Healthy meat

 The current belief (for most anyway) is that meat isn't really part of a healthy diet. We're told about societies where people routinely live past 100, and how they all eat dried beans, garlic, ancient grains, kale, and olives (or something like that).  In the US beef tallow and full-fat dairy products are experiencing a bit of a resurgence, but the overall consensus is that red meat is not healthy.

The Middle Ages thought about things differently.  For them, red meat was both a luxury and a health food.  Most people, most of the time, ate a basically vegetarian diet, a lot of bread (whole wheat for the most part), whatever vegetables were in season, dried beans and lentils, with the occasional egg or piece of cheese to round it out.  The wealthy added in red meat when they could get it, but other than the annual pork-fest (eat a whole lot of fresh pork at pig roundup time in November, salt and smoke the rest and try to make it stretch out for six months), peasants ate red meat very rarely.

(Those skeptical about the wonders of the whole-grain and kale diet might point out that medieval people rarely made it out of their 50s, but we're not going to talk about that now.) 

Monks ate a vegetarian diet all the time (as did even the wealthy on Fridays and during Lent, though fish was OK then), with one exception.  If they were sick, they needed beef broth! Everyone knew that a sick person needed something strong and nourishing, and beef broth did the trick.  Abbots would look with deep suspicion at monks who "got sick" with remarkable frequency, needing to spend time in the infirmary receiving sustenance.

Beef broth of course comes from boiling beef, with probably a few spices, some honey, and some onions to give it a little extra, if being eaten by someone not entirely ill.  (No potatoes for stew of course, as potatoes are New World, and no carrots, as carrots were not yet domesticated.  Maybe some turnips.). All medieval doctors agreed that boiling meat was better for you than roasting it, even though a lot of people preferred the roast-meat flavor (I certainly do).

An interesting work on nutrition written (and rewritten) during the Middle Ages was  "De observatione ciborum," or as we might translate the title, "Comments on Food."  It was originally written in the sixth century by a physician named Anthimus, in exile from Byzantium (where he was doubtless known as Anthimos). He came both to the court of the Ostrogothic king Theoderic the Great and to the Frankish royal court to serve the Merovingians.

He believed that if you ate the proper foods (including meat), and in the proper way (no gobbling or stuffing oneself), one would not need medicine.  (Sounds sort of New Age-y.  Everything old is new.) He listed several dishes that would (supposedly) help one recover from such ailments as dysentery or a fever.

Given that medicine at the time relied heavily on theories of humours, with blood-letting a big feature, and that the many powders and tinctures doctors might suggest had most definitely not been tested against a placebo, maybe one really would do better with some nice beef broth.

Anthimus is noted today not only for his healthy-living tips but some of his comments on typical behavior of the Franks.  For example, he said that they considered raw bacon a great delicacy.  (Not entirely clear if it was smoked and salted but just not fried, or if it was plain raw pork belly.  I think I won't be a Frank.)

Anthimus's work was copied and expanded in subsequent centuries.  It reappeared at the Carolingian royal court, where again it discussed a particular kind of diet as uniquely Frankish, an aspect of cultural identity.  It continued to be used and quoted at the courts of the powerful through at least the twelfth century.  We are what we eat, and the idea of building healthy living on a proper diet has a very long history.

Abby Riehl of Purdue University is making an extensive study of Anthimus and his work.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval health and disease and other aspects of medieval history, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available everywhere in paperback

 

 

Healthy Living and Eating

 Don't get me wrong.  I prefer to eat "healthy" foods.  Lots of fruits and vegetables every day and a minimum amount of the kind of packaged foods where they have to print the ingredients very tiny because there are so many of them that otherwise they wouldn't all fit on the label.  When all you could buy in the store was "WonderTop" bread, we made our own.  It's been years since I had an Oreo (TM).

 

But there's a reason that a lot of food has all those ingredients, as food companies have sought to make their products taste better, to last longer, be more attractive in appearance, and in many cases even include nutritious additions.  Medieval people did not eat processed foods at all in the way we think of processed food, and yet most who survived the ills of childhood did not make it out of their 50s (see more here on medieval life expectancy).

A few years back I had to have eye surgery for a detached retina.  Joking with the surgeon beforehand, I said, "You mean I couldn't clear this up with healthful exercise and a vegan diet?"  Quite disturbed by the question (and probably not realizing I was joking, surgeons are serious people), he told me this wouldn't do the trick.  And yet these days some people at least seem convinced that if we lived and ate like medieval peasants, we would have a long and healthy life.

(Fun fact:  I would have been blind as a bat in the Middle Ages.)

Medieval peasants certainly ate a plant-based diet.  During the summer, they had plenty of fruits and vegetables, though without refrigeration or trucks bringing fresh food from Mexico or California's Central Valley, in the winter vegetables were mostly limited to root crops like onions or turnips and dried beans and peas.  Bread constituted the principal source of calories.  Eggs and cheese were the principal source of protein, along with an occasional fish if one lived along the sea or a river.

Interestingly, meat was considered a health food.  If someone was sick, it seemed appropriate to give them red meat.  Monks, who normally ate a peasant diet, were fed beef broth in the infirmary.  A common accusation against a monastery considered decadent was that most of the monks became "sick" every week.  (Whee! Time for beef broth!)

How about the healthful exercise?  Everybody got far more exercise than most of us do, even those who work out at the gym for an hour every day.  Aristocrats were fairly constantly on the move, and that meant riding.  As anyone who has been on horseback will tell you, riding is a lot more energetic an activity than sitting in a car, even though the horse is doing most of the work.  If you didn't have a horse, you walked, often miles a day.  Peasants would wrestle their animals or their plows around all day.  A little exercise is great, but 12 hours a day is going to wear your body out fast.

I'm still not going to start eating Oreos, but I like having milk (full of calcium) available year round, fortified with vitamin D, and I like being able to get fresh fruits and vegetables all the time.  I exercise a half hour to an hour a day, but it's more likely to be walking than heaving hay bales up into the loft.  I've already made it out of my 50s.  Don't want to take any chances.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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

Renaissance fruit

 Earlier I posted about medieval fruits and vegetables, the mainstay of the diet for people who had access to a lot less meat than we do in the modern West.  Today I want to discuss a bit more about how we know what their fruit was like.

Surprisingly, we know an awful lot from Renaissance paintings, dating from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.  The artists would put people in the foreground, maybe a wealthy duke who wanted to be memorialized, maybe a Madonna and child, and then fill in the rest with a realistic landscape or household setting.  Often they would include fruit.  For example, Baby Jesus might be depicted holding some cherries, whose red juice was considered symbolic of the blood of the Sacrifice.

(Wait, the kid's not even to his first birthday, and we're already foretelling his painful death?  Yep, that's what's happening.)

A painting by Bellini from the end of the fifteenth century shows a Madonna and child with what appears to be a pear sitting in front of them. Recent scholarship has indicated that it is more likely to be an apple, perhaps symbolizing the Fruit that Adam and Even unwisely ate, causing all sorts of problems, to be contrasted to the salvation Jesus would bring.

 Renaissance painters also sometimes did still lifes, pictures of bowls of fruit and flowers and the like, and helpfully these still lifes often came with labels, as the artist was proud not just of painting an attractive picture but of doing so extremely accurately.  "See, I caught the distinguishing characteristics of this variety of peach or these plums very clearly."

These detailed paintings have been used to identify many kinds of "heritage" fruits, with the purpose of not letting the biodiversity of multiple varieties disappear, as just a few popular types take over the market.  In Italy especially (where a lot of this Renaissance art is found) there is now a concerted effort to find a few small orchards that might still be growing some of the scores of varieties that used to be grown, before the big orchard growers turned to varieties that, with chemical fertilizer and irrigation, could turn out large harvests.

Interestingly, a lot of these small orchards with old varieties are found at monasteries.  The monks and nuns have had orchards since their monasteries were first established, and since the fruit was for their own use, not for the grocery store, they kept on with the varieties they knew best.

Historians can also get a better sense of what medieval fruit looked like.  It was smaller and doubtless a bit scruffier than modern fruit, and often what we would call misshapen.  The apple in the picture above, for example, is a variety dubbed "cow nose apple," still grown in a few places and considered very good, but it doesn't look a lot like a nice round, red McIntosh.

There is an article in the November 2024 Smithsonian magazine about Isabella Dalla Ragione, who is leading the effort in Italy to rediscover and identify many types of heritage fruit, with the purpose of maintaining fruit's ability to adapt to changing climate and conditions.  She found many clues in old manorial records from the Renaissance as well as in Renaissance paintings.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

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

Good and Bad Plants

 We constantly make distinctions between good and bad plants, especially as they are good or bad for us.  The distinction has a long history.  The book of Genesis in the Bible has God warn Adam, as he's driven out of Paradise, that from now on he's going to have to work growing and harvesting grain, and that bad plants (like thorns and thistles) were going to get into his fields, causing trouble.

We call plants that are growing where we don't want them weeds.  But the distinction between good plants and weeds is a tricky one.  Any plant growing where we don't want it may be labeled a weed, and individual plants may be good or bad in different contexts.  Dandelions, all lawn maintenance firms agree, are a weed that must be eradicated, but they do make one's lawn brightly yellow and cheery after a long winter, plus you can make wine from dandelions (and eat the greens if it's been a long and hungry winter).  For years American cities planted callary pear trees for springtime flowers along the streets, but now they've been declared a noxious weed.  Brush and high grass are generally considered weeds, but they provide cover for songbirds.  Native plants may be considered good and non-native plants (that would cover dandelions) as weeds, but that would dump many of our crop plants into the weed category.

Medieval thinkers understood the difficulty of good and bad as unambiguous labels for plants.  (Interestingly, Latin has no word for "weed," so one could speak of "bad plants" but not "weeds" in the English language sense.)  For example, stinging nettles were definitely bad plants for farmers, who tried to eradicate them, but medieval herbalists used them to make various medicinal concoctions.  Nettles (or at least the ground-up stems) were considered good for colic and for coughs.

The use of medicinal herbs was complicated in the early Middle Ages by lingering fears about paganism, which was usually tied to magic.  So someone grinding up and sprinkling herbs around could either be a wise doctor or a dangerous pagan.  Women especially were looked at with suspicion if they seemed to know too much herbal lore.

The distinction between good and bad plants also had gradations.  It is clear that different kinds of grain were rated more or less highly.  Of the major crop plants, wheat was always described as best, followed by rye, followed by barley, followed by oats, designated as coarse peasant food.  Interestingly, however, dark bread made with at least some rye was eaten by everybody in much of France and Germany, including the elite, and in some places, like Scotland, everybody ate oat bread.

In all of this the assumption was that plants were good if they were good for humans.  Thorns and thistles, against which God warned Adam, were for medieval people the markers of wild places, uninhabited or at best the home of bandits and untamed beasts. Medieval monks sought out wild places to establish monasteries far from worldly distraction, but their first thought was to get rid of all the bad plants and replace them with good crops.

Humans have always had a hard time with wilderness.

Much of the information in this post is treated at greater length by Paolo Squatriti, in the volume The Oxford Handbook of the Roman World (ed. Effros and Moreira, 2020).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval food crops and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval summer

 We think of summer as vacation time, a break from school, a chance to get to the beach or just sit under a shady tree sipping lemonade in a welcome break from work.  A medieval summer had different expectations.

On the one hand, one didn't have to worry about keeping warm, a major worry in the winter.  On the other hand, one did need to worry about keeping cool.  We now take air conditioning for granted, but it only began to spread in the second half of the twentieth century.  Working outdoors on a scorching hot day (and most medieval work was outdoors work) was just as much a pain then as now.  Their only advantage is that the weather was overall cooler, before global warming really kicked in during the last generation or two.  (And Europe is still cooler than much of the US—parts of Britain recently recorded 104 F, the highest temperature ever recorded, though parts of the US get there repeatedly all summer.)

A medieval summer was a time to work, not to vacation.  For most of the population, who were all farming, the spring was the time to plow, sow, and plant.  Hay was cut in June, winter wheat in July.  Vegetables had to be tended all summer.  Their harvest began in August, along with dry beans and lentils.  September was time to reap the rye or barley and to pick and press the grapes, October to bring in the root vegetables and start planting winter wheat.  All spring and summer livestock farmers were busy helping with baby animals being born and getting established.  Life didn't calm down until after the great November pig-slaughter.

At least there was food.  Last year's grain would be mostly gone by early summer, as would last year's pork, but there were plenty of vegetables coming along (peas, beans, lettuce, celery, summer squash, cabbage), and once the winter wheat was harvested there would be lots of bread again.  Young animals (lamb, veal) and extra chickens could be eaten.  The woods and wild places provided song birds to be caught as well as mushrooms and wild berries.

And one could look forward to the root crops (turnips, onions, and the like) and especially the pork of autumn, before settling down for winter repose.  (Being cold a lot and wondering how long the food would last.)

All this summer work was why, when modern schooling was established in the nineteenth century, it was determined that children (and teachers) would not be in school during the summer.  They were needed to work on the farm.

For the aristocracy, summer was a time for activity and adventure.  It was hopeless trying to go to war in the winter, when you'd get bogged down in cold mud and have trouble finding food to scavenge.  Tournaments were always summer events, as were most trade fairs.  And landlords also wanted to keep an eye on their peasants.

In spite of the constant rush of work and activity in the summer, everyone was delighted in the spring to see winter go and to get outdoors again.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on  medieval food, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Cheese

 Cheese has been a staple food in the West for a very long time, probably going back to the period when people around the Mediterranean and in the Middle East first started keeping flocks of sheep and goats, close to 10,000 years ago.  Milk is an excellent source of protein, but it doesn't keep well without refrigeration, and it is only available part of the time, when the mother sheep or goat or cow has just given birth.  Also, a lot of people develop intolerance to the lactic acid in milk (though if one keeps drinking it all the time growing up, this intolerance is much less likely).  Cheese to the rescue!

To make cheese, fresh milk is deliberately curdled using rennet, which used to come from an animal's stomach lining.  The cow gives birth and starts producing milk, you kill the calf to have a tasty veal dinner, and now you have the calf's stomach lining as rennet to make cheese from the milk the cow continues to produce while you keep milking her.  (Note:  modern cheese uses cultures for the curdling process, not requiring death of a calf or kid or lamb every time.)

Properly curdled milk gives you curds and whey, basically cottage cheese.  This can be pressed to get the whey out, formed into a wheel or other shape, sometimes washed or heated, and aged so it develops a rind and hardens up.  Some cheese, like Roquefort, is aged in caves where interesting molds are found, to give it the distinctive blue veins.  There are hundreds of different kinds of cheese, some very local productions, some made in big factories.  Some of the modern French varieties are about as specific as "Madame Grangier makes this cheese in the spring from the milk of her cows Bessie and Bossie."

The Romans enjoyed cheese, and our word comes from the Latin caseus, meaning (you guessed it) cheese.  They distinguished between caseus (any kind of cheese) and caseus formatus, the latter specifically hard cheese made (formed) into a wheel.  This formatus was one of the foods given to soldiers in the legions, and is the root of the modern French  "fromage" and Italian "formaggio" (both of course meaning cheese).

The medieval diet included a lot of cheese.  It was more readily available than meat and acceptable to monks as meat was not.  Even those wealthy enough to enjoy meat on a regular basis would eat cheese or fish on Fridays instead of meat.

A story told about Charlemagne related that he visited a monastery on a Friday, and because they had no fish, they served him their local cheese (which would have been considered second-rate for a king, behind a nice trout).  When Charlemagne started cutting off the rind, the abbot unwisely corrected him, saying the rind was perfectly edible.  Now, no one tells the king he's doing something wrong.  Charlemagne pretended not to mind, ate the rind, said it was all very good, then got his revenge by ordering the abbot to send the royal court 200 big wheels of this tasty cheese every year.  After five years of the abbot scrambling madly to get enough milk to make this much cheese, leaving nothing for his monks, Charlemagne forgave him, but he'd learned his lesson!

Final note:  So-called "cheese food product" is an abomination before the Lord.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Wheat

 Wheat is the single biggest food crop in the world today, and it was also the basis for the heart of the medieval diet, bread.  Planting wheat around the world requires clearing off other plants and trees, to be replaced by fields of food.  Now in 2022, the war in Ukraine is disrupting wheat growing, a real problem because Ukraine has been a major provider of wheat to third-world countries.  Wheat production has really expanded world-wide in the last two or three generations, due to modern fertilizers and improved hybrids and farming methods, but the danger of relying too much on one ubiquitous crop is dealing with its absence.

Wheat has been cultivated for close to 12,000 years, starting in the Middle East.  Without agriculture, you really cannot have cities (or civilization), because you need a reliable crop that will feed a lot of people without everyone having to go out and hunt and gather every couple of days, said hunting and gathering requiring that people be fairly widely spread out, so they don't exhaust local resources.

Medieval wheat was primarily winter wheat, planted in the fall, sprouting but then lying dormant through the winter, ready to start growing for real as soon as it warms up in the spring.  It would be harvested around July.  One can also plant wheat in the spring, but the most common spring-planted grains were oats, rye, and barley, barley primarily around the Mediterranean, rye and oats in more northerly climates.  You can make bread out of any of these, but it was uniformly agreed that it was inferior to wheat bread.  For one thing, those grains don't have as much gluten, meaning bread wouldn't rise nearly as well.

Farm work was thus spread out, some grain planted in the spring, wheat harvested in the summer, non-wheat grains harvested in early fall, wheat planted in late fall.  The three-field system of crop rotation, where one of the three fields lies fallow every year to theoretically regenerate itself, thus provided work spread over the months and a fall-back if there was a disastrous wheat harvest.

(People with ceoliac disease, intolerance to gluten, would have been in serious trouble in the Middle Ages.  There was no "gluten-free" aisle at the grocery store, and for that matter no grocery store.)

Wheat is derived from wild grasses, bred over the millennia to have more seed heads (which is why modern wheat needs a lot of fertilizer) and to have the seed heads not easily break away from the stem.  This makes it easier to harvest, whereas wild grasses have the seed heads break loose and disperse if the stalk is disturbed.  This is fine for wild grasses spreading themselves, but it makes for a difficult harvest.

Wheat thus had to be threshed and winnowed to get the seeds free of the stalks and hulls.  Threshing required beating it once in a barn, to break the seeds free, and winnowing, that is separating seeds from hulls.  On a windy day winnowing could be achieved by tossing the wheat and hulls in the air so the lighter chaff would blow away.

Because it needs no refrigeration, wheat could be easily stored.  The problem was keeping out mice and rats.  Medieval cities tried to stockpile grain against bad harvests.  With wheat, the grain, the food, is also the seed for next year's planting, so if there was a bad harvest there was always the unenviable choice of eating the grain now, to keep from starving, and then having little to plant, meaning starving next year.

Wheat stalks were valuable in the Middle Ages, because they were an excellent source of thatch for thatched roofs.  Modern wheat no longer has the very tall stalks it did then, because it has been deliberately bred for shorter stalks (to put more energy into the seeds instead of the stalk).

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval food and farming, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Pork and Sauerkraut

 My husband makes a very good winter-time dish, pork and sauerkraut, which could also have been made in the Middle Ages.  It takes him a couple of hours to make.  Onions, apples, sauerkraut, and caraway seeds are fried up together with pork loin, then it's baked with some citrus juice (one could substitute white wine, though we don't).  These are all ingredients readily available in the Middle Ages, except for the juice (medieval people would have used wine).  Though it takes a while to make, mostly because of the time to slice everything up, he knows that by making a double batch we can have it again with no more effort than reheating.

Okay, but let's think about what he is not doing.  He's not planting, tending, harvesting, and drying the onions.  He's not tending the apple trees and picking the apples, going over them carefully before storing them.  He doesn't plant, tend, and harvest cabbage, chop it and mix it with salt, and let it ripen into sauerkraut, instead just opening a jar.  He doesn't slaughter the pig or cut it up.  He doesn't even harvest the caraway seeds.

So if you added up how much time all those things take, maybe rather than thinking of it as a 2-hour supper we might think of it as a 6-week supper.  And we aren't even including how long it would take to gather the wood for the cooking fire.

Somebody certainly does all those things so that he can go to the grocery store and get nicely trimmed pork loin, apples and onions, and a jar of sauerkraut, plus juice and a little jar of caraway seeds.  If they're working all day in the sauerkraut factory, how do they ever have time to do anything other than eat sauerkraut for supper?

Now in fact it's not as amazing as it may seem.  Part of it is the increase in what the economists call worker productivity, how much each worker can produce in an hour, which has been increasing steadily for over two centuries, largely due to machines that do a lot of the labor.  Part of it is also division of labor, where people who are just doing one thing can do it more efficiently than those who do that thing occasionally.

Now in fact in most pre-modern societies, including parts of the Third World today, people basically spend a major part of their waking hours involved in food:  finding it, cultivating it, harvesting it, storing it, cooking it.  Ha, ha, you say, reaching for a bag of chips and a tall cool one, I spend much of my day involved with food too.

But it's different.  We don't have to think about food because we know it will be there when we want it.  Our relationship with food, for most people in the modern West, is that we have too much of it and "need to cut down."  We're all living like high medieval aristocrats, not having to work to get our food, just making sure the "little people" are producing it, even eating more than we need.

An ordinary grocery store would have been beyond the dreams of avarice for even wealthy medieval people.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Winter in the Middle Ages

 We in the west with good furnaces probably don't appreciate how lucky we are.  It's cold outside, but who cares?  Set the thermostat to a pleasant springtime temperature, the furnace does its thing, and we're comfy warm (this assumes your furnace is working right).  This was of course not the case in the Middle Ages (or for that matter much of the twentieth century, when furnaces were coal-fired and you had to go down to the basement and shovel).

Humans evolved in the nice warm climate of Africa.  But humans like to go places and find new things, so before you know it, off some of them went, heading north.  Neanderthals' skin pigment decided this was stupid, since there was after all an ice age going on, and headed home to Africa, but the Neanderthals stayed.  Hide in caves and hunt woolly mammoths across the glacier, that's the life.  Before too long, Cro-magnons joined them in Europe.  And winter has been a challenge to Caucasians ever since.

For medieval people, the twin challenges were staying warm and having enough to eat.  Staying warm required fire, which meant burning wood, as they did not have gas or oil (and had not started mining coal).  As I have discussed previously, fireplaces really only appeared in the thirteenth century, as a luxury for the rich, so people before then, and lower status people throughout the Middle Ages, would have open fires in the middle of the room.  It's more efficient, because you don't have heat escaping up the chimney, but it's bad for your lungs.

Besides fire, the best way to stay warm is to snuggle up to other mammals.  Medieval peasants, living close to everybody in their family, and with a heat-producing cow right next door, would have been better off than those in a big, cold, drafty castle.  Let's just say that stone is not a good insulator.  Then everybody would have wanted furs and wool blankets to preserve the warmth.

To stay warm of course requires spending minimal time outside.  Fortunately there weren't many farm chores to be done in the winter.  On the other hand, there wasn't a whole lot to do inside either.  Images of winter done in the Middle Ages mostly show people sitting by the fire.  Christmas provided a nice festive high-point, even though it came in what we would call January (those pesky leap years mess up a calendar), as I previously discussed.

The other big challenge was having enough food.  Castles and peasant cottages alike would try to put aside enough food to last the winter, because if there weren't enough beans and wheat and cheese and root vegetables and smoked meat or salted fish in the larder, one would be awfully hungry come spring.  (Try to guess where the word larder comes from....)  The image above is a twelfth-century representation of November, the period in which one essentially stored up fat like a bear getting ready for hibernation (that's what the well-dressed gentleman  is doing, looks like he has a fish and a big chunk of bread).

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval life, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval vegetarianism

 Medieval people ate a largely vegetarian diet.  Unlike modern vegetarians in the West, who usually choose vegetarianism primarily because they think it wrong to kill and eat animals, or else because they believe a vegetarian diet is healthier, medieval people for the most part did not have nearly as easy access to meat as we do.

Raising meat for food is always going to be more expensive than raising vegetables or grains, because you have to grow the food for the animals first, and a lot of the calories in that animal feed are going to be spent in having the animal grow and run around before you can eat it.  Hunting animals that feed themselves in the wild solves part of this problem, but over-hunting can quickly reduce the number of potential game animals.

Hence for most medieval people for most of the time one's principal foods were bread and vegetables.  In a recent post I discussed the fruits and vegetables medieval people grew.  There were a lot of them, although of course the emphasis was on those that could be dried and stored (like peas and beans) or that would keep for a long time anyway (like onions and turnips).  Lettuce could be eaten all summer long, but forget having a salad in the winter.  The same was true of most fruits, though some, like apples, will keep at least a little while.  They did not of course have the New World vegetables we now take for granted, most notably potatoes, tomatoes, corn, and winter squash.

 Between the turnips, the radishes, the beans, the zucchini, the leeks, and the sauerkraut, there was at least some variety in the vegetables to be eaten.  I've read that the single most common vegetable eaten in the US now is the potato, and that mostly eaten as French fries.

Still, medieval people liked their meat.  Because most of the population was not vegetarian out of principle but rather because meat was hard to get, they ate it whenever they could.  Indeed, meat was considered a health food.  If someone was sick, they were given meat broth.  The wealthy ate meat when they could get it, putting restrictions on hunting to keep the peasants from getting all the wild animals.  Everyone ate pork in the fall, when the pigs, who had been running wild for months, were rounded up and slaughtered.

Even if mostly vegetarian, medieval people were not vegans.  They were happy to have milk, butter, and especially cheese.  Eggs were also fine.  The most determinedly vegetarian people were monks and nuns, who gave up meat along with other pleasures of the flesh, in order to focus more on spiritual matters.  They were still generally fine with eggs and cheese, and, depending on the monastic order, they might have fish once a week.  If someone in the monastery was sick, they got beef broth.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval food and other aspects of medieval social history, see my book Positively Medieval, available either as an ebook or a paperback, from Amazon and other book sellers.

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.

Mills

 Mills were the equivalent of medieval factories, places where machinery provided a lot of the hard work that made it possible for people to do more than they could have through their own physical labor.  Although there were some precursors in the ancient world, mills, essentially in the form they kept through the nineteenth century, are medieval inventions.  (Below is a picture of a nineteenth-century water mill.)  Big electricity-generating windmills and water mills ("hydro power") show that mills are still very important, even though the technology has changed.

The Romans had had water mills, but they treated them as toys; none of them were more than miniature little mechanical contraptions that looked cute when water ran through them.  Windmills  appear to have developed originally in central Asia and spread very rapidly across Europe in the twelfth century.  (Contrary to what you may have heard, windmills do not cause cancer.)

Windmills predominated where there was strong and steady wind.  Water mills could be set up on any rapidly running stream, or, as in the picture above, a race could take water from a stream and funnel it to a mill, with a big drop (fall) to power the wheel.  Medieval streams were thick with mills, and there were always quarrels about people damming streams (to create the big drop of water) and depriving people downstream of water.  Along the coast there were tide mills.

If you have ever visited a historic mill, you have probably been impressed by all the gears.  The wind or water drives a shaft around and around, and gears and ropes take that power off for useful purposes.  Because, I have discussed earlier, bread was the single biggest item in the medieval diet, grinding grain into flour was the most important function of a mill.  In ancient Rome, it would take a slave all day with a hand mill to grind enough flour for the household for that day.  With a mill, you could grind a 50 pound sack of grain into a 50 pound sack of flour in half an hour.  Big millstones ground against each other to break the hard grains of wheat into flour.

It's actually possible to tell if a community had adopted mill-ground flour, because a tiny amount of stone dust gets into the flour and wears down people's teeth, which is evident in skeletal remains.

Mills had many other uses.  They could power hammers, used both in forging and in "fulling," the beating of woolen cloth to make it thick and tight (like what we call boiled wool).  They could also be used for sawing lumber, again making the work much easier for humans; we still speak of sawmills.  With all the ropes and gears mills could be dangerous places, but the miller was a highly revered member of the community.  Some lords and monasteries insisted that the local inhabitants grind their grain only in their mills (for a fee of course), to make back the substantial expense of building one.

As Americans moved west in the nineteenth century, one of the first things to be established in a new community was a mill.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

Read more about medieval food and technology in my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms. Also available in paperback!

Corn

They did not have corn in medieval Europe.

Wait! say my British readers (or those who have been reading books by British medievalists).  There are all these references to "corn"!  Yes, but they are using the word "corn" in its broad sense of "grain."  They certainly had grain (wheat, barley, rye primarily) in the Middle Ages.  But there was no maize, corn in the American sense, Zea mays to be scientific.

I thought I would blog about corn because it's an excellent example of how our diet and the diet of medieval people differed.  (They didn't have potatoes or tomatoes either, as I have previously discussed.)  Corn is a New World plant.

Both North American and South American indigenous peoples cultivated maize.  It is descended from a wild grass-like plant, teosinte, with which only a few mutations on key genes produced cobs rather than just little tufts of seeds, and didn't have the seeds scatter spontaneously when ripe.  It has been cultivated in Mexico for at least 9000 years, perhaps eaten originally as popcorn (though without "butter flavor" or movies).  It was well established throughout the Americas when Europeans first arrived.  For the Iroquois, it was one of the "three sisters," along with beans and squash, vegetables that they grew to supplement the wild animals they hunted.

In the Andes, almost as many varieties of corn were developed as varieties of potatoes.  They still have many not found in the US, such as purple corn or the very large-kerneled so-called Inca corn.  The picture below is from a produce market in the Andes.

Corn is now pervasive in the American diet.  You may start the day with corn flakes.  If you eat store cookies or drink soft drinks or put "maple flavored" syrup on your pancakes, look at the label--the chances are excellent that you will see corn syrup used as a sweetener.  (Medieval people didn't even have sugar for the most part, much less corn syrup.)  Puddings, sauces, and pie fillings are thickened with corn starch.  Corn bread is made of corn meal.  Corn tortillas of course are made of corn, and indeed tortillas were a part of the diet of Mexico and the American southwest long before the Spaniards arrived.  Corn, both the ears themselves and the stalks, are now chopped and fed to cattle.  Most of our beef cattle are fed a heavily corn-based diet to fatten them up.  Corn is also used to make ethanol, which is added to most gasoline.  Right now fresh corn on the cob is just starting to appear in farmers' markets in the northern part of the US, but this is a tiny fraction of where corn ends up.

In the world overall, more corn is harvested by weight than any other grain.  It grows fast and can be cultivated in a variety of settings if one chooses the right variety, mountains, plains, northern climes, tropical climes....  Some people now may want to reduce the amount of corn in their diet, but it's hard.

When the Spaniards reached the New World they started eating corn (unlike tomatoes, which they initially considered poisonous).  However, they had serious doubts about corn flour as a substitute for wheat flour.  Priests said only wheat flour could transubstantiate in the mass, meaning you couldn't use tortilla chips for the wafer, and the army leaders feared eating corn would weaken them somehow, making them more like the natives.  Of course this issue was complicated by the fact that wheat is not native to the New World.

So as you munch your cornflakes, popcorn, store cookies, pudding, cola, and nacho chips, remember that medieval people would have had no idea what you were eating.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval food, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Beer, onions, and barley bread

A number of years ago I co-wrote a textbook for undergraduates on life and society in Antiquity and the Middle Ages.  In some ways my book Positively Medieval (see below!) is a continuation of that idea.  The publishers' idea was to make a book of social history in two volumes available for classroom use, to complement the more common kings-and-battles political history textbook.  My volume covered the West before 1500, and the second volume covered life and society after around 1500.  I used a photo of mine of a medieval castle's stairs for the cover of my book (as I did again for Positively Medieval, though a different castle, I guess I like medieval staircases), so my co-author had to come up with a photo of a modern staircase for his volume.

I seriously considered calling my textbook "Beer, Onions, and Barley Bread," because those were the constants of the diet from early civilization through the Renaissance.  I was talked out of this title, because it could make the unwary think it was a cookbook, rather than an overview of ancient and medieval social history.  But these are still important topics in their own right.

Beer was the basic medieval drink, as I've discussed earlier, drunk by children and adults alike.  It was a lot lower proof than modern beer, though not "lite," because it was supposed to be thick and crunchy.  Onions will grow almost everywhere and keep well without refrigeration—an important consideration in all societies before the twentieth century.  It was one of the most important vegetables in the medieval diet.

Barley was used not only to make beer but to make bread, because barley will grow well both in hot and cold climates.  Unlike winter wheat, it would be planted in the spring.  This meant that both the planting and the harvesting would be done at different times; because the labor was spread out, it was at least theoretically possible to harvest more grain during the fairly short window when it was planting-time or harvest-time (spring planted barley would be harvested after the winter wheat).  Barley bread was nice and thick and crunchy (starting to see a trend? fortunately medieval teeth were pretty good, without sugar in the diet to cause cavities).

No spaghetti with tomato sauce? No chocolate?  No coffee? No French fries (or any other kind of potato)?  No corn chips or corn on the cob?  Not even much in the way of salt or spice?  Suddenly the Middle Ages seems much less exciting and romantic.

But here's a medieval recipe to show that things weren't entirely bleak.  It comes from a late medieval Italian cookbook.

Onion salad
Cook onions (one per person) in the embers of the fire, until the outside is well blackened.  Peel as soon as they can be handled (the dish should be served with the onions still warm).  Cut into thin slices.  Mix with olive oil, wine vinegar, and a little salt and spice.  (The spice might include cloves, pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, or saffron.  Be creative.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval social history, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

More medieval recipes

A little while ago I blogged about medieval recipes.  There's been enough interest that I've decided to add some more.  Note that these are not all everyday recipes; many instead are dishes for great feasts in great households, and measurements are extremely free form by modern standards.  For example, they usually didn't bother mentioning salt, because of course you would salt your dish.  But it's fun to see how medieval tastes differed from ours, and how medieval cooks tried to be imaginative with what we would consider a limited choice of ingredients.

Fava beans with herbs
Take some fava beans and use hot water to skin them, the same as you would with almonds.  Add some good broth and boil them long enough to be cooked properly.  Add some parsley and chopped mint and a little salted meat and boil together.  This should be a nice shade of green.  You can also make this dish with peas but do not skin them with hot water.

Chicken stew
Boil up your chickens and save the broth.  Cut up the chickens and cook the meat in lard.  Pound together the meat, the chickens' livers, some almonds, and a little broth.  Boil it with ginger, cinnamon, cloves, pepper, and grain of paradise [another kind of pepper].  Add a little vinegar.  Serve the meat in bowls, with the broth poured over it.
[medieval people preferred capons for dishes like this--a capon is a rooster castrated when young, so it grew up large but tender]

King Manfred's meat pie
Take chicken gizzards and livers and add pork belly.  Chop it all up with a knife.  Add pepper.  Fry it all up in a deep pan.  Let it cool and add eggs.  Meanwhile make a crust, and put the mixture in.  Bake it gently until done.


Stuffed eggs
Hard boil eggs and cut them in half.  Take out the yolks and mix with marjoram, saffron, and cloves.  For every 8 eggs, also mix in one beaten raw egg.  Mash in a little cheese.  Fry the eggs in pork fat and eat with verjuice.
[verjuice was made from partially fermented grape juice and crushed grape seeds boiled together]

A good source for medieval recipes is Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy, by Odile Redon, Françoise Sabban, and Silvano Serventi (University of Chicago Press, 1998).

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval food, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Medieval Recipes

It's Thanksgiving time in the US, the time when people who don't cook much for most of the year feel compelled to pull out the old recipe cards and the roast pan.  You can certainly eat Thanksgiving dinner in a restaurant, but this is considered second best.  It's a home event.

The old recipe cards often include things no one would be caught dead eating the rest of the year, like canned green beans mixed with canned mushroom soup and topped with canned onion rings, or canned sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows.  Both of these are baked, but unfortunately not enough to reduce them to a cinder.

But I digress.  Medieval homemakers for the most part didn't have cookbooks and stained recipe cards for the excellent reason that most of them couldn't read.  (They also didn't have turkeys, but that's a separate story.)  Meals were normally cooked at home, because restaurants weren't an option.  Bread and beer could be bought, but villages wouldn't have other sources of prepared foods.  The inns in the cities (and occasionally at crossroads) catered to travelers for the most part, not the locals.  So we know what medieval people ate but not necessarily how it was prepared (well, how many ways can you cook lentils and onions?).

But we do have some medieval recipes!  These were written for cooks at great aristocratic households toward the end of the Middle Ages.  For the most part they give us an insight into foods prepared for great feasts, not for everyday consumption.  But Thanksgiving is a great feast too, so that's okay.

Medieval recipes were far less exact than modern recipes.  Indeed, the idea of having exact measurements for ingredients is really only a little over a century old, having started with Fanny Farmer and her Boston School Cookbook.  Before then there was a great deal of "stir in a heaping spoonful of this or that" and "cook for an hour or so."  Medieval recipes were even more free-form.

The reason of course is that they were aimed at people who already knew how to cook and who had a pretty good idea when something was done or if it needed a little more or a lot more seasoning.  Even now, Chinese recipes, written for Chinese people, just list the ingredients, because of course you'll know what to do next.

Even when medieval recipes call for a "quart" of this liquid or a "pound" of that solid, it's hard to know if their pounds and quarts correspond to ours.  Medieval eggs, we know, were substantially smaller than ours, so you'll want to reduce their number.  So it's fun to experiment with medieval recipes, especially since it's interesting to see ingredients combined in ways that wouldn't have occurred to us, but the key term is "experiment."  Here are a couple to get you started, straight out of medieval cookbooks.

Chickpea soup (this would have been a good everyday supper)
To make eight bowlfuls, take a pound and a half of red chickpeas and wash them, drain them, and put them in the pot where they will be cooked. Add half an ounce of flour, some good oil, a little salt, about twenty crushed peppercorns and a little cinnamon.  Mix with your hands.  Then add three measures of water, along with a little sage, rosemary, and parsley root.  Boil until it is reduced to eight bowlfuls and add a little more oil.  If making for an invalid, leave out the oil and spices.

White cheese tart (this is a dessert, using sugar, which came into Europe at the end of the Middle Ages)
Take a pound and a half of good fresh cheese, chop it fine and pound it well.  Now take twelve or fifteen egg whites and mix them very well with the cheese, adding half a pound of sugar and half an ounce of white ginger.  Also add half a pound of good pork fat and some milk, as much as is needed.  Then make the pastry crust, as thin as it ought to be.  Put in the cheese mixture and bake it nicely, until the top is slightly browned.  Put a little sugar and good rose water on top.

Here are some more medieval recipes if you enjoy these.

A good source for medieval recipes is Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy, by Odile Redon, Françoise Sabban, and Silvano Serventi (University of Chicago Press, 1998).

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on medieval food, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Fish in the Middle Ages

Today people are encouraged to eat a lot of fish because it is supposed to be healthy, full of omega this and that, even sometimes called "brain food."  Medieval people ate a lot of fish because cold-blooded creatures (like fish) were considered to produce a lower quality meat than mammals.  Many wanted to eat something not as good as red-blooded meat.

This of course was not everybody.  Peasants mostly ate bread with maybe some nice onions and lentils if they were lucky.  Fish was embraced by monks and nuns, and by aristocrats on Fridays, in all these cases because they wanted to be simple and ascetic.  These days even Catholics are only expected to abstain from red meat on Fridays during Lent, but in the Middle Ages, and until quite recently, every Friday was meatless Friday.  (In the modern US, of course, this has given rise to things like grocery stores promoting king crab legs for Lent.  I can hear the medieval monks rolling in their graves.)

(This is a picture of a carp, not a king crab.)

Aside from religious issues, fish could make a good supplement to the diet.  Those who lived along the coast or along a lake or river would routinely fish.  Many communities and monasteries had fish weirs, that is a barricade in a river or stream made of sticks or brush, something that would allow the water to continue flowing downstream, but would trap the fish.  These fish were not, strictly speaking, farmed the way that a lot of salmon and tilapia is farmed today, because people were not trying to grow up fish from tiny hatchlings and feeding them.  But fish caught in the weir might be transferred to an enclosed pond (and given a little food) so as to be ready whenever fish was wanted.

Fish were also an important trade item.  Especially in the North Sea, people caught a lot of fish (mostly cod), salted it heavily, and sold it to areas further from a source of fish.  Fortunately for the fishermen, oceans were both a source of fish and a source of salt.  This fish would have to be soaked for a day or so to get out the extra salt before you would actually want to try to eat it.

Fish also make a good symbol.  You've probably see the spare sketch of a fish that is supposed to identify someone as a Christian.

This is the ichthus, a word meaning "fish."  Although (supposedly) early Christians fearing persecution used this symbol to identify themselves to other Christians, it is not really found during the Middle Ages.  How can a fish be Christian, you understandably ask?  It's because the first three letters, ICH, were considered an abbreviation for Iesus Christus (remember, the distinction between I and J is a recent one).

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on medieval food and religion, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.