The Five Senses of Historical Fiction( Cont’ d) heads, while cloaks covered shoulders when the weather was unkind.
Inside the churches you’ d find them not blank stone, but painted with an eye-popping mélange of color and gold leaf, enough to choke our modern sensibilities with color sensory overload.
4) TOUCH. Here’ s where travelling to do your research can be valuable. What does the cold stone of a church interior feel like? What of the rough woolens worn by everyday folk? Or fine velvets or silks? A trip to a fabric store can give you that, or even a Renaissance Faire. The feel of a shaggy horse’ s hide, or the thick fleece of a sheep. Chapped fingers and noses from the cold. These sensory details will be important to bring your prose alive. Think creatively on how to get close and personal with them.
5) TASTE. I’ ve made it my business to know medieval life, and part of that is knowing what it was the people ate and drank, and experiencing it myself. Medieval recipes are not hard to find. Recipes are available, some more complicated, like making a cockatrice. That’ s a mythological creature with the front part of a bird and the back part of a four-legged animal. But medievals were clever. Here’ s the medieval recipe:
Cokentrice
Take a capoun and skald hym, and draw hym clene, and smyte hem a- to in the waste overthwart. Take a pige and skald hym, and draw hym in the same manner and smyte hem also in the waste. Take a nedyl and threde, and sewe the fore partye of the capoun to the after parti of the pygge and fore partye of the pigge to the hinder party of the capoun, and then stuffe hem as thou stuffiest a pigge. Putte hem on a spete and roste hym an than he is y-now, dore hem with yolkys of eyroun and pouder ginger and safroun, thenne wyth the ius of percely with-owte and than serve it forth for a ryal mete. Did you get all that? Basically, cut a chicken and a pig in half at the waist, sew the front half of one to the back half of the other, stuff them, and roast them on a spit. Glaze them with egg yolks and powdered ginger and parsley and serve as a royal feast. Sometimes the feathers would be carefully put back on the bird for a fancy presentation.
You don’ t have to be that elaborate. Just knowing the sorts of spices you’ ll be using can really give you the idea of English medieval cookery. For instance, spices were expensive and exotic. They all had to be imported and so some of the fancier meat dishes were cooked with cinnamon, cardamom, and mace. We think of these as dessert spices now, but if you eat Moroccan dishes, you will
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SPRING 2017
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WRITERS’ TRICKS OF THE TRADE