The Man of the House Who Loved to Cook
It wasn’t remotely beneath a medieval man’s dignity to take a genuine, hands-on interest in what was cooked in his own household — quite the opposite, in fact, since food touched directly on both a family’s public standing and a husband’s own private comfort, and some of our best surviving evidence for medieval cooking comes precisely from men who cared enormously about getting it right.
Francesco Datini, a wealthy Italian merchant, left behind genuinely detailed instructions for exactly the dinner he expected on arriving home: “A good broth with fat cheese of one kind or another to eat therein… eggs, fish… and many good figs and peaches and nuts… and look to it that the table be well laid and the room well cleaned.” He was fussy about ingredients too, once instructing a servant buying veal to specifically ask for “fine veal for that gentleman from Prato” to ensure good service, and there’s even a hint in his letters that he occasionally cooked a little himself. The Goodman of Paris showed an identical hands-on streak in the guide he compiled for his young wife, right down to warning her how to spot watered-down milk: “Say to the woman who shall sell it to you that she give it not to you if she have put water therein… it will turn.”
Men also had a practical reason for this interest that women of the household often lacked: they were the ones most likely to travel, and so the ones expected to bring back genuine treats from further afield. A young wool merchant regularly returning from business trips to Calais brought his mother preserved ginger and saffron on one occasion, and six sugar loaves and a dozen pounds of currants for a colleague on another — proof that even hard-headed businessmen kept half an eye on the family shopping list while away.
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