Is it typical for a good chef to also be an expert nutritionist?

[CheertheSecond]

I read many novels that depicted good blacksmith = good swordsman/fighter
or great wizard = great magic developer/magic artifact craftsman/ magic mentor
or vice versa.

The same deal also happened to chefs/cooks.
Highly skilled chefs are very informative about the nutrition value of an ingredient, how nutritionally balanced a meal is, and etc.

Is this real in medieval setting? To be more specific, did professional chefs in medieval time that knowledgeable about nutrition as the novels/comics depicted?

 

[Deleted member 54065]

Well, in my training, they did tell us the nutritional values of the ingredients we used. But it's still nowhere near the actual nutrition specialist.

I read many novels that depicted good blacksmith = good swordsman/fighter
or great wizard = great magic developer/magic artifact craftsman/ magic mentor
or vice versa

The same deal also happened to chefs/cooks.
Highly skilled chefs are very informative about the nutrition value of an ingredient, how nutritional balanced a meal is, and etc.

Is this real in medieval setting? To be more specific, does professional chefs in medieval time that knowledgeable about nutrition as the novels/comics depicted?

As for medieval chefs...

From what I read in medieval cooking, they'd only care how the food tastes, not necessarily the nutritional value.

 

[Corty]

Are racist people better drivers, then? Are they always ready for a race?

 

[Deleted member 54065]

Let me cite an example:

Pot au feu in medieval times is just a dish made up of various meats and ingredients thrown in by travellers inside an inn. That would mean high in fat (cholesterol), and with the potential for rotten meat high in those eras, the chance for an upset stomach is always there.

Yeah, but I want to know if the medieval chefs were really as knowledgeable as most novels I read wrote them.

I already answered that question. Prolly missed it coz the thread replies are being merged.

 

[Assurbanipal_II]

Chefs these days appear to be good mercenary leaders too.

 

[CheertheSecond]

Chefs these days appear to be good mercenary leaders too.

Gordon Ramsay the drill sergeant

 

[Placeholder]

> Yeah, but I want to know if the medieval chefs were really as knowledgeable as most novels I read wrote them.

Medieval chefs: butter + salt = tasty!
Modern chefs: same.

 

[ThrillingHuman]

The most ideal food was that which most closely matched the humour of human beings, i.e. moderately warm and moist. Food should preferably also be finely chopped, ground, pounded and strained to achieve a true mixture of all the ingredients. White wine was believed to be cooler than red and the same distinction was applied to red and white vinegar. Milk was moderately warm and moist, but the milk of different animals was often believed to differ. Egg yolks were considered to be warm and moist while the whites were cold and moist. Skilled cooks were expected to conform to the regimen of humoral medicine. Even if this limited the combinations of food they could prepare, there was still ample room for artistic variation by the chef

from wikipedia, there's an entire acticle on medieval foods

 

[LilRora]

They can often have good theoretical knowledge about related subjects. If we're talking about mediaval ages though, knowledge about nutrition was fairly low. Cooks for royalty and nobility might have known a few things, but it definitely wasn't in-depth knowledge, much less scientific knowledge.

I'm pretty sure that cooks often had their local beliefs then, such as about humours (as TrashyHuman wrote above), but it's not about nutrition as much as it is about food energy (as in, cooling/warming, damp/drying, or other categories). It's mostly consistent across various cultures, but I think it's much more ingrained in Asia and more traditional cultures, whereas in medieval Europe it was mostly known among nobility and royalty, not the lowest class.