Medieval cookery

HARD PASS!

I'm up for it.

Well, I've eaten roasted meats!

Although I've never slow-roasted meat over open coals in the medieval style, nobody cooks meat that way in the modern world. I read a book by a food historian who tried medieval roasting, he said it was wonderful and unlike anything you get out of an oven.

Don't eat the figs.

Ancient Roman is hardly Medieval.

Pretty sure we've all had rye bread. Roast pork. Venison. Fish. Oatmeal. Honey. Apple cider, ale, wine.

R3 Have you ever cooked on one of these? While not slow cooking it's the same.

It’s just offal!

orphan child casserole and virgin's blood shortcake

i've had some "ancient rome" meals... what i remember the most is the sweet/sour taste of most of the food.

Honey and venison are not recipes.

There’s probably a lot of blood and goblets and urine reduction

It was great if you were nobility. Peasants lived on coarse bread, beer, and the occasional onion.

Thanks for posting the vid OP, that was wonderful.

You're welcome! I'm very interested in how people back then used food as medicine.

on in England that woman would be allowed to appear on tv

Mead is great!

I'm still eating the secondhand shoe I got for Christmas.

"You're welcome! I'm very interested in how people back then used food as medicine. "

Well it's not like they had actual medicine.

Do try honey mead, it's available at some liquor stores and is quite nice if you like sweet wines.

I draw the line at roast swan and jellied eels!

And garum fish sauce. But I'd be happy to try roast meats served on a trencher.

A good thing R15. Because they have actual experts who know their stuff, as opposed to shiny people, who don't...

Lucy Worsley, who's the Chief Curator for the royal palaces, makes some wonderful history shows for the BBC that delve into everyday life in the past, many debunking popular beliefs and throwing in surprising trivia tidbits.

Here's one example of her work on the history of English food for any of you culinary buffs with time on your hands

I wonder if garum was similiar to Asian fish sauce. I imagine it would have been much more pungent.

Mmmmm, just what I wanted: An anteater’s pancreases with donkey entrail pudding! 😫

I've tried a medieval perogi recipe that was excellent.

It's always interesting when you realize where in the world all our food came from. Like how potatoes and corn are from the Americas so they weren't introduced to the rest of the world until the 1500s. or how many foods can only be grown in certain climates so it used to be expensive and exotic to have a pineapple or oranges. Or how nearly every spice on Earth came from Asia. The food we mindlessly pick up at the grocery store each week would have impressed most European monarchs and cost a fortune.

yes, R21, garum is very similiar to Asian fish sauce. If you're curious about garum, try "colatura di alici", you can find it in italian delis and on line. It's still very popular in southern Italy, and it's the closest thing to garum in western cuisine. It's absolutely delicious on pasta, btw.

I walked around the county fair eating a giant turkey leg which feels so weird to type.

Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmerelda Dickson Wright (the hostess in the OPs video) was a fascinating woman. A barrister, cricket umpire, guild butcher, and recovering alcoholic. I watch her appearances in the 'Two Fat Ladies' series on a regular basis.

Growing up in Russia in the '60s, I had kebabs slow-roasted over open coals every summer. And maybe four or five times in my 12 years there, I had pineapple or bananas, rare delicacies for which people would spend hours in line.

Good Lord, r28, how old are you, pray tell?

In the middle ages, the job of roasting meats was considered to be man's work! Women were too weak to lift the huge joists of meat that were cooked in great houses or castles, and were thought to be too frail to stand the scorching heat of the open fires that were used to cook meats in those days. Kitchens were hellishly hot, which is why the guy on the right isn't wearing anything but an apron.

And yes, that's a guy on the left. In those days, women wore long skirts, and men wore knee-length skirts and colored tights.

Now some DLer is going to fantasize about being head chef in a medieval kitchen who's surrounded by twinks in nothing but aprons.

Peasant food

I'm 56, R29. Hence "growing up in Russia in the '60s". These were still Soviet times, when ordinary people didn't have things like barbecues and grilles. Or cars. Or phones.

[quote] Soviet times, when ordinary people didn't have things like barbecues and grilles. Or cars. Or phones.

Perhaps, but they certainly had fashion.

Fashion was actually easier to come by, R34. Not in the stores, but people smuggled things in from better-off Soviet Bloc countries, or made their own. A grille, on the other hand, wasn't something your typical Russian would spend money on, even if one was made available.

Pears in red wine sauce

I've occasionally quaffed from a stout flagon of grog, 'tis all I'll admit to.

R24, you are so right about the foods available in Europe... it's a pre and post 1492 world. Columbus and later other explorers from Spain and Portugal returned with spices and foods people had never experienced.

My history is vague here, but was it the English who maintained the spice trade from India and elsewhere? Again, a huge shift in culinary experiences... coffee, tea and much more.

The Russians I know still cook Shashlik (kebabs) on special skewers and they often use a portable grill called a mangal. The flavor is similar to barbecue coals, not gas barbecues.

I've had some medieval foods - mead comes to mind. And mincemeat is a holdover from medieval cookery. But, yes, the common diet would have been supremely dull to our palates. Bread, oats, and pease porridge. (Basically cooked split peas). Milk and/or simple cheese if they were lucky and had a cow. Very rarely, some mutton, or some bacon. I suspect that most vegetables were cooked to death - medieval people were afraid of raw vegetables, probably with good reason. I once stayed where a scottish au pair girl was preparing the lunch for the farmhands. She got up at 8 am and cut up onions, cabbages, turnips, rutabagas, and potatoes, and boiled the hell out of that for about 4 hours. You can't imagine the stench of it by noontime. I think that's how medieval people ate.

They probably cooked vegetables beyond belief because there was no really clean water to wash off the soil and manure used as fertilizer back then. Salad probably wasn’t too popular either for the same reason.

Yeah, there was probably only one kind of fertilizer available for your vegetable patch back then! And it's not like you had enough clean water available to wash the manure off the veggies, clean water was such a rarity in that world that nobody who could afford wine or beer drank water.

That's always seemed like one of the oddest thing about the middle ages, the way people drank alcoholic drinks for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and when they were thirsty. The fermentation process killed the germs in water, and they didn't have tea or coffee, or any source of caffeine. CAN YOU IMAGINE LIFE WITHOUT CAFFIENE??? So yeah, it was alcohol all around, even if a lot of the stuff they drank every day had less alcohol content than modern beer and wine.

Oh yeah... one of the reasons that Rome was able to conquer the known world, even places where you wouldn't dare drink the water, is that their armies traveled with great casts of "sour wine". Wherever they went they'd mix the local water with the low-quality wine, and the alcohol would kill some of the germs and make the water safer to drink, if not actually safe. If the supply lines failed, troops in far-flung locations would begin to get sick en masse.

Now that's one aspect of ancient Roman cookery I'm not eager to re-create!

This was a great show, two people spend the whole day eating historically accurate meals of different eras. In the medieval show they did, they were basically drunk by noon and they couldn't understand how anyone got any work done back then.

When I lived in Switzerland a friend and I went to Martigny and we took the little tourist train up to the Chateau and had a delicious medieval meal.

There was a special breed of dog, now extinct, called a “turnspit dog”, that ran on the medieval equivalent of a treadmill to turn the massive spits of roasting meat.

Fermentation does not kill bacteria. Boiling the wort (pre-beer) does kill bacteria. That’s necessary so that when you add the yeast, then they don’t have to compete with bacteria, which could ruin the beer.

Anyway, many people (scholars) consider it a myth that people drank beer in larger quantities than water during medieval times. It's more likely that it was commonly drunk as an additional source of calories and energy. People drank a lot of water, and there were water works (aqueducts from Roman times and other kinds of conduits) that tried to bring water from fresher, less polluted sources to towns. In villages, people had wells, too. There are wells and evidence of wells 5000 years old in many places around the world. People didn't routinely drink out of open sewers, rivers, or ponds, because the water would have smelled and tasted horrible. Although the germ theory didn't exist in the middle ages, common sense did exist, and people would know that you didn't want to drink water from a source where other people or animals were pissing and shitting. However, in any sort of travel, where you wouldn't know where to look for clean water, beer would probably be a beverage of choice.

Germs aren't a theory r47.

Falleth

The word of the day.

Medieval feast : no cake and sweet till the 15th

I really recommend this cookbook. I made one of the Celtic archeological recipes with hazelnuts and smoked fish and it was put of this world.

I'm guessing Byzantine food was more interesting and healthy.

Uh, ok, I’m fascinated by R28! Growing up in USSR during the height of the Cold War must have been insane. Can you start a thread about what life was like there, R28?

Our food was barley palatable

I was given the Heston Blumenthal tome "History" for Christmas.

Leftover trenchers were given to the poor.

as were muffin bottoms, R56

One of my favorite British series. There are individual episodes from most historic time periods (YouTube). Plus Giles Coren is adorable, and looks good in a toga. The 80’s episode is hilarious.

Garum and Focaccia bitches.

I've eaten AT Medieval Times,

You eat chicken with your hands and cheer for your knight.

My knight the blue team was hot. I even got my picture taken with him instead of the slutty princesses.

No but I’ve had Midas Brew. Does that count?

Bolognese as a slightly red sauce first appeared in 1880, this white one shares a lot with older recipes including the use of cinnamon. Food history is fascinating.

Glug or mulled wine had its origin in 2nd century Rome.

Well the French kept a lot of their medieval recipes, and in some medieval villages like Saint Cyrq Lapopie they are still cooking them, never ate anything more tasty and delicious! They sure know how to cool!

^how to cook

R64 did you have a favorite dish from that village?

Pastiera. Delicious.

"It was used in the pagan celebrations of the return of the Spring time. During these celebrations, Ceres’ priestess brought an egg, symbol of new life in procession. Because of the wheat or the einkorn, mixed with the soft ricotta cheese, it could come from the einkorn bread called "confarreatio", an essential ingredient in the ceremony of the type of ancient Roman weddings named after it. Another hypothesis we may consider is that it comes from ritual bread used, which spread during the period of Constantine the Great. They were made of honey and milk the people offered the catechumen during Easter Eve at the end of the ceremony of baptism.'

There were lots of fast days during which the consumption of certain types of food was restricted. I read in one book that there were so many of them that they took up about half the year.

I've always wanted to try some of the recipes from A Forme Of Cury (sp?)

bump

Great thread, thank you R70!

[quote]Germs aren't a theory R47.

You misunderstand the sense of the word 'theory' in that context, which is like a 'scientific theory' - a paradigm that is so well-tested that it is for all intents and purposes a fact, i.e. the 'theory' of evolution. "Germ theory" supplanted the common belief that illnesses were caused by evil spirits ('Spirit' theory), which could be fought off with prayers, anointings, apotropaic rituals, sacrifices, etc.

^^ Addressed to R48.

[quote] yes, [R21], garum is very similiar to Asian fish sauce.

They're produced the same way. Place anchovies in a barrel, salt them, the liquid that comes out is the fish sauce.

Medieval teeth were actually in pretty good shape because they had no sugar and at a lot of coarse grains which kind of sloughed off plaque. Probably horrendous breath though.

Dog Fish Head makes a beer called Midas Touch that is based on an ancient recipe discovered in a tomb. It's actually very good.

There's a great Youtube channel called Tasting History, where a (presumably) gay chef recreates various dishes from antiquity.

The cookewy ingwedients used in Wome were wather gwim by our standards. Gawum - which was a wepulsive fermented fish paste - pwedominated in many dishes favoured by the awistocwacy.

The British still eat disgusting fish paste. One of their fish pastes is made out of herring with the guts still in it.

R54, I’ll take that with a grain of salt!

R75, my father grew up in a small rural village in Yugoslavia in the 40s-50s. There was no dentist. They brushed their teeth with wood ash and salt, I think it was. Used toothpicks, too. They didn’t have soda or candy, and drank raw milk, sometimes squirted straight from the cow’s udder.

His teeth were straight and white and he didn’t have a cavity until he was in his 30s and had been in the US for a while.

There was candy in town, but they were so poor, they never got any. It was like medieval times for my poor dad. At least by the time he died, he was a complete Internet addict.