Chicken Danish

In the Middle Ages, there was little trade or travel. So there must have been distinctive local cuisines all over the place, right?

Surprisingly not. The poor lived on a plain subsistence diet that was much the same everywhere: bread, porridge, cheese and boiled vegetables. At the same time, the aristocracy was intermarried all over Europe, so there was an international court cuisine, based on expensive imported ingredients like spices, almonds and rice. City people, who were neither peasants nor lords, cooked as much like the aristos as they could afford.

This was so even in remote Scandinavia, where the nobles ate much like their cousins to the south--as much as they could afford to do, anyway. There’s a medieval Danish book of 22 recipes, many of them for quite basic dishes like fried chicken (fry it, cut it up when cool and serve warm), chicken pie (pullus in pastellis, flavored with sage and bacon) and information about how to extract oil from nuts (crush, wring through a cloth). Even so, four of its recipes called for almonds and 10 for imported spices.

The most elaborate recipe was roast venison with salsum dominorum, which the book translated as “salt of the lords.” This sauce was one part each cloves, mace, cardamom, pepper and ginger pounded with bread, vinegar and five parts cinnamon. “This is the best the gentry have,” the recipe boasted. Conveniently, it was also a preservative that would keep meat for three weeks.

A copy of this book made it as far as Iceland, where almonds and spices would have been harder to get than in Denmark. So would wine--even venison, for that matter. And the sauce of garlic and fresh grapes (a sauce for goose, incidentally) would have been strictly fantasy reading in Reykjavik.