Food Waste

 In the modern US, more than a third of the food produced is never eaten.  Instead it goes to waste, some of it composted, but much ending up in landfills where as it decomposes it produces methane, a gas that helps lead to global warming.

How about medieval food?  Was it wasted in the same way?

Well, food waste is always an issue, but it's different in different societies.  In the US, more than half of the food wasted is wasted before it even gets on somebody's plate.  A farmer who produces far more potatoes (for example) than he knows he can sell will just leave them to rot in the field.  A wholesaler won't even bother trying to sell misshapen fruits and vegetables to a grocery store.  A restaurant will cook up a lot of a dish it hopes will sell well, and often there is some left over, ready to be tossed.  A grocery store will fill the dumpster with overripe bananas, apples that have developed a  bad spot, or meat that didn't sell by its Sell By date.  A bakery may put "day old" bread on sale, but two-day-old bread is thrown away.

Most of this would not have been at issue in the Middle Ages.  A farmer would try to harvest and store everything grown, whether or not there was an immediate market for it—and in fact there usually was.  Misshapen fruits and vegetables bothered no one.  Who cared if the apple wasn't perfectly round and red?

There were far fewer of what we'd consider restaurants, and an inn would just reheat the next day anything that didn't move today.  Bread had to be baked frequently, since it didn't have the preservatives found in most modern bread, but dried out bread would still find a place on the menu, probably cooked into something else.

The food wasted before it got to the consumer was wasted for other reasons.  Grain was a favorite meal for mice and rats, and storage facilities were not nearly as effective in the Middle Ages as they are now at keeping out the vermin.  Cats were valued not as pets but as pest control.

All food will eventually rot, becoming unfit (or even dangerous) to eat, and it was much harder to keep without modern refrigeration.  Hence drying, salting, smoking, or sticking full of peppercorns or cloves were widely practiced, as was making milk into cheese, a more durable form.  But an onion will eventually rot even if properly dried, even heavily salted and smoked meat isn't going to last over a year without refrigeration, and spices were expensive.  And there nothing like canning to preserve "shelf life."  Fresh fruits and vegetables had to be eaten when fresh.

Even so, some part of the food was never going to be eaten.  A lot of cheese has an inedible rind.  No one was going to eat onion skins or egg shells or bones.  Technically these are also food waste, destined for the landfill today, tossed in a midden heap or buried in the Middle Ages.

How about food that now either gets taken into the house (and left to slowly go off in the refrigerator) or gets onto the plate but not into the mouth?  Such waste constitutes 40% of the food waste in the modern US.  In medieval times, there was doubtless some of that, but very little.  By our standards, most people were always on the edge of being "food insecure."  If food was there, you ate it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval food and social history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  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.

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.

A Ninth-Century Garden

 What did medieval people grow in their gardens?  A glimpse into what was (at least) possible is provided by a document of Charlemagne, an order he issued around the year 800.  In this so-called "Capitulare de villis," he laid down guidelines for how royal manors were to be organized, including a stone manor house that had a special room for women serfs to weave cloth.  This "Capitulare" also included a list of plants he wanted every royal manor to grow.

(Here's a nineteenth-century statue of Charlemagne, located in the heart of Paris, claiming him for France rather than Germany.)

Now of course this was an aspirational list.  The fact that he ordered all his manors to grow these plants indicates that they weren't necessarily doing so already.  And one certainly cannot extrapolate from might have been ordered for a royal manor and what most people grew in their gardens.  But it is still a very interesting list.

Charlemagne wanted a lot of trees in his orchard, including apples, pears, cherries, plums, chestnuts, almonds, mulberries, persimmons, and quince.  He also specified nut trees, though not what kind of nut (other than the almonds).  Today we have a lot of different varieties of apple, and it was no different in the ninth century, except that instead of Granny Smith and Honeycrisp and Macintosh, the royal document listed, "gozmaringa, geroldinga, crevedella, spirauca, dulcis, and scriores."  If anyone wants "heritage" varieties of apple, maybe they should start figuring these out.

 

Charlemagne's garden was also supposed to grow a lot of herbs.  Spices like clove and peppercorns would have had to be brought in from southeast Asia at great expense, over thousands of miles, but herbs could be locally grown.  These included sage, fenugreek, rue, chickory, anise, caraway seeds, rosemary, parsley, coriander, mint, and rose madder (the latter used for dying).  Mixed in with the herbs were a number of plants that we would consider ornamental flowers, but which could be used in various botanical preparations.  These included lilies, roses, nasturtiums, iris, and gladiolas.

And then there were the vegetables.  These included peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, beets, radishes, fava beans, peas, lentils, cabbage, kohlrabi, turnips, parsnips, onions, leeks, and celery.   You will notice there were no potatoes or tomatoes or pumpkins, as these are all New World plants.  Nonetheless, there were plenty of vegetables to choose from, at least in the summer, and most of these will keep well in a dry place.  They tend from our point of view to look rather bland, which is why you needed to perk them up with some parsley or fenugreek or, if you could afford it, black pepper.

Some plants were listed with essentially the classical Latin name, like alium for onion, or pastenacas for parsnips.  Some had a name that can be figured out from French and German words, like the medieval Latin porros for leeks, which are poirreaux in modern French and porrhe in German (modern scientific name Allium porrum).  And then there were at least some plant names that made perfect sense in the ninth century but leave modern botanists scratching their heads.  For example, what was parduna, which appears between nasturtium and mint?  They obviously knew.

(Click here for more on the medieval diet.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

Yogurt

When we think of medieval foods, do we think of yogurt?  After all, it seems sort of New Age-y.  But it was one of the "foreign" foods that reached Europe during the Middle Ages, as discussed with other examples in my previous post.  Europe was never sealed off from the rest of the world, and if they hadn't gotten a lot of new foods from elsewhere, they might have been eating bread and dandelion greens and not much else.

Yogurt is basically fermented milk, fermented with Lactobacillus, a kind of bacteria that digests milk but doesn't cause disease.  It's quite easy to make, just heat the yogurt to the right temperature in the right conditions, and the bacteria go to work.  (These days commercial yogurt has the right bacteria in the right amounts mixed in, whereas medieval yogurt had to hope they were there.  Not knowing that bacteria existed meant they had to watch for their effect.)

Medieval people had cows but no easy way to store milk.  Pasteurization was not invented until the nineteenth century (which both sterilizes milk and extends its life.)  So milk either had to be drunk very fresh, or else made into butter and cheese, or else made into yogurt, which would last longer than fresh milk though not as long as butter or cheese.

Yogurt probably goes back to the ancient Near East (Mesopotamia), though there is a strong tradition that it was invented by the Mongols, who supposedly filled up their saddle bags with milk, which then thickened and fermented due to the heat of the horse and rider.  (I find this very questionable--how about you?)  The Mongols at any rate eat yogurt today, though the term "fermented mares' milk" may put off the squeamish.

Wherever it began, yogurt became widespread in antiquity in India and the eastern Mediterranean.  The Greeks seem to have eaten it, though calling it oxygala.   The Russians took it up, probably getting it from the Byzantines along with Orthodoxy.  The Turks, who moved into the Mediterranean basin in the eleventh century, were very fond of it and called it yoghurt.

Though yogurt was common in the Mediterranean region in the Middle Ages, northern Europe was slow to take it up.  One story says that it only became popular in France in the sixteenth century, when an Arabic physician cured the king of a digestive upset by feeding him yogurt.

Because the English and the Germans who were the primary settlers of the American Thirteen Colonies had not eaten yogurt at home, it was slow to reach the US.  It really only became common in the early twentieth century, being pushed as a healthful way to eat better and live longer by Mr. Kellogg, who also invented corn flakes (marketed for the same purpose).

Many now claim that yogurt is digestible even for all of those who are lactose-intolerant—which is a high proportion of a population that stops drinking milk once weaned from mother's milk.  It is also claimed that yogurt can restore a healthy bacterial balance in one's digestive system.  These may all be true, though there's still enough New Age-y overtone to American yogurt that one has to wonder.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

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

Foreign food in the Middle Ages

A lot of foods that Americans now take for granted were once considered foreign foods.  Pizza, now one of the most popular American things to eat, really only appeared in the US after World War II.  (I've heard it said now that anyone who knows how to make a good pizza can get a job anywhere in the country.)  Chinese stir fry, sushi, tacos, Greek olives, and so much more have similarly been thoroughly domesticated.

In the Middle Ages, "foreign" foods were also introduced and taken up.  A lot of them came originally from Asia.  Dishes and ingredients that had already been popular in India spread to Persia (modern Iran), and from there to the Muslim Mediterranean.  The Spanish peninsula, which was at least partially under Islamic control during the Middle Ages, was a conduit for new dishes to reach western Europe.

An important migrating vegetable was the eggplant.  From India it spread to Persia, where an eggplant-lamb dish became very popular among the upper classes, and from there onward eventually to Europe, which it reached in the ninth century.  Eggplant however will not grow everywhere in Europe, as it needs lots of sun and also lots of irrigation, so northern Europe did not take it up until more recently.

Why is a purple vegetable called eggplant?  The version first introduced into England was white, not purple (you can still get white eggplant at farmers' markets) and more round than elongate, hence looking sort of like an egg with a green stem, as seen below.  The French call it aubergine, a word that might suggest something grown and served at an inn, but which is in fact a corruption of al-badinjan, the Arabic name for it.  Aubergine is also now the name of a dark purple color.  (Recipe tip:  always use lots of olive oil and spices when cooking eggplant.)

Spinach made a similar journey, reaching western Europe in the ninth century.  Spinach, however, will grow readily in many conditions and does not need nearly as long a growing season as eggplant, so it very quickly spread across medieval Europe.  Spinach has iron (as Popeye knew), so it provided needed nutrients to the medieval diet when in season.

Apricots also spread across Europe around the same time.  The trees are more cold-tolerant than peaches, which helped their spread.  The name is a corruption of the Arabic al-barquq.  The fruit bruises easily,  so it really does not transport well (which is why apricots in the store are usually disappointing), but people who had had the fruit liked it so much that they planted orchards of their own (no problem transporting the seed).

One dish we may now think of as "foreign" is lasagna.  Italian, not English, right?  But in fact it was known both in England and in Sicily in the thirteenth century, as cookbooks from then attest.  In both cases, they probably got it from the Normans, who may have invented it.  Now it wasn't the same as our lasagna, because there was no tomato sauce, but it was a dish with layers of flat noodles and lots of cheese.

Much of the information in this post is based on the important scholarship on food being done by Dr. Katie Peebles.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval food, 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.

Onions

We take onions for granted.  There they are, at the farmers' market or at the grocery store, maybe in a mesh bag for $2.99.  We cut them up and cook them in oil or butter as Step One of a multitude of dishes, from spaghetti to chili to soup to turkey stuffing.

Medieval people had onions too, and they appreciated them ("not like kids today").  Onions are fairly easy to grow, and once dried, they will keep well, without refrigeration or smoking or salting.  They added a nice touch to a medieval diet which was always threatening to become bland.  They could be a dish all by themselves (think onion soup).  In the spring, as onions were just starting to grow, you could have green onions, where you eat the whole thing, including the leaves.

(Green onions are good in the spring when mixed with cottage cheese, which would be made from the milk when the cow had her calf.)

The above picture is a sixteenth-century image of an onion.

Medieval people also ate other onion relatives as well.  Leeks are not now common in the US, but they were a regular addition to the medieval diet, often stewed (leeks, like green onions, can be eaten leaves and all).

Then there was garlic.  Garlic then, like now, really could perk up a bland dish.  Medieval people would also have dishes made up almost entirely of garlic.  When you don't have a lot of different kinds of food to choose from, you make the best of what you've got.

But wouldn't they all have garlic breath? you ask.  Well yes, probably, and they didn't have little pocket tins of mints to suck on.  But if everybody has been eating garlic, it's much less of an issue.  And besides, they did try to keep their mouths clean.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

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

Meat in the Middle Ages

Modern people in the West have an uneasy relationship with meat.  On the one hand, we love it.  The smell of hamburgers on the grill or turkey roasting gets everyone's attention.  It's obvious from our teeth and from archaeology that our Stone Age ancestors ate meat (normally cooked) as part of their diet.  Meat has more calories per volume than vegetables (generally), so if one is hunting and gathering it makes sense to hunt for meat.  Humans can eat pretty much every kind of animal, whereas an awful lot of plants are indigestible or just don't produce nutrients for us (grass won't work for humans).

On the other hand, there are a lot of things we think "bad" about meat.  Every recipe for a "healthy diet" starts by talking about cutting back on red meat with its saturated fat.  Many vegetarians and vegans believe it is not right to raise sentient creatures just to kill and eat them.  (I once saw a sign in range-country Wyoming, fighting back:  "Did you know that every day thousands of innocent plants are killed by vegetarians?  Eat more beef!")  This is further complicated by the popularity of things like gluten-free diets, the so-called "Paleo" diet (not clear where Paleolithic woman would have gotten the olive oil), and low-carb diets, where one tucks happily into meat.

As I discussed in an earlier post on the medieval diet, medieval people had a lot fewer foods to choose from than we do, because they didn't have New World foods like corn and chocolate (much less processed foods or fruits and vegetables out of season).  For them, the majority of their daily calories came from bread.  "Give us this day our daily bread" was not spoken metaphorically.  However, they loved meat and ate it when they could.  They couldn't have cared less about saturated fat.

Meat was expensive, rare, and hard to keep fresh centuries before refrigeration.  For most medieval people, pork was the most common meat, but it was only eaten fresh in the fall, at the time of the big pig roundup and slaughter.  Everyone at their fill, then the rest was smoked and salted to last the winter as an occasional treat.

The aristocracy hunted for deer and went hawking for birds, but over-hunting then, as now, can drastically reduce the population of hunted creatures, so the powerful tried (without overwhelming success) to restrict the right to hunt to themselves.

For most people, beef was eaten only when the old dairy cow was no longer producing, and chicken when the hen stopped laying, though young bulls and cockerels might be harvested out of the flock.  Songbirds and rabbits provided additional sources of meat.

Red meat was considered to make one lively and lusty.  Monks considered this bad, so they normally ate no red meat at all.  (It all made sense in terms of Humors.)  To lead a pure and simple life, breaking away from material things, they had to give up meat.  Meat broth might be allowed, however, if a monk were ill, and there were always stories (about other monasteries, of course) about monks who feigned almost constant illness so they could live in the infirmary and have meat.

For a special guest (like a bishop or a great lord), the abbot would be expected to serve something better than the bread and vegetables on which the monks normally lived (with maybe some eggs).  So they would serve fish or maybe cheese (but preferably fish), not red meat but a little classier than regular monastic fare.

This idea that fish was a semi-penitential food, halfway to being a vegetable and certainly not to be considered red meat, gave rise to the assumption that Catholics should eat fish rather than meat on Fridays during Lent.  (It used to be every Friday, but it's just been Fridays-in-Lent since the 1960s.)  These days, however, eating fish (generally more expensive than hamburger) has lost a lot of its penitential aspect and seems more a ritual act.

Our grocery was advertising "crab legs for Lent."  Let's not go into detail on that one.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

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

Processed food

Today a lot of people say they want to eat simple, unprocessed food.  Medieval people, however, might have killed for an Oreo™.

One of the biggest differences between the medieval diet (which actually continued up into the nineteenth century for most people) and the modern western diet is processed food.  Unless you are taking fresh meat and fruits and vegetables and eating them after minimal cooking, you are eating processed food.  We don't even think about it.  In fact, a lot of what passes as "fresh, simple, healthy" food is processed.  Think orange juice.  It's pasteurized and has ingredients like calcium added.  Think vegetable oil.  How did it get from the soy bean to your bottle?  Think oatmeal.  Surely the oats didn't grow in the form of little flakes, and clearly something happened to it so it can cook in 5 minutes.  Think sliced turkey from the deli.  Have a close look at the list of ingredients.  And don't even get me started on hot dogs.

Now of course processing is not automatically bad.  Unpasteurized milk used to spread tuberculosis.  Processing reduces spoilage.  And people can have a much more varied diet when a variety of foods are available--the kind we take for granted in a grocery store, which would have left medieval people stunned (see more here).  And especially processed food means that people have time to do all sorts of things during the day besides grow, gather, and prepare food.  Pre-modern people, especially women, would have spent a major part of the day in food preparation.  Farming, producing food, is a full-time job as any farmer will tell you, and in the Middle Ages the great majority of the population farmed.

Medieval people also ate almost entirely locally produced food, except for spices.  Again, we tend not to think very much about how many of our berries come from South America, tomatoes from Mexico, peppers from Holland.  And even American-grown food probably came from California.  Are you in California?  In the central valley? (LA and San Fran don't count).  So trucks if not indeed airplanes were involved in bringing you your fresh, simple fruits and vegetables.

Here the advantage is that we can get fresh fruits and vegetables year round.  Medieval people could not, unless you count parsnips and maybe cabbage as fresh fruits and vegetables.  The moral of the story seems to be that we need modern technology and processing to eat a simple, wholesome diet.

I thought about this while making chocolate cake.  I personally think my chocolate cake, made "from scratch," is far superior to nasty processed cake you'd buy in the store.  Yes, only simple, wholesome ingredients, just like a medieval cook.  First the unsweetened chocolate--whoops, it comes from the tropics of South America (and was thus unknown in the Middle Ages) and was processed from cocoa beans into handy little squares.  Then butter--well, I didn't churn it, and it probably came from out of state, but it's "like" simple food.  Then eggs.  Eggs!  Yes!  Unprocessed, just sitting there.  (Well, the hens were probably on a factory farm.  Let's move on.)  Flour is simple and wholesome--except that I didn't grow the wheat or thresh it or grind it or bleach it or put into white paper bags.  Buttermilk--well, if I'd had a cow, and if I was churning my own butter (see above), I'd have buttermilk, that which is left in the churn after taking out the butter.  A big if.  We need some sugar--sugar cane doesn't grow around here, and the sugar in the box doesn't exactly resemble sugar cane.  Let's assume we can pass baking powder off as a spice (medieval people had spice).  The frosting has more chocolate, some vanilla (it's okay, it's like a spice), and powdered sugar.  We already dealt with sugar--except that powdered sugar also has corn starch, which comes from corn (not a medieval plant), and doesn't look like corn on the cob.  There we are!  A delicious chocolate cake just like medieval people would make (except they didn't have chocolate or sugar--but they had flour!).

If they'd kill for an Oreo, just think what they'd do for chocolate cake!

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

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

Medieval feasts

As I discussed in an earlier post on what medieval people ate, for most of the population, including the aristocracy, food choices were very limited by our standards and very bland.  But for a feast, to celebrate a great holiday (like Christmas) or a special event (like a wedding or knighting), cooks at an aristocratic household would throw themselves into creating something special.

Because the daily norm was to have just enough food to get by (dieting was not a big concern in the Middle Ages), one mark of a feast was for everyone to have seconds.  Another marker of a feast would be to have a great many courses.  A feast would start in mid-afternoon and go on until no one could eat any more.

A good feast would include soup, several different kinds of meat (fish, fowl, red meat), plus vegetables, cheese, and puddings, as well as plenty of bread, of course.  Spices were used enthusiastically.  Some birds which we would not think of eating, like swans, would be roasted whole.  (They didn't have turkeys, though they did have geese; maybe they were making do with what they had.)

It was considered extremely elegant to present the bird looking as though it still had feathers.  Bits of vegetable curls (shavings of turnip, say) could be stuck onto the roast carcass with honey.  Something similar could be done with a pig, which might be presented whole, an apple in its mouth.  Food was supposed to look visually special, as well as tasting special.

Because a feast was a display of wealth and elegance as well as a celebration, a great deal of attention went into the setting.  Special wall hangings would be brought out.  Medieval castles did not have dining rooms, so trestle tables were set up in the great hall for a feast, with table cloths for all--or at least for the most esteemed guests.  Everyone was expected to wash their hands, and servants brought basins and fine towels.

Seating was strictly hierarchical, with the most esteemed guests at the head table with their own chairs, lower status people at long tables with benches along the sides, and others somewhere in between.  Guests were expected to wear their finest clothes.  Everyone got plenty to eat, even though the high table would have elegant table ware, while those down on the benches would be happy with a thick slice of bread on which the meat was piled.  They had spoons but not forks, requiring eating with one's fingers--part of the reason you washed carefully before dinner.

Because no one can eat without stopping for six hours straight, there would be interludes of entertainment.  Music, song, and humorous skits filled the gaps between courses.  In the King Arthur stories, the king would refuse to eat on a feast day until some marvel had appeared--which of course always happened in the stories  Because the wine flowed freely at a feast, there was doubtless a great deal of joking and laughing as the evening wore on, whether anything was funny or not.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

Medieval Diet - What They Ate

In an earlier post, I discussed what medieval people did not eat, primarily because it was not available (for example, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, all New World foods).  Here I will discuss what they ate instead.

The medieval diet, like the diet of ancient Greece and Rome, got most of its calories from bread.  Christians pray, "Give us this day our daily bread," with "bread" a metaphor for all needed things, but when the Lord's Prayer was composed in the first century, bread meant bread.

Bread could be made from different sorts of grain, but wheat bread was preferred.  Medieval wheat (like most modern wheat) was winter-wheat, planted in late fall and harvested in the summer.  Barley, which was more common around the Mediterranean than was wheat, was planted in the spring and harvested in the fall.  Barley was also used to make beer.  Medieval people would not recognize today's "lite" beers.  Beer was supposed to have a lot of calories.  The bread was what we would call whole-wheat, with the wheatgerm in, and the beer was thick and crunchy, almost like runny oatmeal.

Confusing to Americans, the British often call wheat "corn."  This is because the word "corn" just means grain in general, although in the US it is used almost exclusively for maize.  Maize (American corn) was not found in the Middle Ages, so all references in British sources to medieval "corn" mean wheat.

Other foods in small amounts accompanied the bread.  Dried peas, beans, and lentils were a regular part of the meal.  So were root vegetables, parsnips and turnips (carrots were only domesticated centuries later).  You will notice that none of these foods need refrigeration.  You will also notice that they are all remarkably bland, which is why spices were highly valued and highly expensive.  So was salt.

Those parts of Europe that will support grapes produced wine.  Wine was also necessary for the liturgy and had to be imported into places (like Scotland and Ireland) where grapes will not grow.  For the peasantry, beer rather than wine provided most of the alcohol (it was all fairly low proof).

Milk, when they could get it, was mostly made into cheese.  (Unlike modern cows, medieval cows only gave milk for a short time when they had just calved.)  Eggs, when they could find the nests the free-range chickens had hidden, added protein.  Nuts, berries, and mushrooms were gathered in the woods in season.  In spring and summer lettuce and cabbage and other leafy vegetables rounded out the diet.

This vegetarian (if not vegan) diet was the normal diet for most of the population, most of the year, and also for monks, who deliberately ate a peasant diet in a search for purification and simplicity.  A vegetarian diet is now promoted as healthful.  But note that these "healthy" people were worn out by their 50s.

But then there were special foods.  When a hen got too old to lay eggs, she could become dinner.  So could the worn-out ox or cow.  Aristocrats hunted for deer—and tried to restrict peasant poaching, because they wanted the deer for themselves.  Aristocrats also went hawking for geese, ducks, and other wild birds.  Peasants did not have trained hawks, but they sometimes spread a sticky substance on twigs to try to catch song birds—who we would not think had enough meat on them to be worth eating.

Fish were an important addition to the monastic diet, eaten on feast days because monks never (or almost never) ate red meat.  Streams like the one pictured above produced trout.

But the most common source of meat was pork.  Pigs were only semi-domesticated and ran wild much of the year.  Around November, after they had gotten fat on acorns ("mast"), they were rounded up and slaughtered.  Everyone ate as much fresh pork as they could hold for a day or two, then the rest was smoked and salted to last the winter.  Modern ham would seem very insipid to a medieval person used to a ham that had to be soaked for a day or so before cooking, to get out all the extra salt.

Feasts (for the wealthy) were symbolically a denial that the diet was bland and limited.  A good feast included a great many different dishes, fowl, red meat, fish, vegetables cooked in different ways, puddings, nuts, and so on.  A feast started in early afternoon and went on as long as anyone could still eat.

Click here for more on medieval ideas of mealtimes.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

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

Medieval Diet - What They Did Not Eat

The medieval diet, unlike the modern American diet, did not have meat as the central event.  Aristocrats ate a lot more meat than did the peasants, but for everybody bread was the single most important item in the diet.

Here I will point out a few things that they did not eat, mostly because these foods were not found in Europe in the Middle Ages.  In a future post I will discuss what they ate instead.

There was no corn in medieval Europe.  We tend to think of corn as corn on the cob, or a major ingredient in corn tortillas and corn bread.  But in fact corn is a significant part of the American diet.  Look on almost any box or can, and you'll see corn starch or corn syrup.  And of course we use a lot of corn to fatten up cattle before slaughter.

There were also no tomatoes.  Like corn, tomatoes are a New World plant.  In fact, they were originally introduced into Europe as an ornamental plant that grew attractive red fruits believed to be poisonous.  It was a century or two before someone was brave enough (hungry enough?) to eat a tomato, find it tasty, and not die.

Hard as it may be to imagine, medieval Italy had pasta and pizza without tomato sauce.  You also couldn't put ketchup on your French fries.

Part of the reason of course is that there were no French fries!  Potatoes, like tomatoes, are a New World plant.  We tend to think of potatoes as having something to do with Ireland, because of the potato famine in the nineteenth century, but that is because the Irish had been replacing wheat fields with potato fields, because potatoes grow much better in Ireland's cool, damp climate than does wheat--at least until it gets the blight.

The potato, like the tomato, has prospered in modern Europe as in the US, because it also grows well in lots of places besides Ireland.  (See more here on potatoes and tomatoes.)  Russia grows a lot of potatoes--and indeed uses them to make vodka.

Medieval Europeans however did not have hard liquor.  This is not because they were Mormons!  Rather, distilling was not invented until the very end of the Middle Ages.  The major alcoholic drinks were beer and wine.  Without modern bottling (also a later invention), neither will keep very well, and last year's wine had pretty much turned to vinegar by the time of the grape harvest in the fall.

Tea and coffee were also unknown in medieval Europe, even though these are not New World products.  Both reached Europe for the first time in the early modern period, tea coming from China and India, coffee from the Arabs.  Without coffee and tea, no orange juice, and no corn flakes, medieval people might start the day with a hearty mug of beer.

Finally, there was no chocolate.  Yes, I know, it's hard to imagine.  Chocolate comes from South America.  I have seen it suggested that the reason the ancient Greeks invented tragedy is because they did not have chocolate….

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

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