Cider

 One of the treats of fall is cider.  Cider is made from raw apples, pressed to get out the juice, as opposed to apple juice, which is made by cooking up apples and straining out the solids to just have the juice.  Cider was also a favorite fall beverage in medieval Europe.

In fact, because apples then tended to be fairly small and sour by our standards (no Honeycrisp), cider was one of the main ways to get the goodness out of apples.  One crushed the apples, leaving core and peel behind along with the pulverized fruit (which could be then fed to the livestock or used for fertilizer).

 

Apples are not native to the New World, but Europeans brought them over.  The semi-legendary Johnny Appleseed grew up around his family's cider mill in the colonial era, and he thought it a shame that all those seeds went to waste,.  And thus he headed west with lots of seeds, figuring that if he planted them, they'd grow into trees, and as settlers moved west they'd be delighted to discover orchards already planted.  The village of Apple Creek, Ohio, is so named because indeed settlers at the beginning of the nineteenth century found many wild apple trees, attributed to ol' Johnny.

Now planting apple seeds is not necessarily a good way to get good apples.  Every seed is the result of a cross, and some of those crosses are a whole lot better than others.  (A wild apple tree grew in our back yard.  The apples were enormous, so you only needed one or two for a pie, but they were so tart you needed a whole lot of sugar.)  Modern varieties are proliferated strictly by grafting branches of the kind of apple you want onto some other apple tree's root stock.

At any rate, for many years, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, cider was a good way to use "drops," apples that had fallen and were probably bruised, as opposed to the perfect-looking ones that were picked.  These days most cider however is made from picked apples, because of understandable concern that drops might have picked up undesirable germs.  Cider made from drops is required to be pasteurized.

But there is nothing like the taste of good raw cider.  The downside is that it will ferment fairly quickly, especially if it cannot be kept refrigerated, an obvious challenge in the Middle Ages.  (Sometimes commercial cider will have potassium sorbate added to keep it from fermenting.  This is an abomination before the Lord.)  But that was fine!  Medieval people found "hard" cider a refreshing alternative to beer.

(A high school friend decided to secretly make her own hard cider. In those days cider came in glass bottles.  She hid a gallon of raw cider in her clothes closet, the lid screwed on tight.  The result, as they say, was not a pretty sight.)

These days in Britain "cider" means hard cider.  It has been pasteurized to stop the fermentation before the cider turns to vinegar (medieval cooks used cider vinegar is various dishes).  They also have hard pear cider, called perry.  But for Americans fresh (or "sweet") apple cider is a delicious taste of fall.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

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

Cider

One of the things you can do with apples is make cider.  It's the taste of fall (much more so than pumpkin spice latte.)  Cider was certainly drunk during the Middle Ages.  In fact, because medieval apples were much smaller than modern apples, they were more likely to be made into cider than eaten raw.

That's a picture of a modern apple.  Medieval apples would have been closer in size to what we call a crab apple.

Making cider is not very difficult.  Chop the apples coarsely, press the pieces (as in a cider mill), catch the juice as it comes out, strain it to get out seeds, stems, etc.  That's it!  Now you have good raw cider.  It needs to be kept cool or drunk immediately.  This is the cider you get at a cider mill today, and the cider that medieval people made.

Most of the cider you get in the grocery store has been pasteurized so it won't ferment the way raw cider will, and it often contains a small amount of chemicals also designed to preserve it.  I personally can always taste the chemicals and consider them an affront against nature.

So how did medieval people preserve cider?  Well, it was fall, so the spring house would be fairly cool, for at least a few days' preservation.  But much of it fermented, and that was fine too.  It was drunk as hard cider, an alternative to beer.  (Like medieval beer, it still couldn't be kept very long, because pasteurization and bottling were centuries in the future.)  In Great Britain, if you now order cider in a bar you will get what Americans consider hard cider, and the Brits don't really drink what Americans consider regular cider.

Fun fact:  Cider is not the same as apple juice.  Apple juice is made not by pressing raw apples but by boiling up apples, then straining off the resulting liquid.  Perfectly OK but not as good as cider.

Another fun fact:  Johnny Appleseed was a real person, back around 1800.  His father had a cider mill.  He thought it important that, as pioneers headed west, they should be able to have apple trees.  So every year he took a whole lot of seeds from the cider mill and headed west, ahead of the settlers, and planted apple trees.  They resulting trees were all sorts of weird hybrids, but you could always make cider.  The village of Apple Creek in Ohio is so named because when the white settlers arrived, there were already Johnny Appleseed trees along the creek.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

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

Wine through the Centuries

Wine was an important commodity for medieval people.  As I've previously noted, wine and beer, not coffee and tea, much less milk and soft drinks, were the principal medieval drinks.  Near the Mediterranean, wine predominated, slowly giving way to beer as one moved north, because wine grapes won't grow where it's too cold.  Wine was also required for the liturgy, so it had to be imported for the purpose to places like the British Isles.

Wine making seems to have begun somewhere around 1000 BC.  In the west, it began with the Etruscans, who were already there in Italy when the Celtic ancestors of the Romans came wandering into the peninsula.  (The Etruscans gave their name to Tuscany, the hilly area of northern Italy around Florence and Siena.)

The Etruscan god of wine was called Foonfel or something like that (written Etruscan presents, shall we say, challenges to the modern archaeologist).  He was depicted as a young, sexually active male, naked and ready for drinking and action.  He was remembered in folklore in Italy well into the twentieth century, when people whose vineyards were not bearing well would chant a poem in which they asked "Fafnel" to come make their vines bear abundantly.

The Etruscan wine god was often depicted with Uni, the Etruscan goddess of love.  In the images she was often larger and more mature than he was, but he seemed to be very happy with this older woman.  She was often depicted on Etruscan wine cups.  She inspired the Roman goddess Juno, who got to be Jupiter's wife in the Roman pantheon, but was really not the same person as the Greek goddess Hera, Zeus's wife.

You will notice here a strong connection between sex, fertility, abundance, and wine.  There was also sometimes a connotation of blood.  We think of wine as something to enjoy with a good French meal, or something to sip while relaxing in the evening.  Ancient people thought of it as connected with great religious festivals and reproduction.

Under the Roman empire, wine grapes were grown all around the Mediterranean.  With the rise of Islam in the seventh century, wine disappeared (at least theoretically) from the Middle East and North Africa, because Islam forbids alcohol along with pork.  Christians however continued to include wine in their religious ceremonies, though without the sex part.  After all, according to the Bible at the Last Supper Jesus had said that liturgical wine was his blood.

Different regions produced different sorts of wine, everything from light white wines to heavy reds that were so dark as to be nearly brown.  Not surprisingly, wine could be an excellent cash crop, and it didn't need nearly as big fields as did grain.  Even today, the wine-growing areas of Alsace have villages only a few miles apart, because they don't need large empty tracts for crops, and the buildings stop abruptly at the edge of the village—no malls or quicky-fills at the edge of town, as that would destroy valuable vineyard space.

In the twelfth century in France, landlords with a piece of land that would make a good vineyard (good soil, right slope facing the right direction) would buy rootstock and tools, then go into an agreement with a peasant, an arrangement called complant.  The peasant would undertake all the labor of planting the vines and tending them as they grew, but once they started to bear in a few years, he and the landlord would split the profits of the wine.

Medieval wine was highly sought out when it first appeared in the fall, because without modern bottling wine didn't keep well and might be close to vinegar by the time the new wine came in.  A good sprinkling of spice helped but not a lot.  Some powerful lords enforced a "wine ban," where they and only they could sell their new wine in the fall for the first three weeks, thus taking advantage of everyone's eagerness to buy.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

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

Coffee and Tea

In a textbook I was once asked to review, the author was discussing the ancient Romans (but it might as well have been medieval people):  "They did not drink coffee or tea.  They did not drink distilled spirits."  The distinct impression the book gave was that ancient Romans were a bunch of Mormons.

Now of course, as I noted in an earlier post, a lot of what we eat but medieval people did not is food from the New World:  corn, tomatoes, chocolate, potatoes.  But tea and coffee are not New World products.  They still didn't drink them in medieval Europe--any more than distilled spirits (which as the name suggests, requires distilling, not invented yet).  This is because they did not have them.

(Yes, I know, in my stories people drink tea.  This is because, in spite of the medieval-looking setting, my stories are actually set in an alternate version of the nineteenth century, a version where the Middle Ages never ended.  I've explained this.)

Tea originated in China, leaves from a local shrub brewed in hot water.  It was drunk there from at least the first century AD on.  There are various legends about generals ordering their men to drink tea instead of straight water, which required boiling the water, thus killing off germs that were meanwhile incapacitating the other generals' armies.  Although this appears like a tall tale, the bitter infused leaves do seem to have begun as a medicinal drink.  The western word 'tea' is derived from the Chinese word.

From China tea spread to other parts of Asia, especially Japan and Korea.  But it did not first reach Europe until the sixteenth century, when Portuguese explorers brought some back.  In the seventeenth century the Dutch East India Company started importing tea, which became popular as a luxury drink in Europe.  Not until the nineteenth century, when the British began having India (then part of its Empire) start growing tea in order to break the Chinese monopoly, did tea become the all-purpose British drink it still is today.  (Tea has also become very popular in India in the last 200 years.)

Only in the West did tea get drunk with milk and/or sugar; in East Asia it was (and is) taken straight.  Iced tea, which is the predominant American form of tea, is essentially unknown in the rest of the world.

Coffee was also unknown in medieval Europe.  It is brewed from roasted and ground coffee "beans," which are actually the seeds of a berry native to Africa.  It is first known to have been drunk in Arabic regions, probably around the fifteenth century.  From there it spread to the Ottoman Empire (roughly what is now Turkey) and, by the seventeenth century, had become very popular in Europe.  Coffee houses sprang up, where people imbibed this exciting and stimulating beverage.

Louis XIV is reputed to have received a coffee bush from the Ottomans, one that produced especially good coffee beans.  This bush is the ancestor of all "arabica" coffee cultivated today.  Modern Latin America is where most of the world's best coffee is now grown, but it really only began to be planted there in the eighteenth century.  North Americans started to take up coffee drinking in preference to tea during the American Revolution, when the British heavily taxed tea.

We now take our morning hit of caffeine for granted.  Medieval people would have rolled out of bed and either had nothing to drink or else a satisfying mug of beer.  It would certainly make one's mornings take on a different complexion.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

For more on coffee and tea (and beer!) and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.