Brawn, Bacon and Puddings: Cured Meat at the Medieval Winter Table

Martinmas and the autumn pig

The medieval farming year had a season for killing pigs. Martinmas, the feast of St. Martin of Tours, falls on November 11, and it was closely linked with butchering and the feasting that followed. A Middle English lyric on the labors of the months, preserved in a Bodleian Library manuscript dated 1450, sums up November in one line: at Martinmas I kill my swine.

The painted calendars in books of hours tell the same story in pictures. November pages often show swine being fattened on acorns and other nuts in the woods, a practice called pannage. Others show pigs being led to the butcher, or the butchering itself.

The reason was fodder. A note in Frederick Furnivall's 1868 edition of the English courtesy books, citing a Professor Brewer, explains that cattle were not fattened in stalls, so autumn was when they were fat, and that winter meat was largely what had been killed at the yearly autumn slaughter and salted down. Brewer's further claim that no fresh meat was eaten in winter goes too far for great households, whose feast menus list roast swan, capon and venison.

Salt and souse

The sources used for this page say far more about eating preserved meat than about making it, but salt is everywhere in them. Russell pairs bacon with peas. Serving guides speak of powdered meat, which their editor glosses as salted or pickled. The provisions for a feast given for Richard II and the Duke of Lancaster in September 1387, printed by Thomas Austin, begin with fourteen oxen lying in salt beside two fresh ones, and go on to three tuns of salt venison.

The fullest description comes later, from William Harrison's account of England in the reign of Elizabeth I. Pieces of boar were boiled until tender, cooled, and then kept in closed vessels under small ale or beer mixed with verjuice and salt, with the liquid changed now and then so that it did not sour. This is sousing, a pickle and not a dry cure. Harrison adds that legs of pork could be hung up for a while to dry.

What brawn was

Brawn today names one particular pork dish. In the Middle Ages the word simply meant flesh or muscle. The Forme of Cury, compiled about 1390 by the master cooks of Richard II, speaks of the brawn of capons and hens as well as the brawn of swine, and its 18th-century editor Samuel Pegge remarked that the word had only later narrowed to rolls of boar meat.

At a feast, brawn meant the fat, firm meat of a boar. Russell specifies brawn of the wild boar. By Harrison's day it was made from the fore part of a tame boar that had been fattened on oats and peas for a year or two in gentlemen's houses. The neck pieces were cut round and called collars, and the shoulders were called shields. Each piece was bound up, boiled until a straw could be pushed through the fat, and then soused.

Mustard first: brawn opens the dinner

Brawn had a fixed place on the menu. Russell's dinner of flesh begins with an instruction to set out mustard and brawn of boar first, ahead of the pottage, beef, mutton, pheasant and swan. His carver is told to slice the brawn in its dish and see that there is good mustard with it. A serving guide from around 1500 puts it just as plainly: first mustard and brawn, with sweet wine served alongside.

Real menus bear this out. Austin prints the meat menu for the funeral feast of Nicholas Bubwith, Bishop of Bath and Wells, held on December 4, 1424. Its first course includes brawn with mustard, chines of pork, roast capon, swan and heron. The feast for the installation of John Stafford as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1443 begins with brawn and mustard. So, Austin notes, did Queen Catherine's coronation banquet, where it was the one meat dish on a menu otherwise made up of fish.

It was not only a dish for the great. Russell's feast for a franklin, whom he ranks with merchants at a squire's table, starts with brawn and mustard and follows it with bacon and peas. Harrison, more than a century later, says brawn was served from November until the end of February, but chiefly at Christmas time, that dinners began with it, and that a draft of sweet wine usually followed because it was hard to digest.

Sausages and puddings

Readers looking for sausages in English cookbooks of this period will mostly find them under another name. Neither the Forme of Cury nor the two 15th-century collections edited by Austin has a recipe headed sausage. Meat, blood or grain packed into a casing and boiled was a pudding.

The cookbook in Harleian Manuscript 279, which Austin dated to about 1430 or 1440, gives a pudding of porpoise: blood and fat mixed with oatmeal, salt, pepper and ginger, put into the gut, simmered gently and then lightly broiled. The same book has a haggis of sheep, with chopped innards, pepper, saffron, bread, egg yolks and cream boiled in the stomach, and a pudding of capon's neck. Bishop Bubwith's funeral feast in 1424 served a pudding of swan's neck alongside the brawn. Austin supposed that these neck puddings were delicacies.

Not everyone approved. A 15th-century drinking song printed by Furnivall, from the songbook of an Ipswich minstrel, turns down beef, bacon, tripe and puddings one by one and calls each time for good ale instead.

From brawn to a charcuterie board

The words on a modern menu are newer than the foods. Charcuterie is a French word that Dictionary.com dates in English to 1855 to 1860. The habit it names is far older: cured and cold pork set out at the start of the meal with something sharp beside it.

The St. Nicholas Day Feast at Yuletide Medieval Festival begins with a mini charcuterie and later serves a banger with the roasted game hen. It is a modern menu, but a guest in 1420 would have recognized the order of things, with preserved pork first and the roast to follow.

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