hudebnik

I had read in the guidebooks about the "medieval town" of Provins, its Medieval Faire every summer, its shows of jousting, siege engines, and falconry, its restaurants providing medieval costumes and strolling minstrels... all in all it sounded like a RenFaire-style tourist trap, so I had some misgivings. But it also seemed that all this medievaloid tourism was built atop a good supply of actual medieval survivals, so we got on a train to Provins yesterday morning.

Provins is classed as "Paris suburbs" (l'Île de France), analogous to taking a commuter train like the LIRR, Metro North, or NJ Transit rather than Amtrak. And the governing body for l'Île de France has evidently decided to treat the whole area as a single transit zone, so we didn't need to buy tickets at all, just wave our Paris Metro passes in front of a reader and walk through a gate. That said, there were a bunch of stops, one of which was a spur where the train had to reverse direction, so it took about 1:20 each way. A pleasant and restful train ride through the countryside.

Half a dozen of the Provins medieval attractions are all covered by a "Pass Provins", which one is supposed to buy at the Office de Tourisme, so that seemed like a logical first stop. Unfortunately, somebody in the Provins town government thought it a good idea to put the Office de Tourisme and the train station at exactly opposite ends of town. Fortunately, there's a city bus that runs between the two. Unfortunately, the attractions nearest the Office de Tourisme and farthest from the train station were the ones I thought best to visit last. Fortunately, Google maps showed an Office de Tourisme annexe just outside the train station. Unfortunately, it was fermé. Fortunately, there were clear signs pointing past it to Office de Tourisme, so we (and a dozen other tourists) followed those signs, hoping there was another on the near side of town. (Spoiler: there wasn't.)

The town really is wonderfully picturesque, with lots of charming half-timbered houses, and the weather was perfect. We stopped at the 12th-century church of St. Ayoul, a young monk who, on an expedition to transport some precious relics from another abbey to his own, was set upon by brigands (or monks from a rival sect? I wasn't sure of the translation), his tongue cut out, his eyes pierced, and his head cut off. He's now a patron saint of eye problems, as well as of the town of Provins. The facade of his church is decorated in the same style as Chartres, with large figures wearing bliauts backed up by a chorus of angels, some of them playing psalteries or vielles. But it's much smaller than Chartres, so these figures are only a few feet over the visitor's head, easier to see. The interior is largely 17th-18th-century, but had some interesting pictures and historical plaques.

A block away was the 14th-century (I guess) Tour de Notre Dame and its clock, forming an arch over a narrow street; the clock wasn't quite that old, but it and its street were pretty.

We continued following signs to Office de Tourisme and Cité medievale, along the main commercial street of town. We walked around the outside of another 12th/13th-century church (on the Rue des Oignons), closed for extensive repairs, then we stopped at one shop for chocolates and another for a delicious sit-down lunch. Then passed the Hôtel-Dieu founded by Count Thibaut the Great in the 11th century and headed up a steep hill towards the Lycée Saint-Thibaut, the Eglise Collegiale de Saint-Quiriace, and the remains of the castle of the Counts of Champaign.


In the 11th-14th centuries, the nearly-autonomous Counts of Champaign gave their protection to six annual merchant fairs: two in Provins, two in Troyes, one in Lagny-sur-Marne, and one in Bar-sur-Aube, spaced throughout the year and each lasting six weeks, so a majority of the year there was a fair in one town or another. These were wholesale, to-the-trade fairs, with apparently legal limits on what could be sold in smaller quantities. The fairs provided a lot of revenue and wordfame, while the Counts reciprocated with legal protection and safe passage for the merchants coming from all over Europe and beyond.

The Eglise Collegiale is a large, imposing structure near the highest point of town, started in the 12th century, but with the decline of the Fairs in the 14th century, it ran out of money, so the "nave" end (towards the right in the first three photos below) is actually shorter than the "altar" end. The fourth photo below is taken from what should have been part of the nave. We walked around inside the church for a while, then went on with the walk.
Musée de Provins et du Provinois, which allegedly has a bunch of interesting archaeological finds, was a block or two farther along the road. Unfortunately, it had no public bathroom, and indeed had a sign at the desk saying the nearest public toilettes were at the Place du Châtel, another two or three blocks down the road, so we went on, promising to come back to the museum.

The Place du Châtel appears to be Ground Zero for RenFaire-style tourism (especially restaurants), and we saw a troop of elementary-school children parading around the square in their newly-borrowed costumes. After visiting les toilettes, we saw a sign advertising a biscuiterie medieval and walked another block down the road to see what it was about. It did indeed sell a variety of cookies and cakes based on medieval recipes (including Hildegarde's "cakes of joy", presumably adapted to modern tastes by adding sweetening), as well as a hot-chocolate mix "d'une recette du XIVeme siecle" (I pointed out to shalmestere that, in fairness, it didn't say a European recipe from the 14th century, which would be startling). And indeed, the chalkboard behind the counter described it as Chocolat chaud Azteque, so shalmestere ordered a cup. It was thick, dark, dairy-free, and unsweetened (albeit served with a couple of packets of sugar); no chili peppers, as the Aztecs would have included. Not particularly flavorful, perhaps because the dark chocolate was diluted by the corn starch thickening.


Next stop: the Tithe Barn, a large 12th-century building originally used for storing either merchants' wares or merchants themselves. We still hadn't acquired a Pass Provins, so we paid for this a la carte -- 5 euros apiece. The ground and basement floors are filled with life-sized dioramas of various kinds of merchants and craftsmen, in sometimes-dubious costumes, with an audio guide in your favorite language interviewing each one in turn about his or her business. It was a little hokey, but they managed to get across a fair amount of information. The upper floor is apparently open only to group tours: we saw the troop of elementary-school children heading up there.

Turned around and headed back towards the museum and the adjacent castle keep (the "Caesar Tower"). We randomly chose to visit the keep first, for another 5 euros apiece. This was impressive, and provided panoramic views of the town and countryside from the top. Also, for the engineering geeks in my audience, pictures of the roof infrastructure and support system for bronze bells. And we got a lot of stair-climbing exercise.


The next stop was to be the museum, but it was now 5:30, the museum's closing time, which we decided was OK -- we'd gotten our money's worth from the town. In fact, the paid attractions we'd actually visited had cost less a la carte than the Pass Provins would have cost. Sat on a bench for a few minutes enjoying the breeze (and resting our legs after all the stairs in the keep), then headed down the hill,

through a tower in the city walls, towards the Office de Tourisme (which we were finally somewhat near) to catch a bus back to the train station. That went smoothly, we caught the next train back to Paris, grabbed some take-out to reheat in the room, and collapsed.

Today, mercredi: the Louvre.

Tomorrow, jeudi: we take a couple of trains to Tournai, just over the Belgian border. One night in Tournai.

Vendredi: from Tournai to Bruxelles, where we check into a hotel for a few more nights.

Samedi: day-trip to Leuven for an exhibition that includes the Leuven Chansonnier, discovered only fifteen or twenty years ago (we got an early glimpse at its contents through our Early Notation teacher, and we have a facsimile of the whole book at home).

Dimanche, lundi: day-trips to Mechelen and/or Ghent.

Mercredi: train from Brussels to the Amsterdam airport, then fly to New York. Assuming there are air traffic controllers in the US to guide our plane in. No idea what customs will be like: they've dropped the de minimis exemption, so we may be asked the value of every item we've bought, in which country, so they can calculate how much import tariff to charge on it. All of which will happen at 2 AM Paris time, so we presumably won't be at a peak of cognitive efficiency.

Last Thursday we participated remotely in an SCA potluck, to which we "brought" a steak-and-stout pie and a roasted rabbit (among other things). The rabbit was a little underdone, and we had only eaten a little of it on Thursday, so the day before yesterday we picked the carcass and simmered it in chicken broth with shallots, celery leaves, onion skins, garlic, carrots, etc, strained the stock, and reduced it to jello. Then yesterday we re-cooked the meaty bits in the jello, cooked some lasagna noodles, cut them into diamond shapes, mixed up some poudre douce, and had Hares in Papdele over Loseyns. With roast carrots and beets (left over from a different meal) on the side. We still have half of the steak-and-stout pie; that'll probably be lunch today. Life's tough.

For those who haven't heard, Constance Hieatt died on December 29, 2011.

I met Constance Hieatt once, at an ACTA conference on food in the Middle Ages -- an academic field she largely created, and in which she enjoyed near-godlike status, yet remained warm, approachable, and open-minded.

The field of historical cookery is unusual in the number of non-academics, and academics from other disciplines, who participate and contribute to it. (The names Terry Nutter and David Friedman spring to mind, but the reader can doubtless fill in others.) I think Hieatt and the other leading academics in the field realized thirty or forty years ago that their books were selling largely to people in the SCA and related organizations, and it would behoove them to treat amateurs and recreational medievalists with some respect -- at any rate, that was the effect, and I think Dr. Hieatt deserves much of the credit for this welcoming, open-minded atmosphere.

As the above-linked obituary points out, she remained active in historical-cookery research to the end: one book is due to be published next month, and another is still in the editing stage (to be completed by her sister). I look forward to them.

After the aforementioned shopping trip to the nearby farmer's market, shalmestere and I packed the car and went to the von Halstern "Winter Wolf Tournament". We're not in Haus von Halstern, and we have very little interest in the average SCA tournament, but murieldechamay's husband was doing the dayboard and feast, so.... It rained for much of the day, which scared off a lot of tourneyers, but for those of us who had planned to spend the day indoors, it was a pleasant, laid-back day. We chatted (with murieldechamay, tashadandelion, and a bunch of other people some of whom surely have LJ accounts but I don't remember them) about music, Renaissance clothing, and the usual SCA gossip. Every few minutes we would get up and grab some more food from the fabulous dayboard, or shalmestere and I would play some music... we even watched a few bouts of fighting, which had been moved from the soggy soccer-field onto the less-soggy asphalt but were still fought in the rain.

murieldechamay had warned us "This is a von Halstern feast: it'll be meat, meat, and more meat." There were a reasonable number of non-meat dishes, but the description was basically accurate. The special theme for the day seemed to be "Bambi": I had about three slices of ground-venison pie with lunch, a bit of venison jerky in the afternoon, a bowl of venison-and-barley stew with dinner, and we brought home some leftovers of both the pie and the stew. There was also roast pork (which went nicely with the very spicy apple-garlic (?) sauce), and fall-off-the-spoon-tender beef, and spinach, and other good stuff, of all of which I was unable to eat as much as my tastebuds wanted because I was so full from dayboard.

No after-dinner dancing was scheduled, so we packed up and got home at the unheard-of hour of 8:30 PM.

Today (Sunday) was gorgeous, clear, and chilly. I was going to make pancakes or waffles for breakfast, but found we were short of ingredients, so I had to run to the grocery before finishing breakfast prep. We walked the Things for about an hour in the park (did I mention it was a gorgeous day?), then spent a less-pleasant hour at Home Depot and a hectic time at Trader Joe's (which I gather opened two days ago, so it was jammed). Once home, I tried to install a new ceiling light fixture in the bedroom, giving up because there didn't seem to be any way to attach the thing without an outlet box already installed behind the ceiling (I don't think there are any ceiling outlet boxes in this house, just wires and the occasional threaded rod coming out of the ceiling). As a fallback, I installed it in the enclosed porch, where the ceiling is (I think) solid enough to put screws into. Anybody know how difficult it is to install outlet boxes?

Washed a bunch of dishes.
Baked two loaves of bread.
Washed more dishes.
Baked a dozen crustless broccoli tartlets.
Washed more dishes.
Baked seventeen Paris-Pie pasties (before I ran out of pastry dough; I've used up less than half of the filling).
Sink is overflowing with dirty dishes.
Still to come: maybe make some more dough and some more pasties, maybe make some macaroons with the leftover egg whites, definitely wash more dishes.

Biggest LBC meeting yet -- 15-20 people.  Good dinner of "faire food", in preparation for a "hastilude" camp where food will allegedly have come from street vendors.

I'mt sitting on a train, on the way from New York to Montreal for a computer science conference .  As reading matter, I brought one of shalmestere's Kalamazoo finds, Regional Cuisines of Medieval Europe, of which I intend to write a review for one or more SCA publications.

Each chapter is written by a different scholar and treats a different geographic area.  Each author discusses the principal primary sources from the area, influences in both directions between the area and its neighbors, and any distinguishing characteristics of the region's cuisine.  The primary sources mentioned are familiar: the Viandier, Menagier de Paris, Vivendier, Du Fait du Cuisine and Enseignements for northern France; Llibre de Sent Sovi and Llibre del Coch for Catalunya; the manuscrito anonimo (aka "the Colin ms.") for Arab Andalusia; Platina and the Tacuinum Sanitatis for Italy; etc.  (An exception is the chapter on southern France, whose author edited the only known medieval Occitan cookbook in her 1989 dissertation.)  The Sicilian chapter, lacking a medieval Sicilian cookbook, confines itself to listing distinctive dishes of modern Sicilian cuisine with etymological and culinary parallels in the medieval Islamic world.

Some of the authors strike me as better scholars than writers: some of the text is disjointed, and sometimes it's difficult to identify the point of a sentence or paragraph.  [The Spain chapter, for example, lists a number of the primary sources and their contents, but doesn't draw the explicit generalizations that I found so useful in the England and France chapters, and the writing is downright clunky.]

The book contains a few recipes, but only as examples to illustrate the trends, similarities and differences from time to time and place to place.  It will serve best as a companion to those familiar primary sources: even if you think you're familiar with them, Regional Cuisines will help to interpret those sources in context.

The serious SCA coook will already have many of the primary sources discussed here [insert list]  This book should be seen as a companion guide to those sources, helping the reader to interpret them in context.

Right.  I'll put those thoughts in a meaningful order later.


[Marginalia:]
Dutch producing hopped beer starting in 14c. ?!  p. 204

Look up Enrique de Villena's Tractado del Arte de Cortor del Cuchillo, aka Arte Cisora, ed. Russel Brown 1984, an early 15th-c. carving manual; compare w/Wynken de Worde.  See what Menagier has to say on carving & serving.