Medieval fruits and vegetables

 In a medieval-style fantasy or historical fiction about the Middle Ages, the people always seem to eat a lot of stew, which tends to be characterized as "brown."  The elite are shown eating meat (generally whole haunches) cooked over an open fire.  But what about the fruits and vegetables?

When I first started this blog two of my earliest posts (still popular favorites!) were on what medieval people did or did not eat.  More recently I discussed a ninth-century garden.  But today I want to focus on what went into a medieval vegetarian diet, which is what peasants ate almost all the time, what monks and nuns ate all the time unless they were sick, and what the elites ate much of the time.

Bread was the basic staple for everybody.  Most of it was made from wheat, essentially the same winter wheat still grown today, but one could also make bread from barley or oats or rye or spelt (a close relative of wheat). Grains could also be made into porridge.  Barley could also be made into beer, the standard drink for everybody.  Ninth-century inventories of monastic property always indicated the grain fields right up front.  Grain of course can be stored without refrigeration and will last quite well if the mice and rats don't get into it.

Storage in a pre-modern era was vital.  Dried peas and lentils and chickpeas and beans would last as well as grain (the beans were like the beans now made into bean soup or baked beans, not green beans, which they didn't have).  Root vegetables would be harvested in the fall and, if kept dry, would last much of the winter.  Here onions were universal, along with onion-relatives like leeks, garlic, shallots, and chives.  Medieval people also ate beets, turnips, and parsnips.

 Root vegetables are not nearly as popular in the modern West as they were in the Middle Ages, now that we have refrigeration plus the ability to get fresh vegetables year round.  Modern Germans are in fact averse to turnips, which Germans ate a whole lot of during the privations of World War II (because they were available) and are now considered cow food.

Some vegetables just could not be stored, like lettuce, but medieval people still grew and ate it in the spring and summer.  Cabbage is leafy but stores fairly well, especially if made into sauerkraut.  They also had summer squash (like zucchini), which will last a certain amount of time without refrigeration, though not the winter squashes (like pumpkin) of the New World.  Celery, radishes, peppers, and cucumbers were popular in the right season.

(You will notice an absence of such New World foods as potatoes, tomatoes, corn, and avocados.  Plus no chocolate!  Maybe there's a reason one hears reference to the Dark Ages....)

A big hearty dish of lentils and turnips can be pretty bland.  Salt helps, but salt was expensive—it was all sea salt from salt panning along the coast, with few exceptions.  Spices like black pepper were very expensive because they were imported from Asia, so most people could not afford them.  But they did grow a wide variety of herbs, which could be dried and kept fairly indefinitely.  These included parsley, sage, rosemary (do we hear a Simon & Garfunkel song coming on?), fenugreek, coriander, and caraway.

Among fruits, the most important were wine grapes, grown wherever the climate was suitable and some places where it really was not, because wine was both the preferred drink of the well-to-do and required for the liturgy (though in Scandinavia beer was often substituted for the communion wine).

 A good sized manor would have an orchard with a number of fruit trees.  They grew a wide variety of apples (no Fuji or Honeycrisp or Granny Smith—ninth-century apple varieties included "gozmaringa" and "geroldinga," now unknown), pears, peaches, plums, quinces, mulberries, and cherries.  An orchard would also have nut trees, walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, and chestnuts.  Wild fruits (especially berries) and wild nuts could supplement what was cultivated.  We now preserve fruit by boiling it up with sugar to make jam, but this doesn't work nearly as well with honey, their only sweetener (and they didn't have a lot of it), so most fruit was eaten fresh.

Medieval people were primarily vegetarians but not vegans.  That is, eggs, butter, and milk (usually made into cheese because it lasts a lot better) and fish were considered fine even for austere monks.  Chicken could count as "not red meat," but everyone liked red meat when they could get it.

A good discussion of medieval food is found in the article, "Nutrition and the Early Medieval Diet" by Kathy L. Pearson, in the journal Speculum (journal of the Medieval Academy of America), vol. 72 (January 1997).

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval food and drink, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.