Virtual Grub Street: A Medieval Hodge-Podge.

Also in the series:

A Medieval Hodge-Podge.
The Earliest Medieval Hodge-Podge Recipes.
Your Goose is Cooked! Medieval and Tudor Goose in a Hotche Pot.

The first English recipes we have for Hodgepodge come from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. Each of the recipes features goose as the main ingredient indicating that there was a general appreciation of goose in the noble houses of the time.

The first recorded recipe came from the collection of the Magister Coquinae of the Royal Court. No dish was cooked in his kitchens without him at least having approved it. Feeding the Royal household was the highest of responsibilities. This is witnessed by considerable the land grants recorded to the name of whoever held this royal office.

The hogge pot had already existed for centuries, however. Many who fail to realize this have given spurious derivations to the name. As another result, they have also been at a loss to explain the long history.

Hogge is actually an Anglo-Saxon word. While later generations gave it fanciful derivations from various French terms,[1] from the word “hot,” etc., the word is actually an early cousin of our modern “huge”. It means big, great, huge. Hogge pot means “big pot”.

Most of us are likely to have accepted long ago that peasants of the deep middle ages placed communal pots in the midst of one or more of their hovels. Every edible plant was gathered up, in its season, and added to the simmering pot. The resulting soup was always changing in hue and taste. The smell of food was always in the air, a genuine comfort in times when food could be hard to come by.

At first it was not only peasants who had a hogge pot. Even the nobility had hogge pots in their more commodious wooden abodes. It is presumed that the contents of their pot included meat — a thing rare among the pots of the peasants. On the practical level, they needed a better diet in order to hunt and fight with ferocity. This expressed itself culturally through rules of dominants laying claim to the best from the goods and services of life.

As life improved in the West, more meat became available. For centuries still, the prerogative of eating it at daily meals was the jealous right of the nobility. The hogge pot remained the peasants’ way. The contents were almost entirely vegetable. The pot simmered continuously through all seasons. A touch of meat made one’s pot a special treat and (presumably) one’s household popular.

Diet was so much improved by the reign of the English King Richard II that the upper class hogge pot shrank down to the size of a single meal (often for scores or hundreds of diners) and filled up with goose or another featured meat. Thus the recipes we have by way of our earliest examples bear only the most distant relationship to the original hogge pot. Even the name had been made more fun to say: people now ate “hotch potch”. This would later become “hodgepodge”.

So then, the first recipes of hogge pot that survive are not descriptions of the original communal “big pot” but rather recorded for the use of cooks of noble houses. The facts that they come in relatively rapid succession, the earliest chronologically being the recipe from King Richard’s kitchen, and that all feature goose at first, strongly suggests that the English dish was popular and soon borrowed by those who had eaten it as guests at the king’s hall. There were, nevertheless, immediately variations from one noble kitchen to another.

The lives at all levels of English society began to experience noticeable improvement beginning with the upper classes under Richard. Progress rapidly increased in household life and diet in the 15^th century. It is then that the hotch potch was left behind to become a culinary delight of the lower classes. It generally included one or more meats as well as vegetables. The recipes and depictions of the nobility, their kitchens and tables, make clear that they had gone onto bigger and better things.

Next: A Look at Some Recipes

[1] In his dictionary, Johnson has it: “Hodge-Podge.” n.s. [hochepot, quasi hachis en pot, French. Our word is also written hodgepot, hotch pot, and hotchpotch. Teut. hutspot. See Hotch Potch.

1. A medly of ingredients boiled together.

The 1971/81 edition of the O.E.D. has: hogpoch, hogepotche, hodge-potch, hodg-podge, -poge (hogg-podge, hodge-bodge), hodg-podg hodge-podge [a corruption of HOTCHPOTCH; prob. assimilated to the familiar personal name HODGE].

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

Dietary Rules for Barnacles: Innocent III to Gordon Ramsey. March 4, 2019. “The Barnacle was a marvel of God, a confusion to those in authority in such matters. Their people turned to them for clarification.”
Shakespeare’s Barnacles. March 3, 2016. “Prospero will wake, he fears, before they can murder him, and will cast a spell on them.”
The King's Esnecce. January 13, 2019. “It comes as no surprise, then, that when Maud’s son, Henry Plantagenet, Count or Duke of most of the western territories of France, and, by terms of the treaty, heir to Stephen, next rose to the throne as Henry II, he was quick to arrange for the safest possible means of transit across the channel.”
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