Old Pies, Stray Flies, and Possibly Poisonous Parsley in the Cook’s Prologue and Tale

Old Pies, Stray Flies, and Possibly Poisonous Parsley in the Cook’s Prologue and Tale

The Prologue of the Cook’s Tale and the Prologue of the Manciple’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales can be taken as satires on innkeepers and those who sell stale food. The Cook’s Prologue is short (with only thirty-nine lines), but it tells us several things about daily dining in Chaucer’s England. Herry Bailly, the innkeeper, accuses Hogge of Ware, the cook, of handling food unhygienically and of making his customers sick. Freshness seems to be a prerequisite for food in Chaucer’s London. Were medieval attitudes toward food hygiene similar to our modern attitudes concerning food safety and health? Given that the manciples, the cooks, and the innkeepers were economic rivals in fourteenth-century England, how do we interpret the fraught yet seemingly intimate relation among Herry Bailly, Roger the Cook, and the Manciple in The Canterbury Tales? By exploring the Cook’s intriguing relationship with the pilgrims and the foods he prepares for his customers, this article reads closely the portrait of the Cook in the General Prologue along with the food references in the Prologue of the Cook’s Tale and the Prologue of the Manciple’s Tale with a view to better understanding how Chaucer refracts the lived experience of London cooks in the Cook’s Tale.