4 - A Cook’s Therapeutic Use of Garden Herbs

Summary

Among the studies in this book about the nature and produce of gardens in the Middle Ages a minor sidelight might be cast by an examination of the use of herbs as a special sort of daily food, that which was intended for particular members of a household.

The garden that was cultivated on any plot available to a household in the Middle Ages was undoubtedly designed primarily to yield produce that was useful to everyone in that house in their daily – and yearly – life. Members of the household had to be fed, of course, and private gardens provided cheap and varied solutions to that continuing concern. But the repertoire of a professional cook had to accommodate the needs as well as the taste of each of his principal patrons. A cook preparing meals in a relatively wealthy house had to take into account the current state of health of those persons individually. He had specifically to answer the requirements of any who were sick, sickly or convalescent. In determining everyday food appropriate to sustain those individuals, the cook was naturally guided by the medical doctrines of his day. A good garden could provide him with a practical source of useful herbs for that purpose.

The role of humoral theory in much of medieval thought is now well recognized. Galenic theories about the nature of concrete reality, things that exist, tended more or less to permeate all philosophic conjecture about the world around us and our relationship with things in it. Both those things and ourselves are constituted by degrees of, and complex combinations of, the opposing qualities cold and warm, dry and moist (see Chart 1). The world was understood to accommodate four elements: earth, water, air and fire. Those four elements are clearly related to four essential qualities that we can sense around us: warmth (in the air and in fire), cold (in the earth and in water), dryness (again in earth and fire), and moisture (again in air and water). Apart from those elements, though, other things existing in the world partake of the same elemental qualities. Some things are moist by nature, and others are dry; at the same time some things are warm by nature, and others are cool. Varying only in intensity, each of those qualities went far to explain and define the physical nature of everything.