Among the Friars Preachers, meals are eaten in silence while a brother reads aloud. The meal is organized not as starter-main-dessert but around daily bread accompanied by two pulmenta (cooked dishes, most often vegetable or fish porridges), a pitance (the portion allotted to each), and wine mixed with water. On lean days and fast days, the main meal is replaced by a simple evening collation, light. The meat of quadrupeds is almost always banned; legumes, fish, and herbs from the cloister garden make up the ordinary fare.

Albert the Great was the greatest botanist of his century: his *De vegetabilibus* describes hundreds of plants observed in convent gardens. Sage, hyssop, lovage, fennel, and parsley — the 'simples' cultivated near the cloister — both flavor and heal. The boundary between kitchen and remedy is deliberately blurred: one eats to nourish the body as well as to balance one's humors.