The gulf of the Dark Ages stretches between Apicius’s cookbook and the hundred or so medieval recipe manuscripts that have come down to us. They portray the feasts of the noble houses of Europe in an overwhelming panorama of meat, game, fowl, and fish. The menus resemble an inventory of the inhabitants of a game park. Stuffed peacocks are reconstituted in their feathers, giant pies burst with live birds, castles of pastry or sugar icing loom so large that they have to be moved by horse and cart—all designed as jokes, part of the entertainment and not intended to be eaten. The huge quantities of spice that perfumed fashionable dishes were not so much culinary refinements as expressions of wealth and power, like the coatings of gold and silver leaf used today in Indian cuisine. To us it seems another world.
