Stuffed porpoise stomachs and blood custard for the rich, pickled carrots for the poor,
and ale for all. Europeans in the Middle Ages ate some weird freaking stuff.
There's no modern country with a food tradition that doesn't include bread.
TechnoGym says that's been the case throughout most of history. According to Medieval Britain,
grain-based foods like bread provided up to three-quarters of the calories eaten by
medieval Brits. Some were even using scooped bread as plates in the Middle Ages, not unlike the bread
bowls occasionally used to serve soup today. Of course, not all bread is created equally.
There were varying degrees of bread quality in the Middle Ages,
and better bread was reserved for those who could afford it. The difference in quality
between types of bread was generally attributed to the grain used to bake
it. If you're wondering which bread was most preferable and expensive in the Middle Ages,
you may be surprised to find that the answer is the opposite of today's standards.
While we may pay more for ancient grains and darker breads today, medieval diners
preferred white bread, made from wheat, which was too expensive for most peasants to grow and
refine. The poorer classes often baked rye or barley breads and even resorted to peas,
beans, and acorns to fill out a bread recipe when grains were in short supply.
Today we know that many fruits and vegetables are packed with nutrients that help our bodies,
and your parents may have begun forcing them on you long before you liked them. Apparently,
some things never change, because medieval recipes for fruit and veggie dishes abound, from fried
beans and pea porridge to apple bread pudding and cherry pudding. These prove either that the good
people of the Middle Ages were also aware of the many potential health benefits of these natural
beauties or at least that fruits and veggies were easy enough to grow. But not everything
about the produce preferences of medieval diners is consistent with today's practices.
Proponents of raw food diets believe that too many nutrients are lost when fruits and
veggies are cooked, preferring to eat them only in their rawest form. But medieval
chompers believed the opposite. Not only did they prefer not to eat their produce raw,
but they actually thought that raw fruits and vegetables were dangerous.
The British Library reports that one book even bore the alarming warning:
"Beware of green salads and raw fruits, for they will make your master sick."
As some foods actually are dangerous to eat raw, and it's possible food washing
was less thorough than it is today, it probably was safer overall to just
cook everything before serving it in the Middle Ages, so let's not judge too hard.
The wealthy have never shied away from grand demonstrations of their personal worth,
so you shouldn't be surprised to learn that the banquets of the Middle Ages
were no dim affairs. Medieval hosts loved to show off. Gracing the tables of many
a medieval banquet were eye-catching presentations of less common animals,
and plenty of them came from the sea. As the British Library reports, impressive sea life
like seals, porpoises, and whales were no strangers to medieval banquet tables.
"This is fine feasting, is it not, Sir Rodney."
"Indeed, Lord Ulrich."
Still, a decadent presentation doesn't always indicate a quality bite, at least
not by today's standards. Take porpoises, for example: one known preparation of this
sea animal was porpoise pudding, which was basically a stuffed porpoise stomach. It
could be compared to Scottish haggis, substituting a porpoise stomach for a
sheep stomach. In this type of recipe, you're unlikely to taste much of the porpoise itself,
as it's really just providing a casing and it's not necessarily the star ingredient,
but hey — it's still in there, and medieval revelers apparently enjoyed having it.
While you may think that garishly colored candies and sweet treats are modern inventions, banqueters
in the Middle Ages were well accustomed to vibrant hues in their food, particularly custard.
Common today, custard was an equally common dessert in the Middle Ages,
at least for the rich. Custard is a dairy-forward dish traditionally thickened with egg, and all of
these ingredients were readily available to medieval chefs. Custard is a fairly broad
term that can go beyond what you may consider a dessert food, but suffice it to say that it was,
in fact, best known as a dessert in the Middle Ages, as it is for most of us today.
Unlike today, though, meals in the Middle Ages rarely included a distinct dessert course,
presenting sweet dishes throughout the meal alongside the savory courses,
as Bucknell University reports.
"Oh, yes. At suppertime she would go straight for honey cakes,
candied almonds, custard. Anything sweet."
In order to whip up rainbow-like dishes in modern times, we may have the convenience of
adding a few drops of completely artificial food coloring to our recipes, but medieval
chefs used natural ingredients to enliven their custards, including sandalwood for red,
boiled blood for black, and saffron for yellow, according to the British Library.
Fish seems like an obvious food choice, but there's more to this salty sustenance
than you'd think. Many of the more substantial dishes we've come across
so far were reserved exclusively for the upper classes of medieval society,
but for those who lived near the sea, even the poor had ready access to fish. This made their
diets different from those of the inland poor who dined on very little meat or fish at all.
“And the lord did grin, and the people did feast upon the lambs, and sloths,
and carp, and anchovies, and orangutans, and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats, and large-”
“skip a bit brother”
Regardless of social status, living near the sea provided medieval eaters access to fresh cod,
herring, eel, and even whale (not actually a fish, but let's move on). People living by streams and
lakes similarly had access to freshwater fish, though the rules became a bit more classist here.
As the History Learning Site explains, many medieval villages were built by rivers,
and villagers were able to fish and eat species like dace, grayling,
and gudgeon if the local lord permitted. But even in these cases, proper salmon and trout
were generally reserved for the lord only, as were the contents of the stocked ponds they often kept
on their large estates. Violators of this fishy hierarchy were subject to serious punishment.
Remember that colorful custard situation we just learned about? You know, the custard concocted
primarily with a sizable dose of dairy? This was made possible by the abundance of dairy products
available to medieval people, and though custards were generally for the rich alone, dairy was not.
There certainly were plenty of more refined dairy dishes like almond milk
pie and cheese tarts being prepared for the ruling classes of the Middle Ages,
but the British Library reports dairy cows were often kept by the medieval poor,
so their diets included plenty of cheese, buttermilk, curds, and whey.
Cheese may be a wildly popular dairy product by today's standards, but it's probably not
the first one you think of when considering the entire category of dairy. If you're like us,
you think of milk first, but most imbibers of the Middle Ages did
not. As Medieval Times reports, milk certainly existed in the Middle Ages,
but it was primarily a drink for children and rarely guzzled by medieval adults.
"Dust thus have thou a mug of ale for me and me mate? He has been pitched
in battle for a fortnight, and has a king's thirst for the frosty brew."
While you may come across some sources that say that beer was a common drink for all in
the Middle Ages, the reality is that ale was the drink flowing freely for people
of most classes during these times. Beer by definition had hops added to it. Ale did not,
though it may have used other herbs or spices.
You may have noticed that most of the foods and drinks consumed by medieval
peasants were those that were readily and cheaply available, and it's certainly not
difficult to understand why that would be. Ale, though, is a major exception to this rule.
Unlike everything else peasants enjoyed, ale wasn't the easiest thing to produce in
the Middle Ages. On the contrary, it took several days to brew and required careful
preparation. Regardless, ale remained the primary beverage of any good medieval village
and was consumed by rich and poor alike with every meal of the day, including breakfast.
Let's take a step back into the universal favorites of Middle Ages diners. Like bread,
just about every set of taste buds in medieval Europe was accustomed
to enjoying some version of a widely popular soupy stew known as pottage.
But also like bread, different classes ate different versions.
At its most basic, pottage is not much more than a mishmash of ingredients boiled
in stock and often thickened with a grain. It's the differences in the
ingredients added to the stock that set apart rich-person pottage from poor-person pottage.
Peasants made their pottages primarily from oats and flavored them most often
with whichever vegetables they had available in the tiny little growing
patches found alongside their homes. Leek was a favored pottage ingredient, but, of course,
this depended on accessibility, and more meager times may have called for less zingy pottages
like those made with peas and beans instead. If you could grow it, it went in the pottage.
Meanwhile, a more upper-crust pottage would likely feature considerably more meat and
a wider variety of vegetables for a meal Carl Weathers would approve of.
"Now you take this home, throw it in a pot, add some broth, a potato, baby you got a stew going."
Like most other readily available items on this list, it's fair to say that just about
anyone in the Middle Ages would have chowed down on pickled foods from time to time,
including the well-heeled nobility. Much like today,
though, fresh food was generally considered more desirable, so the wealthy leaned toward
fresh ingredients as often as possible, leaving the pickled foods to the peasants.
“We can pickle that!”
Pickling was hardly different in the Middle Ages than it is today, consisting of tightly
jarring fish, veggies, or eggs in an acidic brine featuring lemon juice or vinegar. The primary
purpose was shelf stabilization, allowing the poor to eat the foods they needed all year long
without having to subject everything to salting or drying. Among the most commonly pickled foods
in poorer diets were herring and fruits, while bacon was, unsurprisingly, reserved for salting.
Pork was one meat that even peasants had somewhat
easy access to since pigs were cheap to keep and required little care.
"The salted pork is particularly good."
"Salted pork?"
There are equal parts fact and fiction surrounding the claim that spices were
widely used in medieval cuisine, and we're going to address both. As fiction can often be more fun,
let's start there: Persistent lore surrounding the Middle Ages claims that spices were heavily used
to disguise the horrid taste of rotting meat in a society lacking the benefit of refrigeration.
By now, you may already be able to debunk this one yourself, since medieval people preserved
meat by drying and salting, but there's an even more obvious reason to disregard this notion:
Spices were very expensive, so there was little chance they
would be wasted on bad meat, or that the poor had access to them at all.
In reality, most spices available to noble Europeans of the time were all
imported from Asia and Africa. These were considered serious luxuries that displayed
wealth and power. Humble black pepper, which is on every modern table today,
was economically treated like gold bullion in some ways.
Also commonplace and inexpensive today, sugar was rare and valuable in the Middle Ages. It
was considered a spice, which may help explain why sweet dishes were not separated from savory dishes
at banquets. Still, there were some spices that grew readily in Europe, like mustard,
and those were available even to the peasants who grew them alongside herbs like dill and mint.