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.
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00:00Stuffed porpoise stomachs and blood custard for the rich, pickled carrots for the poor,
00:05and ale for all, Europeans in the Middle Ages ate some weird freakin' stuff.
00:11There's no modern country with a food tradition that doesn't include bread.
00:15Technogym says that's been the case throughout most of history.
00:18According to Medieval Britain, grain-based foods like bread provided up to three-quarters of the
00:23calories eaten by Medieval Brits. Some were even using scooped bread as plates in the Middle Ages,
00:29not unlike the bread bowls occasionally used to serve soup today.
00:32Of course, not all bread is created equally. There were varying degrees of
00:36bread quality in the Middle Ages, and better bread was reserved for those who could afford it.
00:40The difference in quality between types of bread was generally attributed to the grain
00:44used to bake it. If you're wondering which bread was most preferable and expensive in
00:49the Middle Ages, you may be surprised to find that the answer is the opposite of today's standards.
00:54While we may pay more for ancient grains and darker breads today,
00:57Medieval diners preferred white bread, made from wheat, which was too expensive for most
01:02peasants to grow and refine. The poorer classes often baked rye or barley breads,
01:07and even resorted to peas, beans, and acorns to fill out a bread recipe when grains were in short
01:12supply. Today, we know that many fruits and vegetables are packed with nutrients that
01:17help our bodies, and your parents may have begun forcing them on you long before you liked them.
01:22Apparently, some things never change, because Medieval recipes for fruit and
01:26veggie dishes abound, from fried beans and pea porridge to apple bread pudding and cherry
01:31pudding. These prove either that the good people of the Middle Ages were also aware of the many
01:35potential health benefits of these natural beauties, or at least that fruits and veggies
01:40were easy enough to grow. But not everything about the produce preferences of Medieval diners
01:45is consistent with today's practices. Proponents of raw food diets believe that too many nutrients
01:50are lost when fruits and veggies are cooked, preferring to eat them only in their rawest form.
01:55But Medieval chompers believed the opposite. Not only did they prefer not to eat their produce raw,
02:01but they actually thought that raw fruits and vegetables were dangerous.
02:04The British Library reports that one book even bore the alarming warning,
02:09"'Beware of green salads and raw fruits, for they will make your master sick.'"
02:13As some foods actually are dangerous to eat raw, and it's possible food washing was less
02:18thorough than it is today, it probably was safer overall to just cook everything before
02:23serving it in the Middle Ages. So let's not judge too hard.
02:26The wealthy have never shied away from grand demonstrations of their personal worth,
02:31so you shouldn't be surprised to learn that the banquets of the Middle Ages were no dim affairs.
02:36Medieval hosts loved to show off. Gracing the tables of many a Medieval banquet were
02:41eye-catching presentations of less common animals, and plenty of them came from the sea.
02:46As the British Library reports,
02:48impressive sea life like seals, porpoises, and whales were no strangers to Medieval banquet
02:53tables.
02:54-"This is fine feasting, is it not, Sir Rodney?" -"Indeed, old olden!"
02:58Still, a decadent presentation doesn't always indicate a quality bite,
03:03at least not by today's standards. Take porpoises, for example.
03:06One known preparation of this sea animal was porpoise pudding, which was basically a stuffed
03:12porpoise stomach. It could be compared to Scottish haggis, substituting a porpoise stomach for a
03:16sheep stomach. In this type of recipe, you're unlikely to taste much of the porpoise itself,
03:21as it's really just providing a casing and it's not necessarily the star ingredient.
03:26But hey, it's still in there, and Medieval revelers apparently enjoyed having it.
03:31While you may think that garishly colored candies and sweet treats are modern inventions,
03:36banqueters in the Middle Ages were well accustomed to vibrant hues in their food,
03:40particularly custard. Common today, custard was an equally common dessert in the Middle Ages,
03:46at least for the rich. Custard is a dairy-forward dish traditionally thickened with egg,
03:50and all of these ingredients were readily available to Medieval chefs.
03:54Custard is a fairly broad term that can go beyond what you may consider a dessert food,
03:58but suffice it to say that it was, in fact, best known as a dessert in the Middle Ages,
04:03as it is for most of us today. Unlike today, though, meals in the Middle Ages rarely included
04:08a distinct dessert course, presenting sweet dishes throughout the meal alongside the savory courses,
04:13as Bucknell University reports.
04:16Oh yes, at supper time she would go straight for honey cakes, candied almonds, custard,
04:22you know, anything sweet.
04:23In order to whip up rainbow-like dishes in modern times, we may have the convenience of adding a few
04:28drops of completely artificial food coloring to our recipes. But Medieval chefs used natural
04:33ingredients to enliven their custards, including sandalwood for red, boiled blood for black,
04:39and saffron for yellow, according to the British Library.
04:42Fish seems like an obvious food choice, but there's more to this salty sustenance than you'd
04:47think. Many of the more substantial dishes we've come across so far were reserved exclusively for
04:52the upper classes of Medieval society. But for those who lived near the sea, even the poor had
04:58ready access to fish. This made their diets different from those of the inland poor,
05:02who dined on very little meat or fish at all.
05:05And the Lord did grin, and the people did feast upon the lambs, and sloths, and carp,
05:11and anchovies, and orangutans, and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats, and large…
05:16Little bits, brother.
05:18Regardless of social status, living near the sea provided Medieval eaters access to fresh cod,
05:24herring, eel, and even whale. Not actually a fish, but let's move on.
05:29People living by streams and lakes similarly had access to freshwater fish,
05:33though the rules became a bit more classist here. As the History Learning site explains,
05:38many Medieval villages were built by rivers, and villagers were able to fish and eat species like
05:43dace, grayling, and gudgeon if the local Lord permitted. But even in these cases,
05:48proper salmon and trout were generally reserved for the Lord only, as were the contents of the
05:53stocked ponds they often kept on their large estates. Violators of this fishy hierarchy
05:58were subject to serious punishment.
06:01Remember that colorful custard situation we just learned about? You know, the custard
06:05concocted primarily with a sizable dose of dairy? This was made possible by the abundance of dairy
06:10products available to Medieval people, and though custards were generally for the rich alone,
06:15dairy was not. There certainly were plenty of more refined dairy dishes like almond milk pie
06:20and cheese tarts being prepared for the ruling classes of the Middle Ages,
06:24but the British Library reports dairy cows were often kept by the Medieval poor,
06:29so their diets included plenty of cheese, buttermilk, curds, and whey.
06:33Cheese may be a wildly popular dairy product by today's standards, but it's probably not
06:38the first one you think of when considering the entire category of dairy. If you're like us,
06:44you think of milk first, but most imbibers of the Middle Ages did not. As Medieval Times reports,
06:50milk certainly existed in the Middle Ages, but it was primarily a drink for children,
06:54and rarely guzzled by Medieval adults.
06:57Dost, dost have thou a mug of ale for me and me mate?
07:01He has been pitched in battle for a fortnight, and has a king's thirst for the frosty brew.
07:06While you may come across some sources that say that beer was a common drink for all in
07:10the Middle Ages, the reality is that ale was the drink flowing freely for people of most classes
07:15during these times. Beer by definition has hops added to it. Ale did not, though it may have used
07:21other herbs or spices. You may have noticed that most of the foods and drinks consumed by Medieval
07:26peasants were those that were readily and cheaply available, and it's certainly not difficult to
07:31understand why that would be. Ale, though, is a major exception to this rule. Unlike everything
07:37else peasants enjoyed, ale wasn't the easiest thing to produce in the Middle Ages. On the
07:42contrary, it took several days to brew, and required careful preparation. Regardless,
07:47ale remained the primary beverage of any good Medieval village, and was consumed by rich and
07:53poor alike with every meal of the day, including breakfast. Let's take a step back into the
07:59universal favorites of Middle Ages diners. Like bread, just about every set of taste buds in
08:04Medieval Europe was accustomed to enjoying some version of a widely popular soupy stew,
08:09known as pottage. But also like bread, different classes ate different versions. At its most basic,
08:15pottage is not much more than a mishmash of ingredients boiled in stock and often thickened
08:21with a grain. It's the differences in the ingredients added to the stock that set apart
08:25rich person pottage from poor person pottage. Peasants made their pottages primarily from oats
08:31and flavored them most often with whichever vegetables they had available in the tiny
08:35little growing patches found alongside their homes. Leek was a favored pottage ingredient,
08:40but of course this depended on accessibility, and more meager times may have called for less
08:44zingy pottages, like those made with peas and beans instead. If you could grow it,
08:49it went in the pottage. Meanwhile, a more upper-crust pottage would likely feature
08:54considerably more meat and a wider variety of vegetables for a meal Carl Weathers would approve
08:59of.
08:59You take this home, throw it in a pot, add some broth, a potato, baby you got a stew going."
09:05Like most other readily available items on this list, it's fair to say that just about
09:09anyone in the Middle Ages would have chowed down on pickled foods from time to time,
09:14including the well-heeled nobility. Much like today, though, fresh food was generally considered
09:19more desirable, so the wealthy leaned toward fresh ingredients as often as possible,
09:24leaving the pickled foods to the peasants.
09:26We can pickle that!
09:29Pickling was hardly different in the Middle Ages than it is today,
09:32consisting of tightly jarring fish, veggies, or eggs in an acidic brine featuring lemon
09:37juice or vinegar. The primary purpose was shelf stabilization, allowing the poor to
09:42eat the foods they needed all year long, without having to subject everything to salting or drying.
09:48Among the most commonly pickled foods in poorer diets were herring and fruits,
09:52while bacon was unsurprisingly reserved for salting. Pork was one meat that even peasants
09:58had somewhat easy access to, since pigs were cheap to keep and required little care.
10:03The salted pork is particularly good. Salted pork.
10:09There are equal parts fact and fiction surrounding the claim that spices
10:13were widely used in medieval cuisine, and we're going to address both.
10:18As fiction can often be more fun, let's start there. Persistent lore surrounding the Middle
10:23Ages claims that spices were heavily used to disguise the horrid taste of rotting meat,
10:28in a society lacking the benefit of refrigeration. By now, you may already be able to debunk this one
10:34yourself, since medieval people preserved meat by drying and salting. But there's an even more
10:40obvious reason to disregard this notion. Spices were very expensive, so there was little chance
10:46they would be wasted on bad meat, or that the poor had access to them at all. In reality,
10:52most spices available to noble Europeans of the time were all imported from Asia and Africa.
10:57These were considered serious luxuries that displayed wealth and power.
11:01Humble black pepper, which is on every modern table today, was economically treated like gold
11:07bullion in some ways. Also commonplace and inexpensive today, sugar was rare and valuable
11:13in the Middle Ages. It was considered a spice, which may help explain why sweet dishes were not
11:18separated from savory dishes at banquets. Still, there were some spices that grew readily in Europe,
11:24like mustard, and those were available even to the peasants who grew them alongside herbs
11:29like dill and mint.