Скачать или смотреть Entire History of Europe | Food in Medieval Times: Cuisines by Region – Part 03

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Many of the characteristics of southern French cuisine are also found in medieval Spanish food, but given Spain’s geographic, ethnic, and religious diversity, it is impossible to speak of one Spanish cuisine in the Middle Ages. Just as the plains, mountains, and coastlines had an influence on the food that was produced and eaten, so did the different peoples that invaded the peninsula over the centuries. The Romans established two provinces in Spain, and the food consumed by the Roman army consisted largely of bread, cheese, olives, olive oil, wine, and some roasted meat. Remarkably, these are still the staples of modern-day Spain. It was not the Romans, however, that introduced olives to Iberia, but the Phoenicians and the Greeks, who had already produced olive oil along Spain’s southern coast long before the Romans arrived. Even older is the evidence of bread production on the peninsula, which was, however, substantially improved by the introduction of the Roman ovens. Not the Romans but the Greeks had brought the Malvasia grape to Spain, and in doing so had created the foundation for a wine industry that was to become famous in medieval times. Aside from wheat, olive oil, and wine, Roman Spain was an important producer of salt fish, and salt fish products such as the salty fish sauce known as garum that was the preferred seasoning in Roman cooking. By the early Middle Ages, however, garum had slowly fallen out of favor with European cooks.

Christianity came to Spain with a new group of invaders, the Germanic tribes known as the Vandals, Alans, Swabians, Goths, and Visigoths, who arrived in A.D. 409. Their impact on Spanish cookery was relatively minor compared with that of the Romans before them, and especially that of the Arabs from North Africa who conquered Visigothic Spain and established Muslim rule on the peninsula. It was to last for almost eight hundred years, from A.D. 711 to 1492. In the ninth century the Arabs extended their domain beyond Spain to southern Italy and Sicily. During the time of Arab expansion in the Mediterranean, Baghdad was the center of Arab culture, and when the Arabs settled in southern Spain, in the territory they called Al-Andalus, or Andalusia, it was the court culture of Baghdad they tried to emulate in their capital Cordoba. Andalusia quickly became the gateway through which Arab and the surviving Greek and Roman cultures reached medieval Europe.

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