BoingBoing: Medieval peasant food was frigging delicious

[TheBlackAdder]

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Hollywood would have you believe that if you lived during medieval times and didn't have the good fortune to be born into a noble family, you were forced to survive by eating thin soup, gruel and the occasional rabbit. In this video, the good folks at Modern History TV set the record straight.

https://boingboing.net/2018/12/28/medieval-peasant-food-was-frig.html?utm_source=moreatbb&utm_medium=nextpost&utm_campaign=nextpostthumbnails

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[malaise]

1. Fascinating

Now I'm curious about pease pottage

[TomSlick]

7. Here's a recipe.

[link:https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/744-pease-porridge|


Doesn't sound bad. I question whether it should be eaten nine-days old.

[malaise]

12. Looks good

We already love several split peas or other dishes with peas
Thanks

[BritVic]

13. One of the rhymes I heard as a child

Pease pudding hot
Pease pudding cold
Pease pudding in the pot
Nine days old !

The pease pottage in the video looks more like mushy peas (which are served with fish and chips here in the U.K)

Pease pudding is made with split peas and is yellowish in colour - delicious in a ham sandwich !

[malaise]

14. I learned that but since I always hated porridge

I was never curious about it. Now it has meaning.

[tavernier]

16. And the second verse...

Some like it hot, some like it cold, some like it in the pot, nine days old... was where the Marilyn Monroe movie title came from.

[Moostache]

2. Too bad we poisoned the rivers...

Won't be much viable salmon left now

[renate]

3. If you're interested in this kind of stuff, have you seen The Supersizers?

Sue Perkins (of The Great British Baking Show fame) and Giles something live and eat like people in all different periods of history, and get medical exams before and after to see how healthy the diets were. It’s both fun and interesting. They used to be on Amazon Prime or Netflix (I can’t remember) but it looks like they’re on YouTube.

Edit: Giles, not Nigel.

[Lars39]

8. I watched a lot of that...it was fascinating

I still can’t get over some of the foods eaten in th UK during WWII rationing years (13 iirc).

[KCDebbie]

4. Thanks so much for sharing...

I had always figured that peasants were better fed than the wealthy Europeans as the wealthy ate a lot of meat (they could afford to) and working people ate more vegetables because they were cheaper or could be grown on small plots of land...

[PETRUS]

5. Also...

Medieval peasants had more leisure time - and kept a larger share of their production - than the average worker today. Not that they didn't suffer other problems...

[left-of-center2012]

6. Excellent !

Thanks for sharing.

[Retrograde]

9. Dinner today was essentially this

sauteed cabbage with carrots, onions, and smoked ham hock. Basically, what grows in northern Europe (and can be kept over winter).

We have a large new Chinese immigrant population where I live, and of course they're opening new restaurants. The newest one near me features Szechuan peasant cooking: it's something my Polish grandmother would recognize but with a different spice set. Lots of cabbage, pickled vegetables, organ meats - just with a lot more capsicums.

[Raine]

10. Very interesting

I love this kind of stuff, thanks do much!

[suffragette]

11. Interesting how the menu that was for peasants then would be expensive dining now.

And... YUM!

[malaise]

15. What I found really interesting is the fact that the peasants ate healthier food than the upper

Last edited Mon Jan 14, 2019, 02:28 PM - Edit history (1)

class. She mentioned brown bread/flour, but in my part of the world the same is true for sugar and rice.
We don't use a lot of sugar, but we never use white sugar or white rice at home.

[suffragette]

17. Yes. Interesting to think of linguistic terms like refined and refinement in this context, too.

There’s a certain amount of artificiality both in the food and cultural context of those.

Thanks for the region specific info about the white sugar and rice. I’m guessing brown rice, then, but would that be sugar cane or honey (or both) at home?

[malaise]

19. Absolutely

I can hear my grandma with the refined sugar talk. It seems to be more about sugar than flour or rice in these parts - molasses and brown sugar are still very popular and some folks love honey.
It is mostly Rastas and health conscious folks who have been promoting the benefits of whole wheat flour or brown rice.

[suffragette]

20. Didn't even think about molasses! Honey is much more common here in Pacific Northwest.

Yum - fireweed honey!

[malaise]

21. I love honey in lemonade

Never had fireweed honey

[suffragette]

23. It's a bit like the silver lining in a cloud. Fireweed grows here naturally after a fire or in a

cleared space. The honey is dark, but with a mild, almost buttery taste. Seems not to crystallize as quickly either. Definitely a local treat.

When I lived in Germany, my first apartment was in a building near fields and there was a local man who sold his honey there. Very good. Our landlords were an elderly German couple who pretty much adopted us. Sometimes they would pop up the stairs with home cooked meals. Since this was near the ever shifting border with France, the regional food there shared more roots with Alsace than Bavaria. Foods like sauerkraut were a revelation. She aged her own in a crock, rinsed it, then cooked it with wine and juniper berries. Delicious and completely different from the Bavarian version, which is also the version common in the US.

[Yavin4]

18. They ate a lot of chicken

Well, at least The Hound did:

&t=35s

[Aristus]

22. My wife and I have a favorite farm-to-table restaurant where the food is delicious.

It's also incredibly expensive.

The Middle Ages: when farm-to-table was every day life, and not an expensive night out...