Speaker: Jim Chevallier

North Hollywood, California

SUMMARY:

“For over a century, the term “medieval food” has not in fact referred to the food of most of the Middle Ages. Rather, by convention, it typically refers to food from a few centuries at the end of a millennium. Why? The standard explanation is that not enough information has survived from earlier centuries to merit study. But in fact, not only do we have a wealth of information on food from the first centuries of this era, we have, not only recipes, but actual meals. While nothing like the cookbooks of the later centuries survives, we have sufficient information to be able to actually create well-documented dishes from the Early Middle Ages, when the Franks began moving Gaul from a Roman province to what would become France. Sources for this information include laws and statutes, medical texts, lives of saints, histories, monastic rules, literature, official supply lists and an ever-increasing body of archaeological data. This talk will provide an overview of what we know of the food of this period and how we know it, based on Jim Chevallier’s book Feasting With the Franks.  www.chezjim.com/books/Franks.html

BIOGRAPHY:

Jim Chevallier’s career as a food historian began with research into the croissant and then French bread in general. He has since been widely cited on these subjects. He has also translated a number of medieval and eighteenth century cookbooks. In 2018, Rowman and Littlefield published his “History of the Food of Paris: From Roast Mammoth to Steak Frites”; in 2019, Choice magazine named this an outstanding academic achievement for 2019. His history of French bread, “Before the Baguette”, was a Gourmand World Cookbook Award Winner for 2020. Having long explored the “missing piece” in French medieval food history, in 2021, he finally published “Feasting With the Franks: The First French Medieval Food”, the first book to look in detail at the food of the Early Middle Ages in what became France.