Medieval Pottage: The Soup Pot That Fed Every Rank

One dish for every rank

The Forme of Cury, compiled about 1390 by King Richard II's master cooks, says in its opening lines that it will first teach a man to make common pottages and common dishes for the household, and only afterward the curious pottages, meats and subtleties meant for grand occasions. Even at court, in other words, cooking began with the pot.

Samuel Pegge, who edited the roll in 1780, noticed the same thing from the other end. Its dishes, he wrote, are chiefly soups, pottages, ragouts and hashes, with meat hacked into pieces instead of served as whole joints. He called the very first recipe, hulled beans boiled in broth and eaten with bacon, a dish of the poorer householder, and said the same of the cabbage and turnip pottages that follow it.

What the village pot held

Cookery books were written for great households, so for ordinary people the best evidence is the pots themselves. In 2019 a University of Bristol team led by Dr. Julie Dunne and Professor Richard Evershed published a chemical analysis of food residues in cooking pots, studied alongside animal bones, from West Cotton, a small medieval village in Northamptonshire. They found that stews, or pottages, of beef and mutton with vegetables such as cabbage and leek were the mainstay of the peasant diet, and that dairy products also played an important part.

That is very close to what the royal cooks called common pottage. The difference at a lord's table lay less in the idea than in the extras.

Common pottages in the king's cookbook

The early recipes in The Forme of Cury are short and plain. Caboches in potage quarters cabbages and boils them in good broth with minced onions and the whites of leeks, then adds saffron, salt and a sweet spice mixture the roll calls powdour douce. Rapes in potage does the same with turnips, and a closing line says parsnips and skirrets can be made the same way. Another recipe boils ten kinds of pot herbs, presses them small and simmers them in broth.

Peas and beans appear again and again. Beans are dried in a kiln or oven, hulled and boiled, or boiled and ground in a mortar, thinned with broth and colored with saffron. For perrey of pesoun the cook boils peas under a lid until they burst, strains them through a cloth, and cooks them again with minced onions, oil, sugar, salt and saffron. Dried pulses, onions, cabbages, roots and bacon are exactly the kind of stores a winter kitchen could draw on.

Running or standing

Medieval cooks judged a pottage by how it sat in the dish. A thin one was served running. A thick one was standing, a word Pegge glossed as stiff or thick. Thickness came from grated bread, egg yolks, rice flour or meat pounded in a mortar.

Mortrews, one of the best-known thick pottages, shows the method: hens and pork are boiled together, the meat is ground to a powder, mixed with grated bread and the cooking broth, bound with egg yolks, spiced, and boiled until it is standing. At the other end of the scale, a gruel of oatmeal and pork in a 15th-century cookery book is strained and sent out running. The Forme of Cury even has a standing pottage of apples, called appulmoy, made with almond milk, honey and rice flour.

Bread and broth belonged together. One recipe in the roll, fennel in soppes, simmers fennel with onions, oil and saffron and then pours the liquid over toasted bread.

Named pottages around 1420 to 1460

The fullest list from the decades after Henry V comes from the cookery book known as Harleian MS. 279, which its editor Thomas Austin dated to about 1430 or 1440. Its first part, a calendar of diverse pottages, runs to 153 recipes. It opens with long worts with meat: beef and marrow bones boiled in water, greens parboiled, cut in two or three and added to the beef, the whole thickened with grated white bread and seasoned with saffron and salt.

A few of the names that turn up in the cookery books and in John Russell's Boke of Nurture, a household manual written around the middle of the 15th century:

• Long worts: leafy greens boiled with beef and marrow bones, or in a second version with strained green peas, onions and oil.
• Joutes: mixed pot herbs such as borage, violet, mallows, parsley and beet, boiled, chopped and cooked in broth, served with boiled bacon in a separate dish.
• Caboges: cabbage in broth with marrow bones, thickened with bread.
• Gruel "forced": oatmeal gruel enriched with ground pork.
• Peas with bacon, which Russell lists among his good pottages.
• Frumenty with venison, the wheat pottage of great feasts.
• Mortrews: pounded hen and pork, served standing.

First on the table

Pottage came early in the meal. The Boke of Keruynge, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1513, begins one first course with pottage, worts, gruel and frumenty with venison before the roasts arrive. Russell, for his part, advised sticking to the familiar pottages and setting aside the more contrived ones.

A century after Henry V, the physician Andrew Boorde could still write, in his Dyetary of Helth of 1542, that pottage was not so much used in all Christendom as it was in England. He described it as the liquid in which meat has been boiled, with chopped herbs, oatmeal and salt added.

From pottage to the soup course

The warming seasonal soup served at the St. Nicholas Day Feast at Yuletide Medieval Festival is a modern recipe, and it sits where pottage sat in a 15th-century first course: near the start, before the roast. Of all the dishes on a festive menu, a hot bowl of broth and winter vegetables is the one a diner of 1420 would have known best.

Questions