Arrabona - Múzeumi közlemények 31-33. (Győr, 1994)

Kisbán Eszter: Egy XVI. századi hazai étlap értelmezéséhez

A Sixteenth Century Monthly Menu in Hungary: A New Interpretation of Date and Social Affiliation Amongst the sources of Hungarian food history, there are only two daily menus covering longer periods, in each case a full month, from the 16th and 17th centuries. Both were recorded on aristocratic estates. In such courts during the early modern period, there were always several tables, and the lord with his family, the officials and servants of the court were seated according to their ranks at tables which were served with different numbers of dishes. All the dishes prepared in the kitchen for the dining room (the lowest class of servants might have been served in a different room) came onto the lord's table while fewer and fewer dishes appeared as the ranks descended. One of the two monthly menus (January, 1603) shows clearly the difference between the lord's table with an average of 11 dishes at each meal and that of his middle rank officials with 6 dishes, because the lord was partly at home and partly away during the recorded period. The other sequence was recorded from a Nádasdy estate in the mid-16th century (October). The average number of dishes at meals was there 4.8. The archivist who discovered and published this source, dated it to 1550. It was then interpreted as a source of that year and as the menu of Lord Nádasdy himself. If the menus were really from 1550 they would have had Monday and Tuesday as the standard weekly days of abstinence. That seemed very unlikely in Hungary. Therefore the present writer checked the extensive Nádasdy accounts for relevant decades and established that the days of abstinence were always Friday and Saturday. Since the menus have no year on them but two different guesses by later archivists only, the above comparison weights more strongly and puts the menus to the year when their days of abstinence fall on Friday and Saturday as in the accounts. The attachement of the menus to the lord's personal social level has to be questioned as well. There is no way of knowing from which Nádasdy estate the menus were left, nor where Lord Nádasdy himself was during the month in question. But the number of the dishes at each meal, compared with both the 1603 menus and other sources which do not name the dishes but gave their numbers by meals for specified ranks on estates, suggests that the menus of the Nádasdy estate were used for middle-class officials in the absence of the lord himself. A closer look at the wording of the source itself also reinforces this judgement. These considerations change the mid-16th century monthly menu from the earlier suggested status of a 1550 Lord Nádasdy menu to the level of a 1553 menu for middle-class officials on some of the Nádasdy estates. Eszter Kisbán 171