Tag Archive | peasant food

Medieval Monday – Eat Like A Peasant

Dec17

It may be the 21st century, but three things have come together in the last few weeks that have had me thinking like a medieval peasant.  I’m on a health kick where I’m trying not to eat any pre-packaged food, I’ve gone crazy over experimental cooking, and I’m broke.  But being the medieval apologist that I am, I saw this as a brilliant opportunity to think like a peasant when it comes to eating.  And that’s exactly what I did this weekend.

The first thing I made was bread.  Super simple!  No, I mean that!  It’s a lot easier to make bread than you would think.  This particular recipe for honey wheat bread involves only ingredients that would, in fact, have been on hand in your average peasant household of the 12th century.  Water, yeast, butter, honey, salt, and flour.  That’s it.

bread

Granted, in the Middle Ages they didn’t use lovey rectangular load pans.  They baked their bread in circles.  But I think that would have worked for this recipe too.  I’ll have to try it sometime. … Sometime when I don’t want to make turkey sandwiches out of my bread.

Bread is easy.  What happened next was a fit of pure experimental cooking.

Now, when I get in a mood for experimental cooking, it’s either going to be awesome or a disaster.  What started this experiment was my desire to make something I could take to work that was not pre-packaged but that I would still think was delicious.  And yes, I thought to myself, “what would a medieval peasant do?”

First, I knew that I will eat just about anything in pastry form.  I thought about it … and yes, that passes the medieval peasant test.  Medieval peasants would have had access to flour, be it wheat flour or some other kind.  Chances are they would have had at least some access to butter or lard for shortening.  Add to that a pinch of salt, which would have been harder to come by but not impossible, especially in the 12th century, and voila!  Pastry!

Next I thought about what’s seasonal.  If I had lived in the Middle Ages, what would I have had access to in December?  The answer is vegetables that store easily in their natural form.  So I went out and bought turnips, butternut squash, carrots, peas (not frozen), onions, and an enormous sweet potato.

Okay, is the sweet potato medieval?  No.  Not at all.  Sweet potatoes were originally cultivated in Central and South America and gradually spread northward.  Not as far as Pennsylvania though.  But I like them and they work well enough to illustrate the point.  They are root vegetables that are in season even when fresher greens are not.

So, sweet potatoes aside, I chopped up all of my seasonal, local veggies and threw them in a big pot.  Then, still thinking like a medieval peasant, I rolled out some pastry dough and cut it into circles.  I filled each circle with my root veggie mix, threw on a little salt, pepper, basil, and turmeric and ….

Wait, I here you say that neither pepper nor turmeric are medieval spices.  True.

Black pepper is native to south India.  However, it was not only known in medieval Europe, it was a highly prized luxury item.  During the 12th century the Italians had the monopoly on the pepper trade through their Mediterranean trading partners.  It became so expensive through the Late Middle Ages that the Portuguese sent ships south around Africa to obtain black pepper themselves.  Yes, the great push of 15th century exploration was so that Europeans could get their hands on pepper more easily.  But would a medieval peasant have added it to their experimental cooking?  No way.

What about turmeric?

Also Indian.  And pretty much unheard of in medieval Europe.  Its introduction into western cuisine wouldn’t happen for many more centuries, until the British occupation of the Indian subcontinent.  But it’s delicious and research shows that it prevents cancer, so it made the cut.

Okay, so I included two very not medieval spices in my “medieval peasant” cooking.  So what spices would they have used?  The would probably have used the spices that every peasant grew in their cottage garden, things like thyme and tarragon, basil, sage, coriander, rosemary, and dill and other things mentioned in this spiffy article.  Whatever grew locally.  These herbs would also be used as medicines – and a lot of them are far more effective than modern allopathic practitioners like to give them credit for.

So what about my experimental cooking?  Well, it turns out that making a medieval Hot Pocket is a little harder than it looks.  I should have cut the circles bigger or filled them with less stuff.  This first batch kind of looked like a disaster.

disaster

So I gave up on authenticity and pulled out a large muffin pan to make pot pies.

pies

They turned out much prettier.  I’m sure that your average medieval peasant housewife would have done a better job with the freeform pies than I did.  In fact, there are these fantastic little things called pasties that I think I ate my weight in when I visited the UK a few years ago.  Pasties have meat though and I think a bit more of a sauce than I came up with.  They also most certainly have their origin in medieval cuisine.  But most medieval peasants would only have had access to meat during festivals and holy days when their lord provided it.

Incidentally, my original purpose – creating something portable that I can take to work for lunch – holds up to my medieval analogy.  I’m sure medieval peasant farmers headed out to the fields with lunch in tow too, and what better to take with you than a self-contained pastry pocket meal?

In the end, my experiment was designed with the completely biased but also probably true belief that medieval peasant cooks were creative and knew how to make the most of what they had.  Just because they were poor by modern standards doesn’t mean they ate nothing but gruel.  There are a lot of ways to take common, inexpensive, seasonal and local ingredients and make them into something delicious.  It also helps if you happen to like the taste of turnips.

Historical Problems v. Modern Problems

Nov30

Okay, if you’ve been reading my blog for more than a few seconds then you know that I have a soft spot in my heart for medieval peasants.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that if I lived in the Middle Ages I would rather have been a peasant than a noble.  I think this pretty much continues to be true up until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when I would have preferred to be a noble.  But that’s beside the point.  Rural peasant life in the Middle and Early Modern Ages was probably pretty awesome.

And I can hear half the people reading this flipping out and sharpening their argument knives.  Of course life as a medieval peasant or even a 19th century aristocrat was dismal compared to life nowadays!  How could you even think that there is anything better than right now?  People of History were poor, dirty, and starving, right?  Everybody knows that!

Okay, I’ll admit that life in the modern world has a lot of advantages that life “back in the day” absolutely didn’t.  But were the problems that people faced in days gone by really any worse than the problems we face right now?

Let’s take a look at this….

Food, Clothing, and Shelter

Behold! The medieval peasant house! (Now with chicken!)

Food, Clothing, and Shelter are the three basic needs of human beings.  We need to eat, we need to not walk around naked and cold, and we need a roof over our heads.  Most of the population of the medieval world, the early modern world, and the modern world have these things.  The big differences come in quality, quantity, and convenience.

As I discussed in my post a while back about The Medieval Peasant Diet, what people ate in the Middle Ages was less varied and depended on the region and the seasons, but there was food.  There was less food if the land yielded less and more if it yielded more.  But there was food.  People had far, far fewer changes of clothes back in the day and getting a new piece of clothing was a serious big deal.  But they had clothes.  Houses were smaller and they didn’t have modern appliances.  Sometimes large families had to share a small space and sometimes a nuclear family was only a few people with more than enough room to spare.  But they had houses.

In the modern world we have many, many more options.  We eat food, whether its in season or not, imported from all over the globe.  In many cases someone else prepares it for us, whether at a restaurant or at a factory before it’s packaged and frozen.  So the modern world has variety and convenience going for it.  However, a lot of debate has been stirred about the true nutritional value of the food we eat.  And what about all those preservatives we’re eating with the food, not to mention hormones and antibiotics in our meat and dairy?  And I don’t know if they ever solved the problem of genetically modified foods, but there was that too.  Plus I do believe that obesity is a bigger problem than ever before (no pun intended) not to mention heart disease, diabetes, and the like.

Clothes are readily available and just about everyone in the Western world probably has more of them than they know what to do with.  Most of us don’t have to wear the same thing every day with one good dress for Sunday and one pair of shoes to last several years.  Although that’s exactly what my Grandma did growing up in the 1930s in rural Ohio.  We’re not as far separated from those days as we think.  So we have variety and ease of accessibility going in our favor in the modern world.  But I can’t tell you how many items of clothing I’ve bought at the mall only to have them fall apart after a couple of washes because they are poorly made.  And I spent a lot of money buying those things.  Not to mention the questionable conditions a lot of our clothing is made in overseas.  Sometimes it seems like we’re okay with the exploitation of the poor and even children in the name of fashion.

Frankly, this looks like a pretty cool complex. But what's the rent like?

Houses are everywhere.  Massive developments full of houses that are packed with modern conveniences dot the landscape.  Our houses and what we have in them are perhaps the biggest difference between then and now.  We have a lot of space and a lot of time-saving devices packed inside of that space.  But then there’s that whole sub-prime mortgage crisis thing that started this recession.  And how many people actually own their house?  I mean outright own it without paying a mortgage?

In my eyes, housing is a good example of how things haven’t changed as much as we think they have.  I rent an apartment.  Most of the people I know make mortgage payments to a bank.  None of us really owns our own home.  Medieval peasants didn’t own their own homes either.  Their lord did.  They made payments to the lord of service and money to live where they did.  They paid rent.  We pay rent.  Land is actually owned by a very, very few people, or corporations, and those people own a lot of it.  At least medieval peasants or 19th century factory workers were under no illusions.

Psychological Factors

How about the less tangible things of life?  In the modern world right now money is a problem for most people.  Unemployment rates are soaring.  Poverty rates are soaring.  Occupy movements are grabbing a lot of attention worldwide.  And what are those protests about?  I haven’t been able to really figure that one out, but I have heard the slogan that 1% of the population controls 99% of the money.  Yep.  ‘Twas always thus and always thus will be.

Medieval Food - not fast (and the cook doesn't look too happy either)

In the pre-Industrial world 95% of the population lived a rural life.  They lived in small communities on manors owned by a lord, absent or present, and most of what they did was related to the land.  A few people were in trade and an even fewer people lived in the cities.  Because life was lived so close to the bone you knew what you had to do to put food on the table.  You had to grow it and you had to prepare it.  Most people took up the profession of their father.  The question of “what do you want to be when you grow up” was a no-brainer.  Few people were educated, but then again, few people needed to be educated.  It was a life without many choices and without much variation.

Psychology and psychoanalysis are modern inventions.  We need professionals to help us figure out who we are, what our place in society is, and how to cope with life.  We have so many choices of what we want to do or be or where we want to live or how we want to live.  We have SO many choices!  But so many of the choices we have involve a huge outlay of money.  Study after study shows that a college or post-graduate degree puts you in a higher income bracket, yet getting those degrees is more expensive than ever.  I know that I racked up over $45,000 in student loan debt to get a degree I’m not overtly using.  Yes, I’m smart and I have the paper to prove it, but as I frequently tell people, how smart was it to go $45,000 into debt for a degree I won’t use for what it is?

In the pre-Industrial world and rural societies of the early modern age there was a sense of community, of closeness.  Neighbors knew each other and everyone had to work together for the sustenance of the whole.  How many people in the modern world know all of their neighbors?  How many people struggle with a sense of identity?  How many people go online looking for love instead of asking friends or family members to recommend someone for them?  On the other side, how many people can pick up and move if they’re miserable where they are.  Back then you were stuck with the hand you were dealt.

Modern Food - fast and yummy (and a heart-attack waiting to happen!)

The point I’m trying to make here is that it is so easy for us to look back on history and lament about the things we couldn’t live without.  How many of you have thought at one point or another that you wouldn’t want to live back in time because they didn’t have toilet paper.  Really?  Wiping your backside is that important?  I wonder if your average medieval peasant were given a glimpse into the future if they would shudder at the thought of living here, saying that they couldn’t stand to live in a place with so much noise or without job security or where everything moves so fast and there’s no time to rest.  Yes, medical advances have done amazing things for life expectancy and infant mortality is a fraction of the problem it used to be, but have they truly improved day-to-day health?  Not to mention quality of life and satisfaction with it.  Are people today actually happier than they were a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand years ago?

In the end it all comes down to the individual life you are handed.  I’m sure it would be better to be a middle-class American than a 14th century scullery maid.  But I kind of think it might be better to be a 12th century farmer’s daughter than a 21st century single mom with a crack-addiction.  Honestly, there is so much variation in individual lives that it’s next to impossible to say which lifestyle would have been better or worse.

As for me, I think I would have liked to be a peasant in 12th or 13th century England living in Winchester, Hampshire.  I think that would have been a good life.  What about you?  What life from History do you think you would have liked to have lived?

Medieval Monday – The Peasant Diet

Nov14

Something really interesting happened to me when I set out to research what medieval peasants ate.  I found a lot of contradictory information.  On the one hand, there are websites and books out there that suggest that the peasant diet was mean, people didn’t get enough nutritional value from their food, and food itself wasn’t readily available.  On the other hand, there are just as many resources that state that, in fact, the diet of medieval peasants was far superior to that of the modern man.  There are a bunch of things out there about how we should be attempting to eat more like our medieval ancestors.  So of course I just couldn’t resist the delicious historiographical dilemma brought up by all this food talk.

Let’s look at the facts, shall we?

Medieval peasants were, by their very nature, rural and agrarian.  They lived in an era when food was not processed (unless you count lugging your grain harvest down to your lord’s mill to grind it into flour) and foodstuffs were not shipped around the world like they are today.  You ate what was available locally.  Which means that you can’t really talk about the diet of “The Medieval Peasant” because it varied so greatly from region to region.

So, for example, if you were a peasant who lived in Italy you would have things like olives, citrus fruit, and Mediterranean fish in your diet.  And pasta.  Italians eating pasta is a cliché for a reason.  If you lived a bit further north in France you would most likely be drinking a lot of wine, whereas if you lived in England you’d be drinking ale.  In England they most likely had more lamb since the wool industry was one of the biggest economic powers of the country.  But English peasants probably weren’t cooking things in olive oil.  You get the picture.

But there were a few things that we can pretty safely say went across the board.  Take bread, for example.  Bread was a staple of the medieval peasant’s diet no matter where you lived.  And it wasn’t Wonder bread either.  For the most part peasant bread was made with coarse grains, like oats, rye, and barley, and was thick, dark and heavy.  It’s interesting because some of the contradictory information I found in my research was about wheat and whether it was available to peasants.  Some sources, like the information published on the East Kentucky University website that a lot of other websites cite, indicate that peasants did have wheat in their diet while other websites, like MedievalLife.net, indicate that wheat was a cash crop that was either given to the lord or sold at market and that it was off-limits to peasants unless their lord said they could have some.  I tend to think that, while it probably varied from manor to manor, wheat was at least a little bit a part of the average peasant’s diet.

Strangely enough, though, modern dieticians caution against eating too much processed wheat.  There’s a big trend these days towards whole and less processed grains.  Also towards staying away from meat.  Medieval peasants generally only had meat on special occasions, and even then it was rarely red meat.  Hmm.  Maybe those medieval peasants were on to something.

The other undeniable standard of peasant food was “pottage”.  Ah pottage.  As near as I can gather from all the sources I read, pottage has a reputation for being anything you could throw in a pot to make into a soup or stew.  When I first heard the term as a very young student I was left with the impression that pottage was an actual thing, that somewhere out there you could find a recipe for “pottage”.  I don’t think so.  I think what it means is any kind of soup or stew.  Because it all goes back to the fact that peasants were not stupid.  They wanted to eat something that tasted good.  And just because they didn’t have an elaborate spice rack (because they didn’t – spices were expensive and really hard to come by) didn’t mean they gave up and ate bland, tasteless mush all the time.  Oh no.  What they lacked in spices they made up for in herbs.

Yes, please!

Every peasant house had a lovely little garden growing outside.  And you know what they grew in those gardens?  Herbs, vegetables, yummy things.  I can imagine that our good friend pottage was a lot like the super delicious barley and mushroom soup that I got for lunch at Whole Foods the other day.  It was probably also a lot like the lamb stew my aunt makes in the winter.  It was probably a whole lot like the completely awesome Brunswick Stew I had once when I went to Colonial Williamsburg and ate in one of their authentic pubs.  In other words, medieval peasant pottage, in all likelihood, was probably seriously delicious.

Correction, medieval peasant pottage was probably as delicious as the skill of the woman cooking it.  If it were me as a medieval peasant it probably would have been a bunch of inexpertly cut up vegetables and some beans thrown in a pot with a bit of salted pork and herbs that didn’t really compliment the whole overcooked to the point of being gruel.  I’m not a great cook.  Then again, if I had been a medieval peasant I probably would have learned how to be a great cook because I couldn’t zip down the street to get my barley and mushroom soup at Whole Foods!

Another universal staple of Northern Europe at least was ale.  According to just about every source I could find, medieval peasants consumed around a gallon of ale a day.  Whoa.  But lest you think that this meant the medieval countryside was swimming with tipsy peasants, medieval ale had a much lower alcohol content than what we consider ale today.  But what exactly, you might ask is ale.  Not being a drinker, I had to look this one up.  Thank you Wikipedia for having a description of what medieval ale specifically was.  It was apparently a barley-based warm-fermented drink made with brewer’s yeast and seasoned with a variety of herbs.  And it was highly nutritious too.  Funny, but all sorts of modern diets recommend adding brewer’s yeast into your diet on a daily basis.

So.  The end result of all this curious research into what medieval peasants ate not only lead me to Whole Foods for soup, rustic bread, and various cheeses, (I didn’t even get into the amount of cheese and butter and eggs medieval peasants ate) it also lead me to think about what the diet of the average modern person is.  Some criticism was leveled against the medieval peasant diet for not providing enough nutrients.  Hmm.  I wonder if we’re all getting the nutrients we need from our pre-packaged, microwaved, high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, gallons of soda, stop at McDonald’s when you don’t feel like cooking diets?  Yeah, I think we have to admit that even though it was much more limited and even though the time of year and health of the harvest in any given year effected the amount and types of foods eaten by medieval peasants, they probably did eat better than we did.

Oh, and one other thing that I forgot to mention that I have always found fascinating although I can’t remember where I read it.  Almonds were a massively important part of the medieval peasant diet.  As nuts but also almond milk.  In fact, in many cases dairy milk was reserved for the upper classes, so peasants relied on almond milk as their staple for drinking and cooking.  Just wanted to add that in there because I think it’s cool.  And I happen to love almonds.