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.

Mould-board plow

I've talked before about growing crops in the Middle Ages.  But today I want to discuss one particular medieval invention that made it all possible, the mould-board plow.  (American farmers today call it the moldboard plow.  Historians stick with mould-board.  Our students get confused enough as it is without thinking this has something to do with that funny orange stuff you find when you forgot the cottage cheese in the back of the refrigerator.)

Let's start with plowing.  If you've driven through the countryside much you've doubtless seen farmers plowing and wondered vaguely what they were doing.  They were preparing the soil to grow crops, loosening it up, creating crevices in which seeds could lodge and sprout, turning it over so that whatever had been growing there before (say, weeds or grass) would be killed and turned under to rot and fertilize the soil.

Plows have been around as long as agriculture.  For millennia the plow was a basic pointed stick with handles.  The pointy part, the plow-share as it is called, was if possible made of metal.  (Think of the Old Testament hope for a better time, when people will "beat their swords into plow-shares.")  It could be pulled by an ox, a donkey, or even a person in a pinch, with another person walking behind to guide it.

This plow (the Romans called it an aratum, and it's the root of our word "arable," meaning land that can be cultivated) was not very efficient, because fields had to be cross-plowed.  That is, the plow-share would slice the soil, but you had to plow both end-to-end of a field and side-to-side to get the soil properly turned over.  It was however lightweight and cheap.

Medieval people (eleventh-twelfth century) came up with something much better, the mould-board plow, pictured below.

It was called this because it had a mould-board, a curved piece of wood or metal right behind the sharp plow-share.  This would turn the soil over as it was sliced into.  (The word is "mould," meaning soil or earth, not "mold.")  In the medieval image above, it's the dark, curved part of the plow, seen edge-on and hence somewhat cryptic looking (keep reading).

A mould-board plow was called a carruca in medieval Latin, related to "cart," because it was heavy enough that it normally needed wheels.  It also could be pulled a lot easier by a strong animal like an ox or two than by a donkey.

It was also more expensive (because of all the metal), so a lot of peasant families ended up having to club together.  But it was much more efficient, because you didn't have to cross-plow, meaning you could plow twice as many fields (more or less) in the same amount of time, leading to more food being grown.  The heavy, moist soils that could be plowed with the carruca were also generally richer, better for growing crops.  On the other hand, it was so effective at digging up heavy, moist soil that it was never adopted for thin, light soils, such as much of the land around the Mediterranean or on hilltops, where it would be unnecessarily cumbersome and the danger was drying out the soil.

The basic medieval design for a mould-board plow lives on.  Today they are pulled by tractors, not oxen, and often they will have multiple sets of cutter (plow-share) and mould-board side by side.  But if you look at the modern plow pictured below, you will see that the basic design is the same as the twelfth-century plow, even though there's a cutting wheel instead of a pointy plow-share.  There is still a plow-share, but it's now attached to the bottom of the mould-board (you can see it in the left-most of the three mould-boards pictured below), which is mounted horizontally rather than vertically (as in the medieval plow pictured above).  And of course there are three sets of cutters and mould-boards next to each other in this modern plow.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

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