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.

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.

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.