Today I thought it was about time for a return to Forme....
of Cury.
See what I did there?
Yes, I'm going to that medieval cookbook which I know and love so well,
The Forme of Cury, for a dish called makke. It's basically beans and fried onions,
good hearty peasant food, and that is exactly what we're going to be discussing today.
So thank you to 'The Great Courses Plus' for sponsoring this video
as we try to suss out what a medieval peasant might eat.
This time on Tasting History.
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Now if you've ever watched an episode of Tasting History where I cook from
The Forme of Cury, and i'll put a link up here to one of my favorites,
you'll know that the recipes in the book were actually written for King Richard II.
Hardly a peasant,
but the problem is we don't have any recipes for peasants
because nobody cared what they ate but we can look through The Forme of Cury
and find some recipes that would have the ingredients that might be available
to peasants. So that really narrows it down because almost every recipe in the book has
a ton of spices, and peasants would not have any spices, but this recipe for makke has only a few
ingredients that will kind of have to change up otherwise it's nice and simple good peasant food.
Makk: Take drawn beans and boil them well.
Take them up of the water and cast them in a mortar
grind them all to dust till they be white as any milk,
warm a little red wine, cast thereamong in the grinding,
do therto salt, pour in dishes.
Then take onions and mince them small and seed them in oil till they be all brown,
and flourish the dishes there with
and serve it forth.
Wonderfully simple, and frankly pretty good side dish for Thanksgiving if like me
you insist on subjecting your family to medieval cooking. So what you'll need is:
3 cups or 450 grams of beans.
Now most of the beans that we use today would not have been available in medieval Europe. They're
all New World beans. If you want to use something that is appropriate to the era the closest thing
that you're probably going to get are broad beans, or fava beans, though they're not going to
be white like in the recipe so no matter how much you grind them up they're never going to be white,
they're more of a green but those are going to be the closest thing, fava beans.
That said, I say use whatever bean makes you happy.
A half cup to one cup of red wine or ale
Now here's one of the ingredients that we're going to swap out.
The recipe calls for red wine but in England
in the Middle ages red wine not really available to many peasants,
so we're going to go with ale you could also use mead perhaps if you want something sweeter.
Also the amount that you use is really up to you it doesn't say
so it's kind of how thick you want your bean dish.
Salt to taste,
an onion minced,
and then oil or butter for frying.
So here's the other ingredient that we're going to swap out because the oil in the recipe
probably refers to olive oil which King Richard would have been using imported from Italy.
Way too expensive for a peasant but a peasant might be
sharing a cow with their neighbor or maybe even have a cow themselves,
so they would have had plenty of butter.
That said the low smoke point of butter,
gonna be hard to fry onions in. Not impossible
but you might want to add in a little bit of olive oil just to cheat.
You could also use lard which many peasants would have as well.
So first take your beans and wash them, and then fill a pot with water and boil them.
Now depending on what bean you're going to use they're going to have different
consistencies. Fava beans kind of tend to disintegrate and just take up a lot of water
so the water pretty much all disappeared I kept adding some,
but it would boil away and or go into the beans and then the beans turn to mush.
If you're using something a little bit harder like a red bean then those will probably stay
firm that said we're going to be mashing them up anyway so it doesn't really matter.
Once they're cooked remove them from the pot and grind them up in a bowl.
Then pour your wine or ale into a small saucepan,
and gently heat, then pour it over the beans and mix it all together.
Then mix in your salt and dish the beans into a bowl.
And now for the onions: take a pan and put it over medium heat,
and then pour in your oil or melt your butter, and then add the onions, and fry them until brown.
Now browning the onions can take between 7 and 10 minutes which is perfect
because i am just aching to tell you a bit about Medieval peasant food.
Now people are always asking me how do I do my research and frankly if i went through the process
I would bore you to tears, but I often start with a course
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go visit thegreatcoursesplus.com/tastinghistory link in the description to
start your free trial today. It's also going to make a great Hanukkah or
Christmas gift, I would think.
Anyway let's get back to Medieval peasants.
Actually before we delve into what a medieval peasant might eat,
let us turn to that 14th century chronicler Jean Froissart
to see what a medieval peasant or serf actually was.
"It is the custom in England, as in other countries,
for the nobility to have great power over the common people,
who are their serfs.
This means that they are bound by law and custom to plow the fields of their masters,
harvest the corn gather it into barns, and thresh and winnow the grain,
they must also mow and carry home the hay,
cut and collect wood and perform all manner of tasks of this kind."
So yeah, today we're talking about the bottom rung of society and that is fine.
The problem is that if you're busy winnowing your lord's grain,
that didn't really sound right,
then you don't have time to log everything that you're eating.
It was long before Instagram so we don't have any recipes, but we can still extrapolate
from other writings and other recipes of the day as well as archaeology what they would have eaten.
Also Medieval peasants are not a monolith and nor was their diet because
the Medieval period covers up to a thousand years depending on who you talk to.
Things are going to change in that time,
also the the space that we're talking about, all of Europe it's huge.
People in Italy are going to be eating differently than
people in England or the holy Roman empire,
or Russia so take everything in this episode with a grain of salt.
Which is a perfect place to start. See a lot of people think that salt was really expensive
during the Middle Ages, and that could be true
but it could also not be true it really depended on where you were.
See most of the sources of salt in Medieval Europe
were either inland salt springs or the ocean so if you lived on the coast getting salt wasn't
going to be that hard or expensive because you could just evaporate your own. That said
separating salt from sand actually takes a lot of
of work so you might have some sand in your salt but you know at least you have salt.
That said most people weren't using it to spice their food but rather to preserve their food so
a little sand ain't gonna kill you, but if you were looking for flavor then you might
have some salt but you weren't going to you have any of the spices that the wealthy people
had, instead you would probably rely on herbs,
which you could grow in your own garden attached to your cottage called a potager.
They would grow all sorts of herbs in these gardens
from sorrel, and sage, and mint, and rosemary, and thyme, and frankly
a lot more herbs than we would use today,
and one that they grew which technically isn't an herb but they treated it as such was garlic.
And for most of the period it was associated with the poor.
There's actually a wonderful quote from the 15th century rather snooty Italian author
Sabadino Degli Arienti where he says,
"Garlic is always a rustic food but at times is artificially made elegant
if placed in the cavity of a roasted duck."
Artificially made elegant, what a snob. Anyway like garlic
which is technically a vegetable they would also grow other vegetables:
carrots, and cabbage, and beans, and peas, and leeks, and onions,
and if they were really lucky they might even have a couple
fruit trees or wild berries. Though some fruits were actually kind of kept away
from the peasantry and were rather prized depending on where you were in Europe.
Peaches for example in Le Porretane by the same author who talked about the garlic
he gives a wonderful story about a peasant and he gets caught for
stealing and eating a peach that was meant to be for the local knight, and he actually
blames it on a donkey but the knight does not believe him and beats him mercilessly.
It's kind of sad actually but it was rather common see punishing peasants
for the poaching of prized provisions was rather a popular pastime for the posh.
The laws varied wildly through Europe
but in Norman England they had something called Forest Law.
All hunting in the silva regis, or Kingswood,
which is basically all of the good forestry where there was game animal
was forbidden to actually anyone except for the king unless he gave a special dispensation which
he could probably you know often give to those friends that he had but if you didn't have Lord in
front of your name, you weren't going to be having any boar or venison or pheasant anytime soon.
And if you were caught poaching one of these animals then the punishment could be rather severe
it could be as innocuous as castration or losing a hand,
or maybe blinding but then it could also be death and there are stories, though I wasn't
able to find any contemporary sources but there are stories that in parts of what's now Germany
it was practiced to take the skin of whatever animal had been killed
and wrap it around the person and then set dogs on them to kill them. Very like
Game of Thrones Ramsay Bolton, possibly not true but who knows.
So it's no surprise that the poor tended to get their protein
from eggs and dairy, and one of the things that they
ate a lot of was something called green cheese which was an unaged cheese
that no wealthy person would be caught eating
but the poor tended to tend to like it because it didn't take a lot of time to make and actually my
very first episode of Tasting History was on making this green cheese. Ah, memories.
Now peasants did eat some meat, some animals were raised and there was some hunting allowed.
Hedgehogs, rabbits, small birds, badgers,
and of course the occasional pig, because pigs were everywhere in Medieval Europe.
Especially in England because they kept the streets clean.
There were actually pigs in London during the 14th and 15th century called Saint Anthony's Pigs
who roamed the city wearing bells around their necks.
It was actually considered an act of charity
to feed those pigs and then when the pigs got fat enough they would either be sold or
slaughtered and given to the poor.
Now if you weren't lucky enough to have a pig then another great source of protein was fish.
They had a lot of it depending again on where you lived.
If you lived near a river you could catch salmon or trout, or beaver,
yes beaver was a fish and I discuss that in my episode on Lenten foods,
there were a lot of weird foods that were considered fish including puffins. So if you live
near the coast you could have a puffin, or eel, or crab, or any of the fish that come from the sea
except no porpoises and no whales which were also considered fish,
because there were laws where only the king got to eat those. In fact
there were actually a lot of laws on fishing just as there were laws on forestry but it
was much more common and that was a great source of protein for peasants.
But there was one great equalizer in the diets of both the rich and poor alike of Medieval Europe,
and that was carbs.
Most often in the form of either
a thickener for pottages or as bread.
The quality of bread of course varied wildly.
While the wealthy might be dining on wastel and restons made of fine white wheat flour,
the poor would be having barley, and oats, and rye and maslin,
but when times were tough and times were often tough
they would make horse bread which was made of dried peas and beans and
whatever else you could find.
Oddly enough one of the "good things"
that came out of the Black Death in the mid 14th century
was the increased availability of wheat to the masse.
In 1394 a ploughman in Lincolnshire received 15 loaves a week as payment,
seven of which had to be made of wheat.
Now the last and perhaps best way to get your calories through carbs
was to drink them,
and at least in northern Europe that typically meant either ale or mead
because with every meal you'd have a bit of ale or mead unless you were drinking water, and yes
they did drink water in the Middle Ages despite what you may have been told ,
but they also drank a lot of mead and ale because you didn't need to worry if it was clean or not.
Had alcohol and it killed everything.
Though many of the ales at the time were called small ales which were much lower in alcohol
because the purpose was not to get drunk it was simply to have something safe to drink.
Now the further south you go in Europe the more likely wine
becomes the drink of choice even for the peasants,
but in England not so and frankly that might be for the best because it seems that
even then just like today France kept the good stuff for themselves and shipped the swill abroad.
Around 1175 on visiting the English court of King Henry II,
Peter of Blois lamented, "The wine is turned sour and moldy;
thick, greasy, stale, flat and smacking of pitch. I have sometimes seen even great lords
served with wine so muddy that a man must needs close his eyes and clench his teeth,
wry-mouthed and shuddering, and filtering the stuff rather than drinking."
And that is why I swapped out wine for
ale today in our recipe. Speaking of which it should be about ready.
So once your onions are nicely browned you can do as The Forme of Cury commands,
and flourish the dish there with,
then serve it forth.
And here we are: makke.
Or, beans and onions. Let's give it a try i'm going to get lots of onions because i like
grilled onions. :D It's very hearty.
Honestly this could be a whole freaking meal. It's just like a bunch of beans it's
it's very simple, it's not flavorless by any means,
but it's very simple.
That said I wouldn't fault you
for throwing in some other spices or herbs or something to to kind of liven up the flavor,
but if you like onions especially just add more onions. That's what i'm going to do because
they really kind of give that wonderful sweet caramelized onion flavor to it but it's good.
It's not amazing but you know it's peasant food this alongside a piece of salmon, muah!
It'd be lovely i could get that at Whole Foods. Now if you enjoyed this video let me know because
maybe I could do a whole like mini-series. I could cover the foods of
medieval monks and the medieval tradesmen and what a knight might eat during the Middle Ages. If
you'd be interested let me know in the comments. So make sure to click the link in the description
for your Great Courses Plus free trial and I will see you next time on Tasting History.