CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Minko, Alena |
|---|---|
| Title | Frumenty: A European Recipe in the Medieval Culinary Tradition |
| Summary | This thesis is devoted to one recipe from medieval culinary tradition – frumenty. In general, it was a wheat porridge made with milk and eggs, sometimes colored with saffron. Thickness and yellow color were its characteristic features. The thesis investigates this recipe in order to establish its content and variations and to see if it was an English specialty, as it is sometimes believed, or a European phenomenon and belonged to the medieval culinary culture overall. For that, cookery books from England and France dating from the thirteenth-sixteenth centuries are taken as a source material. The recipes are analyzed to establish the exact preparation and alterations of this dish. Menus which often were written alongside recipes are investigated to put frumenty into a wider context of medieval banquets, in particular the place of this dish among other foods as well as the occasions when it was served. The ingredients are closely analyzed to see the cultural and socio-economic connotations behind them. English recipes are compared to French ones to see if they relate to each other or are completely different. The thesis is divided into three chapters. The first two focus on the English material, and the third is on the French to give the research a comparative dimension. All the frumenty recipes identified in the cookery books under investigation are in Appendix 1 (English recipes) and Appendix 2 (French recipes). The present thesis may act as a methodological exemplar of how one recipe can be studied in the wider context of culture, religion, and society. |
| Supervisor | Jaritz, Gerhard; Szende, Katalin |
| Department | Medieval Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/minko_alena.pdf |
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