Cooking and cuisine in late Anglo-Saxon England

Abstract

This article tries to explore the question of whether the Anglo-Saxons in the tenth and eleventh centuries actually had an interest in elaborate and socially distinctive food preparations – whether, to use words that have been employed and defined by anthropologists and other social scientists, their food practices distinguished ‘cooking’ from ‘cuisine’, or even ‘gastronomy’. Through the study of written sources and archaeological data, we address several issues which can tell us about the Anglo-Saxons’ attitude towards food: the existence of proper kitchens and specialized cooks; the question of ‘privileged foods’ – categories of food widely recognized as suitable for social elites; and the ways by which recipes were transmitted. The answer is that the Anglo-Saxons may have known some forms of elaborate ‘cooking’, that ‘cuisine’ may have existed but cannot be identifi ed as such, and that ‘gastronomy’ was not a part of their thought world.