Keynote Lecture - April 12, 2003

Dr. Terence Scully of Wilfrid Laurier University presented An Introduction to the Food & Cookery of the Late Middle Ages

 

The talk will include:

• Time & place (the chronological, geographical & social frame)
• The sources of our information
• Regional and social variations
• The fundamental nature of late-medieval food
• Three major influences on food & cookery in the late Middle Ages:
• Technological limitations
• Christian strictures
• Theories of the nature of physical reality (humours & health)

Dr. Scully is a Professor Emeritus of French Language and Literature at Wilfred Laurier University. In order to give his students a greater sense of the reality of the Middle Ages, he and his wife Eleanor (a lecturer at the Stratford Chefs School on medieval and renaissance food) used to put on an annual banquet for the students with decor, costumes, entertainment, authentic music (by the Faculty of Music) and, of course, food. Dinner was roughly 20 different dishes -- as well as the bread and hipocras.
Because very few medieval recipes were available at the time, and he had experience with the manuscripts of the period, he began to transcribe and translate microfilm copies of old recipe collections. Since there seemed to be some interest in medieval food and cookery, he began to have the translations published. The Archives of the Canton of the Valais in Switzerland asked him to transcribe and edit a manuscript recipe collection they knew they had but hadn't paid any attention to, and that nobody else knew existed. It turned out to be the "Du fait de cuisine" of Master Chiquart (in Savoy, dated 1420). Perhaps the best survey of cookery and banquet preparation in the Middle Ages.

His book credits include his recently published "Early French Cookery: Sources, History, Original Recipes and Modern Adaptations" (University of Michigan Press, May 2002), "the Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages", and "Early French Cookery" (with his wife).