The section on cookery, which contains the Menagier’s injunctions for “feeding the brute”, is the longest in the book, and gives an extraordinarily interesting picture of the domestic economy of our ancestors.[19] The Menagier must have been brother to Chaucer’s Franklin, ‘Epicurus owene sone’: 

An housholdere, and that a greet, was he: 
Seint Julian he was in his contree;
His breed, his ale, was alwey after oon;
A bettre envyned man was nowher noon. 
Withoute bake mete was never his hous,
Of fissh and flessh, and that so plenteuous
It snewed in his hous of mete and drynke. 
Of alle deyntees that men koude thynke. 
After the sondry sesons of the yeer,
So chaunged he his mete and his soper. 
Ful many a fat partrich had he in muwe
And many a breem and many a luce in stuwe. 
Wo was his cook but if his sauce were
Poynaunt and sharpe and redy al his geere. 
His table dormant in his hal alway
Stood redy covered al the longe day.

In this, as in all other medieval cookery books, what strikes the modern reader is the length and elaboration of the huge feasts, with their many courses and dishes, and the richness of the highly spiced viands.  There are black puddings and sausages, venison and beef, eels and herrings, fresh water fish, round sea fish and flat sea fish, common pottages unspiced, spiced pottages, meat pottages and meatless pottages, roasts and pastries and entremets, divers sauces boiled and unboiled, pottages and ‘slops’ for invalids.  Some of them sound delicious, others would be ruin to our degenerate digestions today.  Pungent sauces of vinegar, verjuice, and wine were very much favoured, and cloves, cinnamon, galingale, pepper, and ginger appear unexpectedly in meat dishes.  Almonds were a favourite ingredient in all sorts of dishes, as they still are in China and other parts of the East, and they might well be used more lavishly than they are in modern European cookery.  True to his race, the Menagier includes recipes for cooking frogs and snails.[20] To the modern cook some of his directions may appear somewhat vague, as when he bids his cook to boil something for as long as it takes to say a paternoster or a miserere; yet for clockless kitchens in a pious age what clearer indication could a man give?  And, after all, it is no worse than ‘cook in a hot oven’, which still finds a place in many modern cookery books which should know better.  Other instructions are detailed enough.  In one valuable passage he gives a list of all the meat markets of Paris, together with the number of butchers to be found in each and the number of sheep, oxen, pigs, and calves sold there every week, adding also for interest the amount of meat and poultry consumed weekly in the households of the King, the Queen and the royal children, the Dukes of Orleans, Berry, Burgundy, and Bourbon.  Elsewhere also he speaks of other markets—­the Pierre-au-Lait, or milk market; the Place de Greve, where they sell coal and firewood; and the Porte-de-Paris which is not only a meat market, but the best place in which to buy fish and salt and green herbs and branches to adorn your rooms.