. Martin’s little bird,

we may not be his enemy;

servant Heinz, bring here a good wine,

and pour us a hearty draught,

let it go all around!

In God’s name we drink

good wine and beer

to the stuffed goose,

to the roasted goose,

to the young goose,

that it may do us no harm. [2]

English and French cookeries from the preceding centuries contain tens of recipes for goose preparations, exhibiting the popularity and widespread use of the bird. The famed Viandier of Taillevent (late thirteenth-century) contains only one recipe for goose, yet refers to the preparation of geese in several other recipes, indicating that the goose was a typical bird for consumption in French royal households. Only a cook with experience preparing geese would have been comfortable following directions such as “it is plucked dry like a goose” and “it is killed as a goose” in recipes for swan, peacock, and stork.[3] Le Ménagier de Paris also contains similar references to geese in other poultry recipes. The text also contains many more recipes for geese, including pottages, pasties, and hochepot. Sauces were recommended for service with roast goose, and the author even included instructions for fattening the animal.[4] English cookeries contain at least twelve different preparations over thirty times, including goose in gauncele, goose in sauce madame, and stuffed goose.

The Feast of Saint Martin was a seasonal marker for many other meats; in fact, Martinmas signaled a yearly slaughter. Meat was very plentiful and less expensive at market, while large estates and households had an annual stockpile of meat and embarked upon the huge task of preserving their supply. We also learn from Le Ménagier de Paris that the hunting period for animals such as boar extended from September to Martinmas.[5]

Those images of November’s task, the fattening of the pig, not only signaled the season’s import for food production and consumption, but reminded the medieval cook of the fruitfulness of this period situated between days of plenty and want. The liturgical calendar and seasonal availability of foodstuffs combined to make November a tasty treat.

[1] Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose, trans., The Good Wife’s Guide (Le Ménagier de Paris): A Medieval Household Book (Cornell University Press, 2009), 328, 274, 299.

[2] Yossi Maurey, Medieval Music, Legend, and the Cult of St Martin (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 123.

[3] Terence Scully, ed., The Viandier of Taillevent: An Edition of all Extant Manuscripts (University of Ottawa Press, 1988), 285.

[4] Greco and Rose, 283, 289, 339, 321, 298.

[5] Greco and Rose, 287.

‘Thus it prevails against its time’: distillation and cycles of nature in early modern pharmacy

By Tillmann Taape

In past centuries, devoid of freezers and heated greenhouses, the seasons affected medicines as well as foodstuffs. In addition to pickled vegetables and stored grain, early modern people worried about their provisions of healing plants and animal substances. These, too, had their season: many herbs were considered most powerful when picked in May, and ‘May dew’ collected from fragrant meadows at this time of year was said to have many healing properties. In his Destillierbücher (distillation manuals), published in the early sixteenth century, the Strasbourg surgeon-apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig addresses the challenges which arise in pharmacy from nature’s cyclical changes. He explains that most preparations of fresh medicinal herbs are ‘unkeepable’. For example, ‘if you pound herbs, roots or other substances and squeeze the juice from it, then it becomes unpleasant, does not last, […] and soon putrid corruption ensues’.[1] Even with dried materia medica and compound drugs, their medicinal virtues faded over time.

Brunschwig knew this all too well from personal experience. As an apothecary running his own shop near the fish market, maintaining a stock of efficacious remedies was his chief responsibility and expertise. The issue of pharmaceutical provisioning was taken very seriously by Strasbourg’s magistrates. Twice a year, they would send round a committee of medical experts to all apothecary shops, to ensure that no perished goods were stocked, and to throw away any that had gone off.

An apothecary pounding medicines. Brunschwig, Liber de arte distillandi de compositis (Strasbourg, 1512), fol. 6v. © Wellcome Library, London

Brunschwig’s understanding of the material world was shaped by his experience as a pharmacist and shopkeeper, but also by the cosmology and medical theory of his day. While the heavenly spheres were characterised by material perfection and changelessness, all matter on earth was made up of the four elements (air, water,fire, earth) and subject to their constant permutations. They were doomed to endless cycles of generation, change, and decay. Material stability was only possible where the elements were in perfect balance, ‘as you can see in May when it is neither too dry nor too humid, neither too warm nor too cold’.[2]

Brunschwig’s seasonal simile is revealing: a perfect balance of elements is just as rare and fleeting as those precious few balmy weeks in May. As well as pointing to the instability of all earthly matter, the language of seasons and their cold, hot, dry or moist qualities was associated with early modern ideas about the stages of human life. Youth, health, reproduction, decline and death were analogous with the annual cycle of flourishing and decay in nature – a relationship which is richly illustrated in a set of anonymous seventeenth-century engravings (see here for an interactive digital reproduction). The idea of changing seasons was emblematic of an early modern view of the material world which was characterised by instability. Human bodies fluctuated with the shifting balance of their humours, and the very substances which could be used to cure the resulting ailments were themselves fleeting and, in Brunschwig’s words, ‘unkeepable’.

Faced with such difficulties, Brunschwig and others turned to a branch of knowledge with a longstanding commitment to imitating and manipulating natural processes underlying the transformations of matter: alchemy. In particular, Brunschwig describes distillation as a powerful artisanal technique to ‘keep the unkeepable’.[3] Distillation was the art of separation, and in the case of medicinal simples, Brunschwig claimed, their ‘soul’ or healing virtue could be separated from their ‘body’, that is to say the material dross made up of the problematic four elements. Thus liberated, the healing ‘spirit’ of a plant in the form of a distilled water could be bottled and neatly stored on Brunschwig’s alphabetically ordered shelf, where they would keep well beyond their harvest season, for up to three years. Later Destillierbücher echo the idea that one can ‘keep these waters over the year’ as a major selling point of distilled remedies.[4]

While distillation in theory had the power to produce pure and incorruptible ‘quintessences’, this was far too laborious for everyday pharmaceutical practice. Brunschwig wrote for an audience of ‘common men’ as well as artisan colleagues, and most of the distilled remedies he discusses are much more pedestrian. They still have some of the elemental qualities of the original herb, and are ultimately perishable. Compared to ‘unkeepable’ plant juice, however, their decay is slower and more predictable. Brunschwig confidently charts the decline and change in a water’s healing powers over the years, and even gives instructions for ‘recharging’ them. A water can be saved by infusing it with fresh herbs and distilling it once more – thus, Brunschwig reassures his readers, a distilled remedy can ‘prevail against its time’ for another year.[5]

In the early modern world of matter, the seasons symbolised cycles of change and decay which spelled trouble for healers and makers of medicines. In some of the earliest vernacular works on pharmacy, Brunschwig describes distillation as a powerful tool for defying the material corruption of seasonal changes.

[1] Brunschwig, Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus… (Strasbourg, 1500), sig. C1v.

[2] Brunschwig, Liber der arte distulandi simplicia… (Strasbourg, 1509), fol. 36v.

[3] Brunschwig, Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus… (Strasbourg, 1500), sig. C1v.

[4] Eucharius Röslin, Kreutterbuoch von allem Erdtgewaechs… (Frankfurt, 1533), title page verso.

[5] Brunschwig, Liber der arte distulandi simplicia… (Strasbourg, 1509), fol. 18v.

 

Depending on the season

By Jennifer A. Munroe

In Charlotte, NC it was 90 degrees (Fahrenheit) yesterday, with a blistering sun that felt more like mid-summer than mid-spring; today it is 50 degrees and raining so hard we are under a flash flood warning. Also yesterday, Earth Day (April 22) was met this year by a “March for Science” around the globe. Somehow, it all seems fitting: such fluctuations in the weather here in North Carolina are a product (at least in part) of human-precipitated global climate change, a phenomenon still denied by too many people (one is too many, to my mind), especially in Western countries who have too much to gain by the continued overuse of earth’s resources. But what has this all to do with early modern recipes?

Early modern recipes remind us that humans are, ultimately, subject to seasonal change, even if our actions might alter the fluctuations and intensity of temperature and precipitation—or, might affect the way we experience the seasons. That is, although it may seem that we have the power, even to act destructively, our presence on this planet is a shared presence, one borne of interdependence and punctuated by the fact that we are, ultimately, locked in an interdependent relationship with the other animals, plants, soil, and climate on the planet we cohabitate.

At a time when we can access produce like strawberries and avocados in the middle of winter, it may seem we have achieved liberation from the shackles of seasonality. But such mid-winter fruits, as any who have tasted them in January would know, are mere specters of their mid-summer relatives: they may look like the real thing, but taste like it they do not. Early moderns were necessarily bound to the sort of seasonality we aim to circumvent today. As they grew or harvested their own fruits and vegetables, they were (even with hothouse technology) generally subject to the natural course of ripening that comes as a result of having spent enough hours on the vine, stalk, or bush basking in the sunshine, or the slow release of ethylene that makes a tomato red or a blackberry soft. Calcium carbide, our modern-day chemical stand-in, may hasten ripening while a fruit is prematurely transported to market today, but it will not make it taste sweet.

I want to turn to a recipe from the manuscript receipt book of Rebeckah Winche (Folger MS v.b.366) to rethink what it (and others like it) tells us about human dependence on the seasons. If you open a manuscript recipe book, you will notice myriad iterations of “pick it when it is ripe” or “gather in midsomer,” as we do in numerous recipes from the Winche book. These books thus note the optimum time for harvest, when the plant material is at its best. A recipe from the Winche book, “To Preserve Wallnuts,” charges, “Take green walnuts about Midsomer” (153); or another, “To Drie Figges,” similarly calls for one to “Take your figges when thay are ripe & new gathred” (152). Gathering a fruit when it is ripe, or a flower when it is newly-budded, is to take that plant when its oil and sugar concentrations (and its very essence) are at their peak. But I think recipes like these do more than indicate the optimum time for gathering; they also underscore a delicate balance between the desire to thwart time (and seasonality as a marker of time) and an awareness of the futility of halting time and its effects on both humans and nonhumans alike. For while the act of food preservation (here, drying figs) is an endeavor that presumes to hold an object in time and space indefinitely, it is also a sort of hubris—after all, the moment a plant is harvested, its mortality is hastened. Take the recipe “To Drie Figges,” for instance:

Take your figges when thay are ripe & new

gathred. set on a skillet of water then take

your figges & prick them up & down wth a pin

& put them in to the water & let them boyle till

thay bee tender. then take them out & to a pound of

take a pound of loafe suger. then take a quart of

water. & one quarter of the suger & set it on the

fire & when you have scumed it put in your figs

& let them boyle a pritty while then put them in an

earthen pan & so doe for 4 days together put ing in

on gr of ye suger every day until all bee in allways

let ing the sirup boyle before you put in the figs

let them stand 2 days in the sirrup & then lay them

upon a sive & when thay are drayned scrape fine

suger on them & set them in an oven where there

is some little heat or in a stove turning them twice

a day serseing suger on them until thay be dry

then put papers between them & keepe them in a dry place.

As interesting as the instructions for preserving the figs (which ripen in summer) so they last indefinitely might sound–to suspend them in time by way of applying sugar and heat over a prolonged period–this recipe articulates protracted time in such a way that underscores flux, not stasis. Or put another way, even in the act of “keeping” (which implies a holding in time and space of an object’s qualities), recipes like this one underscore fluctuation and change. Taking the figs, “when they are ripe and new gathred” prompts this chain of events, but what follows is a process of “prick[ing],” “scum[ing],” “boyle[ing],” “drayn[ing],” “turning,” and “serseing” over the course of days, even weeks, “until thay be dry” (however long that is). The “ings” here outnumber the “eds.”

We might also recall the numerous recipes from the period in which we find alternative storage directions for different seasons: foods and medicines might last longer in storage in the winter than in the summer. And here, in the simple directions to “keepe them [the dried figs] in a dry place,” we see contingencies of seasonality—keeping something dry in the middle of summer is usually an easier enterprise than keeping it dry in the peak of the spring rains, even if your storage is tucked away and sealed. For that matter, starting a fire and keeping it regulated is easier to do during a drier season than it is a wetter one.

This recipe with a deceptively simple title, “To Drie Figges,” then, reveals a complex and ongoing interaction between human (gatherer) and an array of nonhuman things (fig, sugar, fire, sun, rain, knife, skillet, and more) that seems to defy the very premise of preservation. That is, while the notion of “preserving” seems to imply something very unseasonal—to be kept perpetually in a state over time—“To Drie Figges” reminds us of the multiple states of being, of our dependence on the seasons for the fruit’s ripeness and for its preservation (even after the loads of sugar). Moreover, any user of this recipe would need to know the season when figs ripen, as our instructions indicate merely to “take” when ripe. In England, as in the US, figs tend to ripen in summer, but the moment of optimum ripeness is harnessed not by fixing a date on the calendar to gather, but rather by attending to the particulars of the fruit’s appearance, odor, and texture. As anyone who tends a garden in this time of climate change would know, though, that precise moment shifts from year to year, and is coming earlier all the time, thanks to planetary warming. For these and other reasons, then, recipes remind us of what we might otherwise like to forget: so much is depending not so much on us, but on the season.