Thinking about "THINKING ABOUT FOOD IN FANTASY"

I was at a writer's retreat this weekend when one of my friends posted a link on Facebook for an article for writers about food in fantasy. I happily clicked through, expecting to see a nice bit of writing that would dispel the common myths about medieval European cooking - after all, there's so much more information available now, and all the old bunk about the middle-ages was debunked a decade ago, right?

Sadly, it was not to be. As the other writers around me can attest, I made all sorts of noises as I read the article, including gasps of disbelief and strangled cries of mental anguish. It was ok through the first five paragraphs, but after that it completely went off the rails.

So, of course, I am compelled to post a rebuttal. Are you surprised? I didn't think so.

Sugar

Some of what the article says about sugar (the origins, the early use of other sweeteners-primarily honey, etc.) is essentially correct. But it implies that sugar in Europe was incredibly rare and expensive.

"Sugar was still a luxury in Europe and America until the 18th century, when demand led to the creation of sugar plantations in the New World, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and India, using slave and indentured labour."

"In a fantasy world similar to our Europe at any time up to the 18th century, sugar would most likely be a rare and expensive commodity." 

Based upon the prices in 15th century London (Prof. John H. Munro, University of Toronto), a craftsman's daily wages could buy a half pound of sugar. Yes, that's a lot of money, but it's also a half pound of freakin' sugar for a single day, which is about double the current level of US sugar consumption per capita.

This is not to say that they were eating that much sugar back then, but rather that (for the growing middle class and nobility) there was plenty of sugar to be had. If the characters in your fantasy world are poor then they'd probably have stuff sweetened with honey, otherwise they can probably get sugar.

Meat

The article clearly suggests that meat consumption was not what it is today.

"Without the large scale farming and production that we know today, meat would be less common and much more expensive."

The main reason that modern society requires modern levels of meat production is that we have a very small percentage of our population that actually produces food. Everyone else builds stuff, moves stuff, or pushes paper (or data) around. The few "farmers" we have must do a lot more work to feed everyone.

Yes, medieval agriculture did produce less meat, but they also had way fewer mouths to feed.

There have been a bunch of recent studies which tested the levels of carbon, nitrogen, and iodine in medieval skeletal remains to determine the relative consumption of meat, plants, and fish. They've all shown that medieval meat consumption wasn't out of line with that of the modern diet.

What's more, one study compared the level of meat consumption between the poor and the wealthy and concluded, "No convincing case for social variation in diet can nevertheless be made by comparing isotopic with archaeological and anthropological data."

It's also worth noting that documents from medieval prisons show that prisoners were fed up to two pounds of meat per week. If meat were as scarce as the article suggests then I expect there would have been long lines of people waiting to get thrown in jail.

One final criticism on the topic, the article says:

"Even if a poor family lives next to a wood full of game, they may not necessarily be able to hunt there."

This is technically true, but the poor family could easily raise chickens and pigs for their own consumption or to sell ... and they usually did.

Fruits and Vegetables

The article goes on to discuss the consumption levels of other foodstuffs, and starts off with a statement that is, at best, wildly inaccurate.

"Vegetables are probably going to make up the main bulk of a fantasy character’s diet in any period or setting, unless the character is very rich."

As shown in the section above, the poor got plenty of meat. Further, a huge amount of the daily caloric intake for all classes took the form of bread. The poor got bread from a mixed variety of grains (sometimes called "maslin bread") and the wealthy got fine, white bread (called "manchets" or "paindemain"). Workers in England's manoral system received one or two meals a day as part of their pay, and those meals were often documented to include a full pound of bread per person.

Yes, they ate lots of fruits and vegetables. Whatever was in season was going to be eaten (or preserved if possible), however they were not "the main bulk", regardless of social class. Further, there is plenty of documentation that shows the medieval nobility often had the same health issues related to a crappy diet that we have now: diabetes, obesity, and gout. So some of them (like some of us) didn't eat enough fruits and veggies.

Then there's this little snippet:

"Potatoes, conversely, are notorious for growing almost anywhere."

I think that sentence made me gag a few times.  Yes, potatoes grow everywhere ... except for anywhere outside of the Americas before the year 1500. Potatoes are a new-world plant. They didn't have them in medieval Europe. So, just ... no.

Spices

Go ahead and look at Professor Monroe's page again. Spices were expensive in medieval Europe, but they weren't that expensive. Meat pies sold to the working class in the local market would likely have some spice (probably cinnamon). Saffron, which currently is and always has been the most expensive spice in the world, is included in about half of the recipes in medieval cookbooks. Yes, those books were meant for nobles and the middle class, but they were still consuming an incredible amount of spices each year.

From rough calculations, I've figured that spices were about ten times as expensive then as they are now (based on "minimum wage"). That's pretty pricey, but not out of reach ... even for the working class.

Water

The paragraph on water is just plain wrong. Medieval Europeans drank plenty of water, and most of it was perfectly safe. The alcohol content in medieval wine and ale wasn't high enough to kill off parasites. Wells back then weren't any more polluted than they are now.

Conclusion

It can be very useful for writers to consider food for their settings, and adding food references to stories or games set in a medieval fantasy world can add a great amount of realism. Just be sure to get your information from a reliable source.

How Much is Too Much?

Sometimes people say things that make me twitch, the most common one being the old canard that medieval cooks used spices to cover up the taste of spoiled meat (hint: they didn't).

The thing that sent me into fits today though was a bit I read in an article on the NPR website entitled How Snobbery Helped Take The Spice Out Of European Cooking. You ready? Here it is:

Back in the Middle Ages, spices were really expensive, which meant that only the upper class could afford them.

That doesn't sound unreasonable, does it? They even linked to the website of Professor John Munro (Department of Economics, University of Toronto), which is a site I've often used and cited myself.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

See, the thing is that if you actually look at the numbers Professor Munro provides, you find that they don't make such a clear case for "really expensive", and they certainly don't show spices to have been completely out of reach for the working and middle classes.

Near the bottom of Munro's website is a bunch of tables where he lists the actual prices of a number of goods, and includes the quantity that could be bought by the daily wage of a carpenter or mason. Cinnamon, for example was 24 pence/pound in 1439 London, and the day's wages for a carpenter (8d) could buy about a third of a pound.

Yeah, that's a lot. If you go by the daily wage of an unskilled worker instead (2d) and assume that's the equivalent to today's minimum wage, it works out to about ten times what spices cost in the local grocery store.

Here's the thing: that's for a third of a frickken' pound of cinnamon. Most people don't use that much cinnamon in their entire life.

They could, however, go down to the local spice seller and buy a small amount of cinnamon, say a quarter of an ounce, and it wouldn't bust their budget for the month.

Now take into account that, like today, many in medieval Europe's working class relied on fast food -pies, sausages, and stews from the local cookshops. In order to attract more customers, the owners of the cookshops are going to do their best to make the food taste good. That means sometimes adding ... wait for it ... spices. So even the poorest folks in London likely had a little spice in their lives.

The article goes on to quote some other theories about late medieval and early modern diet, and most of them are even further off the mark than the whole spice thing. I can go into details if you really want, but I should probably take anti-seizure medicine first.

In summary: Yes, spices were expensive, but they weren't that expensive.

... and no, you couldn't really buy a horse with a single peppercorn.

Supersizers Eat Medieval

I recently watched "Supersizers Eat Medieval" ... I know .... I really should do this to myself. Every time I go in hoping for a realistic portrayal of medieval food, and almost every time I'm disappointed.

This time wasn't as bad as it could have been. While they did repeat and reinforce some of the usual myths, they did get some things reasonably close to right. Below are some comments on things that were said, done, or shown in the episode - in no particular order.


Trenchers

The show did depict the use of trenchers as a sort of disposable plate, and noted that they would have gone to the poor when the diner was through with them. That's reasonably accurate, though trencher use was not prominent until the late 15th century - which is much earlier than most of the other stuff depicted in the program.

It's also worth noting that, from the accounts I've read, trenchers were made from three-day-old bread (rye?) specifically baked for that purpose. One description of trencher loaves has them as being rectangular, flat, and about 4" x 6" in size. This is in contrast to the show's hosts cutting slices off of a round, apparently fresh loaf.


Lack of Vegetables

Where are the veggies? Contrary to popular belief, and to what was depicted in the program, the wealthy did eat vegetables (and the poor did eat meat, but that's a whole different matter.


Size of Meals

There is definitely something strange going on about the size of the meals - but it's not necessarily the fault of the program. Even medieval accounts had each diner sometimes receiving absurd portions of meat (e.g. 10 pounds). I suspect a large portion of that was passed on to the poor as an act of charity, or it was shared with members of the diner's household, or some such.


Water

The popular belief that nobody ever drank water in the middle ages is repeated. It's simply not true. We can thank the Victorians for this myth.


Beer

I have no idea where the bit about spitting in the beer came from. If someone can point me to a reliable source, I'll accept it (after all, that's one of the ways they (used to?) make fermented beverages from corn in South and Central America (e.g. "chicha").


Average Lifespan

This is one of those ideas that seems to be unkillable. People are always confusing "average life expectancy" with "maximum life span". Yes, the life expectancy of people in medieval Europe was pretty low (e.g. 30 years), but that doesn't mean that no one lived long enough to get old, nor does it mean that 35 was considered old.

The average life expectancy was brought way down due to infant mortality, but if an individual survived childhood then they stood a decent chance of making it to their 60s.


Peacock

At one point in the program, they make a big deal about how nasty peacock tastes, with the implication that medieval people had to be nuts to eat it. It was relatively common though to use a peacock's feathers to dress a capon - thus making a good tasting bird look really fancy. I've also seen a recipe in a medieval French source that called for the roasted peacock to be dressed with the capon's feathers - not to be enjoyed by the noble, but to be served to some unsuspecting diner as a prank. The implication is that medieval Europeans didn't like how peacock tasted either.


Turkey

At one point in the program they are served turkey. Since turkey is a new world bird, it would not have been available for most of the middle ages (possible for any of it, depending on how you define "medieval").


Gilded Gingerbread

This is a strange one. I've seen lots of recipes for gingerbread, but none that call for gilding. There are recipes for sugarpaste that might have been gilded, and I think there is one (late medieval) case where sugarpaste was called "gingerbread" (it was flavored with ginger). I'm curious where they got this.


Leach

At one point they translate "leach" as "licking". Um ... no. Leach (or leshe) is "slice" - both as a verb and a noun.


Marzipan

Marzipan is described as being expensive. This is sort-of true, in that it is made from almonds which were imported, and that (in 1438 for example) a pound of almonds cost almost twice what an unskilled laborer would be paid for a days work. However given what was also being bought for medieval feasters, that's not that extravagant. Marzipan shows up a *lot* in medieval cookbooks.


Barnacle Geese

The stories about what was and wasn't considered to be "fish" in the middle ages are quirky and fun, and it's tempting to say "Look how daft they were!" However I'm inclined to think that the whole bit about beaver tails, barnacle geese, and the like were just a sort of culinary "technicality" to get around religious dietary restrictions.

For this particular claim, the Wikipedia page on Barnacle Geese has the following note:

At the Fourth Council of the Lateran (1215), Pope Innocent III explicitly prohibited the eating of these geese during Lent, arguing that despite their unusual reproduction, they lived and fed like ducks and so were of the same nature as other birds.

Like I said, it could have been worse. They didn't bring up rotten meat at all.

Recommended Book - Food in Medieval England

A couple of weeks back I added this book to the page of Recommended Books, and I've been meaning to post something here about it since then.

Food in Medieval England: Diet and Nutrition
C.M. Woolgar (Editor), D. Serjeantson (Editor), T. Waldron (Editor)
Oxford University Press

This isn't a cookbook, nor is it one of those nice, easy to read books full of general information about medieval European cuisine. It's a collection of papers written by several authors, all detailing recent research into the study of the medieval diet, coming from a scientific perspective (e.g. archaeology) instead of a historical one (e.g. studying old texts).

There's a lot of neat information buried in these papers, but not all of it is easy to get to. Further, many of the papers highlight the promising work currently being done, but do not actually provide much in the way of results - mostly because the research is too new.

For example, until the 1980s or so, when animal bones were found at a medieval archaeological site, the researchers would make a note about them and then throw them away. They didn't realize the information that could be gleaned from them about animal size and age, butchering methods, dietary composition, etc. This has changed for the better, but it takes a very long time to gather enough evidence, study the remains, and to draw useful conclusions.

If the above makes it sound like this book is dry as a desert and useless to the average person with an interest in medieval history, that's certainly not the case. The nineteen papers included all provide valuable clues to what the medieval diet and lifestyle were like, making sure that it is all tied down to evidence instead of conjecture, which is what I expect from Woolgar and company.

There was however one point which made me groan loudly (thus annoying my wife as she was reading her email). In "From Cu and Sceap to Beffe and Motton", N.J. Sykes is noting the way bones were cut and suggests that it indicates the beef was used for making stew. That's all well and fine, but then he goes on to note that "... boiling would have counteracted the taste of tainted meat, ...." That's right, Sykes dropped the Moldy Meat Myth into an academic paper, and of course he provided nothing to support the (nonsensical) assertion. P'feh!

Other than that one (really bad) slip, this book is absolutely geekalicious. I'll be pulling new information out of it for months.

Excuses, excuses...

Before getting into the subject of this rant, here's a warning about what triggered it:

Yes, I've been watching The Tudors

From what I've been told by people who research various aspects of medieval life (clothing, painting, religion, history, etc.) this program is filled with all sorts of wild inaccuracies, so why should cooking and food be treated any differently?

Surprisingly, for a television series that is so lavish with costumes and settings, food is almost ignored (well, maybe that's not too surprising - very few shows or films deal much with food, probably because it's a very hard thing to film well). Where the show does touch on the topic, they seem to invariably go way wrong.

At the end of the second season, King Henry is presented with a swan pie. Awesome! The thing is the right shape, and they even decorated it with the head and wings of the swan. Then Henry breaks the top crust and starts eating the contents with his fingers. This is a minor quibble, I know, but he would have used a spoon. They had spoons in medieval times. They even have spoons at Medieval Times ("Would you like a refill on that Pepsi?").

Then there are the grapes. In almost every scene depicting a dinner or banquet there are grapes on the table - even in the scenes set in winter. Somehow they've got grapes ready for harvest year round in England. That, or they've managed to work out overnight transport from the southern hemisphere.

What really set my teeth on edge though was something in the episode I watched last night. Henry holds up a piece of fruit and tells Suffolk that it comes from the New World. That would have been Ok, but it was a starfruit, which aren't native to anywhere in the New World but instead come from Indonesia.

[Aside: I suppose they could have used a pawpaw, but given their short shelf life that wouldn't have been much better (maybe they were brought over on the same express flight as the grapes). Tomato? No, they were known but considered poisonous. A potato then, or maybe a peanut. Heck, how about tobacco?]

Now some might say that this kind of criticism is misplaced. The show's creator, Michael Hirst, dismissed complaints of inaccuracy by stating "Showtime commissioned me to write an entertainment, a soap opera, and not history ... And we wanted people to watch it."

That's just bunk.

Hirst is spinning his departures from reality as being artistic deviation, changes to make the story more interesting. I'll buy that for the bit with Henry eating the swan pie, but for the other errors it's just an excuse for laziness. Hirst simply doesn't care enough to expend the minuscule amount of effort to even get vaguely close to right (like on the same continent).

In the meanwhile, I keep watching. It is entertaining, after all, and it helps me to keep up with the nonsense that people learn from Hollywood about medieval Europe.

Thoughts on Misconceptions

I don't normally let a short story get to me, but one I finished reading yesterday is still bugging me. I won't mention the title or author's name as they're actually irrelevant to my point here. It's not that the story was particularly bad in terms of writing style or plot. I probably would have enjoyed the thing if it hadn't been for one small problem: the author had no idea what he was talking about.

Line many stories, the tale centered upon a person from a primitive culture being taken to a more developed one. This is all well and fine, except that instead of learning what primitive human cultures are/were really like, the tale's author simply repeated every myth about "naked savages" he'd ever read or seen in movies regardless of whether they made sense. Ugh! I did laugh when he actually used the phrase "naked savage" when the main character saw himself in a mirror, but it wasn't a good laugh so much as a shocked laugh of disbelief.

So where's the medieval angle here? Well oddly enough, most of the myths the author perpetuated are often applied to medieval European culture as well. There seems to be some need in humanity to assume that life in any given time of the past must have been shorter, simpler, and nastier than it is now. I'll address some of the specific myths in the story from the viewpoint of a historian and medievalist, but the answers pretty much apply to all human cultures.

Cleanliness

Some cultures do indeed bathe more than others, but if a human is going to live long enough to breed then it must maintain some level of hygiene. Medieval Europeans bathed, and it was more than once a year. No, they probably didn't smell like roses or lemons, but neither do some of the people I deal with on a daily basis. They did understand the importance of washing their hands, cleaning their teeth, and the like. Dirt and sweat are one thing, filth and vermin are another.

Diet

Not everyone lived their entire life on the edge of starvation. Yes, there were periods of famine in the middle ages, but there were also time were people had enough to eat. While they didn't have modern agriculture or preservation techniques, they were generally capable of getting enough food from their lands and storing enough of it to get through the winter.

Intelligence

While the sum of human knowledge has increased, the level of human intelligence has not changed for many thousands of years. In other words, medieval people were just as smart as modern people, but they didn't have as much information as we do. There were geniuses and idiots in ancient Rome, and they were much like their modern counterparts.

Sophistication

Live was not simpler in medieval Europe. The merchants there/then had already invented things like insurance and stock futures. They had bank accounts, brokers, overseas manufacturing, fraud, cartels, and everything else we expect from modern business. People - even in the working or farming classes - didn't spend all their time at work. They had fashion trends, theater, religious debates, wedding celebrations, and even fast food. It seems that humans will always make things as complicated as possible given their environment in order to keep from being bored. (Don't believe me? Check out Polynesian cultures)

So yes, I'm sure there were some people in medieval Europe who were stupid and filthy, who worked all of their waking hours, and lived their entire lives on the edge of starvation. However I'm also sure that I could find such people living in modern cities as well. Their lives are not (and were not) typical.

On the Size and Color of Eggs

One of the things I was told back when I had just started to dabble in medieval cooking was that the eggs they had in medieval Europe were smaller than modern eggs. Not being overly skeptical back then, I accepted this as an established fact and filed it away for future reference. As I progressed in my research though, I became more doubtful of this factoid. Now I'm at the point where I'm comfortable in saying it's utter bunk.

The recipe for May Eggs involves pouring the liquid yolks out of partly boiled eggs, 

mixing them with spices, pouring them back in, and allowing them to boil until hard. 

This is difficult and messy enough using large eggs. I doubt it's even possible with small ones.

It's easy enough to understand how such a belief could come about. We're told repeatedly that the great size of farm animals compared to their wild counterparts is directly the result of modern farming practices. What we forget is that some of those practices have been practiced for the past thousand years.

Evidence for modern-sized eggs in the medieval period is surprisingly easy to find.

Chicken Vendors, Vincenzo Campi, 1580s
Web Gallery of Art

The painting above is a beautiful example (click on it to go to a bigger version). See there in the lower right corner? Four Grade-A, Extra-Large eggs.

The Egg Dance, Pieter Aertsen, 1552

Web Gallery of Art

In this one the egg is on the floor, next to the overturned bowl and near the wooden shoe - about to be stepped on.

"Ah! How do you know those are chicken eggs and not goose eggs? How do you know they weren't smaller in, say, the 14th century?" I hear you ask. How about this for an answer?

Taccuino Sanitatis, 14th century

Large, modern-looking eggs ... being gathered from chickens ... in the fourteenth century. That pretty much sums it up.

Oh, and about the color of medieval eggs: common wisdom is that they were probably brown or speckled. P'feh! Take another look at those paintings. See any brown eggs? Me neither. If you find a painting of medieval eggs that show them to be any color other than white, I'd love to see it.

Sugar is sweet ...

Quite a while back I put some notes on the website about medieval sugar. They're all extracts from cookbooks and such detailing the types of sugar available - the color (white, brown, black) and the form (loaf, cone, powder). My main reason for digging up these references was in part to counter a statement I'd often heard that they didn't have powdered sugar in the middle ages.

Of course I couldn't directly prove that they did have powdered sugar - that seems to be an impossible task. What I could show is that they had something they referred to as powdered sugar, and that given the common kitchen tools and processes of the time it is trivial to grind sugar into a powdered form (interestingly enough, I did find an early 17th century source that says to add starch to powdered sugar to keep it from clumping - which is done modernly). While this isn't positive proof, it does make the case strongly enough to be reasonably certain.

One question about sugar that I couldn't answer this way was about its color. While they did referr to some sugar as being "white", there is no way to know if they really meant white, or if they just meant "light colored". Now to my rescue come a couple of illuminated manuscripts which actually depict sugar!

One comes from a book called Tacuinum Sanitatis - a sort of medieval book on health and wellness. It was originally an 11th century Arabic manuscript, and was translated and copied all over Europe throughout the middle ages. In the picture below from one edition from Italy in the late 14th century, there is a depiction of a sugar merchant selling white chunks.

 

Theatrum sanitatis, codice 4182 della R. Biblioteca Casanatense. Rome

Pretty conclusive, but it's nice to have a second opinion. So here is a market scene from a different manuscript. In the lower right is a spice merchant with a large white cone of sugar.

La rue marchande, Le Livre du gouvernement des princes

Paris, BnF, Arsenal, manuscrit 5062

Again, it seems pretty clear. The artists chose white paint for the sugar instead of just letting the beige background color to show through. If sugar were commonly brown or black or beige then they would have used those colors instead. Is this positive proof? Well ... no, these could be exceptions, but taken with the textual evidence it becomes very very compelling. Time to update my sugar notes.

The Learning Process

Let's face it, being proven wrong is embarrassing.

I try to view it all as a valuable learning experience - something that builds character and provides new insights and all that - but the truth is that it's still a bite in the butt.  The thing is, in order to make any kind of impact, in order to do any kind of worthwhile research, it is absolutely necessary to make some assumptions.  That means putting your butt on the line, and that means it's just waiting to get bitten.  Ok, enough of that metaphor.  How about some examples?

At some point on a cooking mailing list I noted the immense variability of Brasica oleracea (the species that includes broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage), and stated that since cauliflower was a corruption of cole flower, medieval cauliflower probably wasn't anything like the modern stuff.  Of course about 5 milliseconds later someone posted a link to a medieval painting of cauliflower that showed it to be very modern looking, and also showed me to be completely wrong.

Detail from "Market Woman with Vegetable Stall"

Pieter Aertsen, 1567.

Need another example?  A few years back in the medieval cooking re-creation community (read: geeks) it was pretty well established that there was no evidence to support the eating of bread spread with butter (other than a strange line in one medieval English text about how strange it was that those weird Huguenots ate butter on their bread), and since bread and butter never appeared on any of the available medieval menus then it probably wasn't eaten.  This statement was made on one of the cooking mailing lists (maybe by me, maybe not - I don't remember).  The result?  Yup.  About 3 milliseconds later someone responded with the results of a quick search of medieval documents showing many many such references.  People in the middle ages did eat bread and butter, they just didn't put it on the menu and apparently didn't need a recipe to make it.

Recently, a person I greatly admire posted to the same freakin' cooking mailing list that she didn't think the (modern-style) fruit preserves commonly represented as being medieval were anything like what was served in the middle ages.  This one really hurt.  I regularly make quince marmalade - incredibly yummy stuff, and very popular - and I've been promoting it as being medieval (which I thought it was).  There was much discussion and the general consensus was (is?) that the modern-looking fruit preserves probably came about in the 17 century.  The stuff before that was either whole fruits in sugar syrup, or something more like Turkish delight.

Oh bother.

I'm finally coming to terms with this.  I'll have to make a couple of changes to the recipe I have online, and make it clear whenever I serve the quince marmalade that it's late medieval at best.

The bigger problem though was that I'd never made the Turkish-delight-like stuff.  However, over the holidays I managed to correct this serious omission.  The result was a plate of diamond shaped slices of very firm quince jelly.  It still had that wonderful quince flavor, and now had the added bonus of being finger food!  It also wasn't any harder to make than quince marmalade (though it doesn't last nearly as long).

Yummy Medieval Quince Stuff

The lesson?  Well, one possible lesson is "Stay away from the cooking mailing lists!"  More importantly though, I'm reminded that researching medieval cooking is a process of successive approximation.  We make the best guess we can, and when new (or old) information comes along we improve upon that guess, even if it means letting go of some dearly held belief.

It's really not that hard ...

I'm more than a little conflicted when it comes to "Medieval Times" - no, not the period of history but the chain of theme restaurants.  On the one hand, it generates interest in medieval European history.  However they present a version of the middle-ages that is notably less accurate.

One of the areas where they stumble rather badly is the food (no surprise that I latch onto this aspect, eh?).  On their website they have this to say about their dinner. 

With clockwork precision, legions of serving wenches and serfs deliver four courses to hungry guests in minutes. The meal begins with savory garlic bread and a steaming hot vegetable soup ladled into pewter bowls: then come roasted chicken, spare rib, a seasoned potato and pastry of the Castle. Two rounds of beverages are included with the feast. Cash bar service is also available throughout the show. To the special delight of the guests, the feast is served "medieval style" - without silverware, but with plenty of extra napkins.

Let's go over this point by point:

1. Describing this as a four course meal is really silly when a typical course in a medieval feast contained four to six dishes - and that didn't include bread.  


2. The vegetable soup might be ok, depending on what exactly is in it.


3. Seasoned potato?  Potatoes are new-world ... hello!


4. What the heck is a pastry of the castle?  Ah, another site lists it as an apple pastry. Apples are good, pastry is good, the name is dumb.


5. Medieval style means no silverware?
   "There were no utensils in medieval times, thus, there are no utensils at Medieval Times. Would you like a refill on that Pepsi?"

So how could they fix this to make it more authentic, while still appealing to the masses?  It wouldn't take much in terms of time or money.

The first step is to go through their menu and recipes and get rid of all the new-world ingredients.  Tomatoes, potatoes, green beans, chocolate, vanilla, tea and coffee are the ones that most often sneak into a pseudo-medieval menu.

I suspect that this would effect the soup.  If so, then find a new recipe that is actually medieval.  There are hundreds of medieval soup recipes out there, many are quite good, and almost all of them are cheap to make.  Pick one or two.

Replace the potato with the old-world equivalent - the turnip.  They're just as easy to cook, and there are medieval turnip recipes that just about anyone would like.

Beverages are pretty easy too.  Serve the kids grape juice, and give the adults the added option of beer, wine or mead.

Finally, for Pete's sake give them spoons and knives!  The medieval serving manuals clearly state that all diners should be furnished with spoons and knives.  We're talking the middle-ages here, not the stone-ages.

Do I actually expect Medieval Times to do this?  No, not really.  I can dream though. It's not like I want them to do a proper four or five course feast with around 30 different dishes, complete with different menus for meat and meatless days. I just want them to get a few very basic things right. Kind of like how people expect a documentary about Pearl Harbor to be set in Hawaii instead of Des Moines, Iowa.

Seed Newsvine

But it could have happened!

The second most annoying thing in researching medieval cooking - the first of course being the myth that medieval cooks used spice to cover the taste of spoiled meat - is what I usually refer to as a cheeseburger argument.  This is usually an attempt to justify a modern dish as being "possibly" medieval, and generally takes the following form:

"They had beef in the middle ages, right?  And they sometimes ground meat, right?  And they sometimes cooked meat on a grill and they had cheese and bread, right?  So they had all the things they needed to make a cheeseburger.  Therefore the odds are that someone somewhere made one in the 500 years between 1000 and 1500."

Um ... no.

Sure, it sounds reasonable, but aside from being research in the wrong direction (choosing something modern and looking for it in the past, instead of looking at what there was and trying to make sense of it) the argument contains a number of logical flaws.

One of the flaws is called "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" (literally "After this, therefore because of this").  To make a cheeseburger you need to have all the ingredients (true), so having the ingredients will inevitably lead to making a cheeseburger (false).  Thousands of people in the US have raw fish and lye in their houses, and the vast majority of them will never make lutefisk.

This could also be a form of an "appeal to probability" (I still can't find the fancy Latin term for this), where it is assumed that because something can happen, it eventually will happen.

Another flaw present is a "fallacy of composition" (again, no cool Latin ... I'll keep looking), which assumes that if something is true for the parts then it's true for the whole.

So, while medieval cooks had all the stuff they needed to make a cheeseburger, and while it was possible that someone would make one, the concept of a cheeseburger (or any kind of sandwich for that matter) simply isn't one a medieval cook had.  Eventually someone did come up with the idea of a sandwich (most historians think it was sometime in the 18th century) and I'm sure a cheeseburger appeared shortly thereafter, so I suppose that given all of human history it was inevitable, but it wasn't in the middle ages.

Sometimes those making a cheeseburger argument tack on a short addendum when challenged, something along the lines of "You don't think they made cheeseburgers?  Prove they didn't."  In terms of classical logic this is called "Argumentam ad ignorantiam" (argument from ignorance), where the only "proof" that a premise is true is that it hasn't been proven false.  If this is allowed than almost anything can be "proven" - Henry the Fifth was actually a female orangutan!  Don't think so?  Prove he wasn't.  See?

Still it's soooo tempting. There's a particularly appealing modern dish, and a recipe or two from the 14th century that has a couple ingredients in common, and maybe even a hint at a method that kind of sort of matches, or maybe just a name that's spelled in a similar way.  That's why we need to practice CONSTANT VIGILANCE!

I'm going to go have a cheeseburger now.

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Medieval Food Myths

Frequently when people I've met find out that I research medieval cooking, they mention something they've learned on the topic. Unfortunately it's frequently one of the following myths. Invariably I'll get thrown into "Teacher" mode and their eyes will glaze over, they start to drool, and finally their heads explode.

In order to prevent future social carnage, I now present these myths along with a brief debunking.


1. They used lots of spices to cover the taste of spoiled meat.

This is so incredibly wrong for so many reasons.

a. The chemicals in spoiled meat that smell and taste bad are so potent that no amount of spice is going to cover them up.

b. They did not slaughter livestock until it was needed, so raw meat didn't stay around long enough to spoil.

c. Considering that spices were more expensive than meat, why would they spend the equivalent of $10 of spices to cover the spoiled taste of a $2 chicken? It'd be much cheaper (and nicer) to just buy a fresh chicken.

d. Meatless dishes from the same time period were spiced just as heavily as meat dishes.


2. Pepper was worth its weight in gold.

A quick check finds this to be far from correct. While pepper was more expensive in the medieval period than it is now - approximately ten times the current cost based on the wages of unskilled laborers - it was not even close to the value of gold.

The price of saffron (which is and always has been the most expensive spice) was about 183 pence per pound in fifteenth-century London. That's closer to gold (240 pence per pound) but still not over.


3. Bread was coarse and brown.

There are numerous descriptions in medieval texts of the bolting process, where ground wheat is passed through linen sacks multiple times to give a fine white flour. There are records of laws specifying the different grades of bread, from coarse and dark to fine white bread. The poor may have eaten coarse dark bread, but the middle and upper classes could and did buy white bread.


4. The wealthy didn't eat vegetables.

I've got hundreds of recipes from the cookbooks of the middle and upper classes that call for vegetables, fruits, and grains. There are many examples of instructions for making and serving salads. There are shopping lists for banquets that call for vegetables. The wealthy weren't just carnivores.


5. The poor didn't eat meat.

Records from medieval prisons and poor houses include weekly menus which feature a substantial quantity of meat three to four times a week. If they were feeding convicted criminals better than the poor outside of prison then prison wouldn't be much of a deterrent to crime, would it?


6. Potatoes / tomatoes / capsicum peppers originated in Ireland / Turkey / India.

All botanical and historical evidence leads to the conclusion that none of these foods existed outside of the Americas before 1492. If anyone can find primary source documentation for these foods being used in Europe before then, I'll be overjoyed to amend this. The same goes for turkey, green beans, pumpkins, cranberries, vanilla, chocolate, and corn.


7. Most vegetables weren't as well developed as they are now.

This can be easily disproved by taking a quick look through medieval paintings that depict food. There you can easily find very modern looking produce.


8. Medieval feasts consisted of bread, roasted meat and wine (or ale).

We have Hollywood to thank for this one. Unlike the popular depiction, medieval feasts were complex affairs which included multiple courses, each with multiple dishes. Meats, fruits, vegetables, and grains were all served. Delicate and subtle dishes were made using a wide variety of spices. Intricate entertainment pieces were also presented - sometimes edible, other times not.