Fancy jellies, pastries, and sweet dishes are coming into vogue, although they have not reached the perfection to be attained by later French cookery; but for the St. Aliquis feast they are able to prepare great molded structures of lions and suns, made of white chicken and pink jelly. The quantity of spices used is simply enormous. To enjoy food thus charged, especially with pepper, is an acquired taste, which developed following the First Crusade. The cooks, too, use a liberal supply of mustard, and a favorite sauce is made from strong garlic. Fresh and pickled olives are sent up from Provence, likewise a good deal of olive oil; but the oil used in common cooking is often extracted from walnuts or even from poppies. Another favorite flavoring is with rose water. All through June you can see great basins of water filled with rose petals steeping in the sun. The liquor thus obtained will add zest to sauces for the next twelve months. There is also a certain whitish substance known as "sugar." It comes from the Levant, in small irregular lumps. Its flavoring qualities are delightful, but it is too expensive to use in cookery. A small quantity is passed about among Conon's higher guests, to be eaten as a confection. The ordinary sweetening is still that of the Greeks and Romans, honey, supplied from the well-kept hives of the bees belonging to the monastery.
Cheeses hardly figure in feasts, but for everyday diet they are important. On feast days they often replace meat. Their varieties are legion—white, green, large, small, etc. Some places produce famous cheeses exported all over France, and in Paris one can hear the street venders shrilly chanting:
"Buy my cheese from Champagne, Or my cheese from Brie!"
As for eggs and butter, they are gifts of the kindly saints, to carry men through Lent and fast days. Theologians have said that hens were aquatic creatures, like other birds; that hence good Christians could eat their eggs freely. But butter (by some unaccountable notion) if eaten during times of abstinence, must be freshly churned. It must not be salted, nor used for cooking purposes.
Passing next to beverages, be it said that the St. Aliquis denizens are fairly abstemious folk. All of them sometimes get tipsy, even Adela and Alienor, but only seldom. Conon's servants help him to bed once or twice per year. Down in the villages there are disgraceful guzzlings among the peasants, especially on saints' days. But the beverages are not very alcoholic—one must absorb a great deal to be really upset. The region grows its own wine for ordinary consumption, and a little thereof is shipped to Paris and even to Flanders and England, along with the more famous vintages of Gascony, Saintonge, Macon, Rheims, the Marne, and the Orleanais. The most desirable French wine is that of St. Pourcain, in Auvergne, and the baron has a carefully cherished tun of the same in his cellars. Poems, indeed, exist in praise of this St. Pourcain wine, "which you drink for the good of your health." On occasions of great state, however, imported wines will be produced, mainly because they are unusual and expensive. The St. Aliquis feasters are consequently offered heady Cyprian and Lesbian from the Levant, also Aquilian from Spain, and not a little Rhenish from the German lands, less distant.
Wine, Beer and Other Drinks
In the autumn when the apples and pears are falling, the peasants will make cider and perry, and get outrageously drunk when these beverages grow hard; but outside of Normandy such drink seldom appeals to castle folk. There are also in common use many substitute wines, really infusions of wormwood, hyssop, and rosemary, and taken mostly to clear the system; although "nectar" made of spices, Asiatic aromatics, and honey is really in request.
The great competitor of wine is beer. In northern France we are in the dividing zone between the land of the winepress and the land of the brewhouse. Everybody drinks beer and makes beer. The castle has a great brewhouse; likewise the monastery. Beer is made of barley, and only late in the Middle Ages will hops be added to add to the zest. Really fine beer is god-ale (from the German "good" and "ale") or "double beer." Common beer is "small beer." Since the Crusaders have returned from the East, spiced beer has been growing in favor—charged with juniper, resin, gentian, cinnamon, and the like, until the original taste has been wholly destroyed.
The St. Aliquis folk do not, however disdain buttermilk. This they like to ferment, boil up with onions and garlic, then cool in a closed vessel. The product is serat, the enjoyment of which is surely difficult for a stranger.
Another form of beverage is not quite unknown. Some physicians prescribe water of gold and allege it "prolongs health, dissipates superfluous matters, revives the spirits, and promotes youth." Also it "greatly assists the cure of colic, dropsy, paralysis, and ague." Of a surety, it aids the patient temporarily to forget his troubles. Yet this is hardly more than a costly medicine. Many years later it will become more common; but its name will be changed to "brandy."