Life with Stretch and Slim: At table with the Emperor

Banquet of the Peacock
Anon, mid-15th century

Characters in novels have to eat sometimes, even in a book about art, music, and an emperor's quest for immortality. So I've been doing some reading about food in the late middle ages and early modern era, roughly around the year 1500. Learning about people's eating and drinking habits and food preparation is always interesting, otherwise we wouldn't find ourselves watching cooking shows for hours on end, right?

Before we talk about what Europeans were eating in the early sixteenth century, let's take a moment to consider what they weren't eating: they weren't eating tomatoes, corn, or chocolate. They weren't eating out-of-season fruit, and they weren't drinking coffee or tea. Even the potato, something we consider a staple of the traditional German diet, wasn't introduced in Europe until the second half of the sixteenth century.

So what were they eating? What did Maximilian find on his breakfast table in the morning, alongside his copy of The Financial Times? (Just kidding, there were no newspapers, either.)

Maximilian's Power Lunch
by Altdorfer

The short answer is bread, meat, and wine. Meals were served twice a day at court in Innsbruck, at 9 AM and 4 PM, and everyone ate together in one large dining hall, from the emperor on down to the lowliest kitchen maid. Who sat where was dictated by strict protocol. The royals, court officials, and the upper servants ate rolls of fine white flour, while the lower servants ate coarse dark rye bread. The diet was heavily meat-based, especially at the court of a fanatical hunter like Maximilian.

Stag Hunt of Frederick the Wise by Cranach (detail)
Maximilian is on the right, in a blue hunting habit

Here's a typical menu at the Innsbruck court of Maximilian and his second wife Bianca Maria Sforza:

Breakfast: meat and soup, game fried in batter or in a pie with pastry, cabbage, porridge, bread, and wine.

Dinner: Cooked cabbage or beets, stew, salted calfs head, or similar dishes according to season.

Wine mixed with water was the beverage of choice.

Anonymous painting depicting
Herod's banquet
Innsbruck, 16th century

Catholics had to adhere to strict rules regarding fasting, and there were lots of fasting days: the forty days of Lent, plus Wednesday, Fridays, and Saturdays throughout the year, and the eve of major feast days. No meat, dairy, or animal fats were to be consumed. Cooks became very creative while working within these restrictions: almond milk sounds like a modern invention, but it was widely used on fast days instead of cow's milk, and they even succeeded in making cheese out of it!

If you were entertaining important guests on a fasting day, here's what the menu might have looked like:

Almond puree with dumplings
Fresh fish, boiled
Cabbage with fried trout
Crayfish cooked in wine, then pureed and sprinkled with cloves
Figs cooked in wine with whole almonds
Rice pudding made with almond milk and decorated with whole almonds
Trout boiled in wine
Crayfish cooked in wine
Shortbread with grapes covered with dough, and sprinkled with icing sugar
Various kinds of pears, apples, and nuts

The Marriage at Cana by Gerard David,
with members of Maximilian's family depicted

Maximilian was fond of good wine, especially Ribolla and Malvasia, and he liked fruit: apples, pears, cherries, peaches and grapes. He also had his fruitier special-order southern fruit like melons, oranges, and figs.

Food is a powerful way to connect to happy memories: people evoke nostalgia by preparing cherished family recipes. Maximilian was no different. In a letter to his daughter Margaret, who was governor of the Netherlands, Maximilian mentions that he is sending her a kitchen hand, and asked that he be taught to make pâtés in the Flemish way. Considering that Maximilian spent some of the happiest years of his life at the Burgundian court, it's no wonder that he looked to food to remind him of those days.