Beyond Sad Gruel: Food and Diet in Medieval Europe

(Host: Lucy)

Seasonal eating and regional eating were the variables responsible for the most widespread differences in what people ate, although then as now, wealth and class played a significant role in what was available to and prized by diners. Contrary to Hollywood myth, though, sad gruel was not the norm. This episode explores cooking, eating, and thinking about food in medieval Europe.

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
In Hollywood’s version of the Middle Ages, peasants ate sad gruel while nobles ate
stuffed pigs and peacocks. But what was eating in medieval Europe really like?

(00:24):
Hello, and welcome to Footnoting History. I’m Lucy, and on this episode, I’m going to
be discussing food and diet in medieval Europe. This topic was suggested by one of our listeners,
Ruth Buechler; thanks, Ruth! And apologies if I’m pronouncing your last name in too German a
way. Ruth wanted to know about cuisine in Europe and Asia and Africa before the globalization of

(00:46):
cuisine in the sixteenth century. Any one of these would be an interesting story.
There’s a rhapsody on pasta from fourth-century China that speaks
to my soul. But I think it makes sense to stick with one continent at a time,
so I’m starting with medieval Europe, the time and place I specialize in.
Particularly in the US, pop culture ideas about medieval Europe are much more widespread than

(01:10):
actual knowledge about medieval Europe. And the most durable clichés about medieval Europe,
whether those relate to the idea of a permanently downtrodden peasantry,
or indulgent banquets attended by people who didn’t know how to use forks,
have been around for a long time. So let’s start with a bit of debunking.
The most widespread differences in what people ate were the results of seasonal and regional

(01:36):
differences in diet. So, for instance, then as now, we could speak of a “Mediterranean diet”;
it just wouldn’t involve tomatoes. I know. Also, while Farm-to-Table is now a call for sustainable
eating, and a label you might find on the menus of cute cafés, it was just… the norm for most of

(01:56):
human history, everywhere there was agriculture. And the importance of agriculture and agricultural
rhythms to defining the lives of medieval people, especially the vast majority — over 90% — who
were involved in working the land, cannot be overstated. This is why I get really excited
about any depiction of farming in medieval TV and movies. Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood may be

(02:22):
a mixed bag, but at least there’s a grain supply subplot! I love the grain supply subplot. Anyway:
technological change affected medieval agricultural work, as did cycles of weather.
The shift from a two-field to a three-field system as a dominant model was a significant one,
enabling better crop yields, and thus improved nutrition, food security, and population growth.

(02:45):
Another important factor in what people ate was what some historians have called The
Cereal Revolution, which is a really fun phrase to say. Now, if you do an internet search for
cereal revolution, you’ll find mostly information about Corn Flakes, Grape-Nuts, and other breakfast
innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But for medievalists,

(03:05):
this term refers to agricultural developments of early medieval Europe, roughly from the late
ninth century onwards. In this period, we see the development of a moldboard plough… Stay with me
here! I promise it’s more exciting than it sounds. This plough does several things at the same time,
which is important in regions with relatively cool climates and heavy soil. The coulter slices,

(03:29):
the moldboard turns the soil, buries larvae and remnants of old crops,
raises nutrients to the surface, and it enables improved field drainage.
So this reduces the risk of seeds rotting in the soil before they can sprout,
and helps contribute to what some historians have called the “cereal revolution,” with more
rye and barley entering the everyday diet. So you have an increased range of delicious

(03:52):
and nutritious whole grains for breads, cakes, and, yes, porridge or gruel. Parenthetically,
just a few months ago I saw a blog post titled “This winter, gruel is so back.” This doesn’t
say great things about purchasing power, but it did contain a number of good recipes.
But what did medieval people eat to go along with the bread, cakes, porridge,

(04:13):
and beer made from grains? Subsistence farming and small-scale gardening were the norm,
so most people had a range of vegetables in their diet. What vegetables, you ask? Well,
whatever they liked, and whatever would grow in their climate. So, if you lived in Italy,
you might have a fig tree in your garden. In England, well, sorry about that;

(04:33):
maybe an apple tree instead. One thing that a colleague of mine and I were discussing just the
other day — apropos our own backyard gardens — is that we don’t always know what medieval people did
with their fruits and vegetables once they were harvested. (My colleague currently has a lot of
turnips and I am about to have more kale than I know what to do with.) For medieval people,

(04:54):
for safety reasons, cooking fruit and veg was more common than eating them raw. As
Sam Gamgee memorably says about the South American potato: boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick
‘em in a stew. You can do any of those things with turnips too. Or apples, for that matter!
In short, then, location probably mattered more than class for most fruits and vegetables. Though
the luxury of having a large enough household for a walled garden, and people to work in it, would

(05:18):
obviously make a larger range of foods possible. King John of England — at least according to
some accounts — died of a surfeit of peaches. Now, as modern historians have pointed out,
attributing John’s death to eating unwisely was a way for chroniclers to criticize his character.
But the fact that he could at least plausibly access peaches in England in autumn indicates

(05:43):
that the monks he’d been staying with kept peaches in their gardens. And by the end of the reign of
John’s son Henry, English monarchs had peaches in the gardens of the Tower of London. The fact
that we know this points to another fact about medieval cuisine: our textual sources for it,
as discussed by Kristin in another episode, are focused on quite elite levels of cooking,

(06:06):
eating, and thinking about food. I think it’s extremely cool to know
that dyeing foods different colors could be understood to change their qualities because
of humoral theory. But that doesn’t tell us about food for most of the population.
The monks, meanwhile, didn’t just keep peaches in case the king stopped by.

(06:27):
Monks and nuns had their diet restrained and closely regulated by the church year,
but fruits and vegetables were always allowed, unlike meat. For most of the peasantry, too,
no matter where they lived, meat other than fish (and pork when pigs were killed in the
winter) might be a comparatively rare treat. Not so, of course,

(06:47):
eggs, which you could easily get from your own poultry, whether chickens or ducks or geese.
The importance of location to what you ate when is illustrated by the island of Korčula,
an island in the Adriatic that is now part of Croatia. In large part since it was an island,
food often overrode other issues in local governance. The island had multiple

(07:09):
administrative districts, with different food production capabilities. Villages were
“agricultural hotspots” in fertile regions, and rural and urban areas, as elsewhere in Europe,
were counterpoints to each other. Vineyards were held by islanders of all social strata,
and figs and wine were both major exports. Olives were grown in great quantity but not exported as

(07:32):
much. Grain fields, meanwhile, had fairly low yield due to seasonal water shortages. The
island economy was fueled by both agriculture and pastoralism, which is the herding of livestock.
And this could lead to conflicts, as recorded in legal documents. Guards were hired for vineyards.
And the question of which olive tree was damaged by which sheep could be brought to arbitration.

(07:53):
While archaeology may have the most to tell us about the food people grew and ate in medieval
Europe, legal records can also be a good source for telling us about how they ate,
and things like how shared ovens were managed in urban areas. Religion also affected what
people ate and how it was prepared. Seville, in Spain, had Christian and Jewish butchers

(08:15):
as well as those who followed the laws of the majority Muslim population. The
halakhic laws of Judaism — often elaborated during the medieval period — covered both
what was eaten and how and when it was prepared. Elisheva Baumgarten, studying northern Europe,
has found charming evidence for a Christian woman lighting her Jewish neighbor’s fire when

(08:35):
she noticed it had gone out on the Sabbath. And for Christians, meanwhile, certain foods
were off the menu — at least theoretically — during all of Lent. And Advent. And Wednesdays,
and Fridays. The longer this list gets, the more significant that “theoretically” may seem. But
in monastic communities, this was strictly observed, which is part of what led to the

(08:56):
much-misunderstood medieval debate about whether the beaver, clearly a river-dwelling creature,
counted as a fish or not. This isn’t a case of medieval people not caring about animal taxonomy.
It’s a case of knowing whether or not you can legally stew that weird-looking beast during Lent.
One perhaps surprising source for what foods were available to people in medieval Europe is sets of

(09:19):
medical recommendations and recipes. Diet advice existed both for specific groups, like pilgrims
(don’t drink the water unless you’re absolutely sure it’s safe, and give your digestion time to
adjust to unfamiliar cuisines), for individuals, like kings (please, your grace, consider eating
less bacon, it’s bad for your health no matter how tasty it is) and for the general population, for

(09:42):
instance, in the famous Salernitan regimen, which took its name from the medical school of Salerno,

in southern Italy. This gives sound advice like:  get moderate exercise and sleep enough, as well (09:48):
undefined
as eat a variety of foods. Medieval medical theory meant that they didn’t follow the fads of modern
diet advice, which tends to label certain foods as either good or bad. According to medieval theory,
it really depended on a person’s individual balance of the four humors, which in turn could

(10:12):
be affected by age, gender, and temperament. Dark-colored meats were linked to melancholy,
for instance; whereas warming foods like red wine and ginger could help cheer you
up if you had a tendency to melancholy yourself. Color, as I mentioned above, was also linked to

ideas about food (10:29):
eating a bland diet of bread  and dairy was clearly abstemious. Contemporary
psychologists tell us that the color of food — and even the color of serving dishes — can affect our
perception of taste. But sensory perception is at least partially culturally defined,
so we can’t know the extent to which this was true for medieval people as well.

(10:53):
Apropos the advice for pilgrims not to drink potentially-unsafe water, I feel I
should make clear that the myth of people never drinking water in medieval Europe is just that:
a myth. It plays into a lot of other myths about medieval Europe: that it was dirty and irrational,
a place where nothing was safe and people were maybe drunk all the time. I actually once had a

(11:14):
student ask me if medieval Europe was the way it was because people were constantly buzzed.
Many assumptions there. And the answer is no. For one thing, the “small beer” or “small ale”
that most people in northern Europe regularly consumed was fermented for a few days at most,
and had a very low alcohol content. Watering wine was also common. And because of reading

(11:38):
a lot of legal disputes, I can say with complete certainty that people also really prized their
access to fresh well water, particularly in cities. So: did people often create fermented
drinks to make sure what they were drinking was safe? Yes. Was all water in medieval Europe

unsafe? No. There you go (11:53):
an actual yes/no  answer from a historian! It’s a miracle!
This takes me to a final set of myths about food in medieval Europe, and these are connected to

spices. Myth 1 (12:04):
medieval people just  used spices to cover up the taste of
spoiled food. For one thing, that sounds so gross. For another thing: even if it worked,
the idea that it was effective would only last until… maximally a couple of hours after the
first time someone tested out that theory. An infamous, often-quoted set of regulations says

(12:27):
that spoiled food from town markets can be given to the residents of hospitals. But this, too,

is one of those things that just makes no sense:  unless you assume that the people of medieval (12:33):
undefined
Europe actually were rational human beings, and go from there. And from there, saying: okay, people
very clearly cared about having strict regulations on food health and safety in the markets, and
cared about ensuring the continuity of hospitals, I think it makes perfect sense if what’s happening

(12:56):
here is the equivalent of a bakery donating day-old bread to a community food program. This
food may be past its medieval sell-by date, but it’s still useful, and it’s going to be
used. In hospitals, making sure that food was prepared in ways suitable to support people’s
health needs was the norm; they wouldn’t just be throwing rotten vegetables in the soup pot.
This takes us to perhaps the most elusive question about medieval food: what did it taste like?

(13:22):
We can reconstruct recipes, of course, but this can only get us so far. We know that
long-distance trade routes brought ginger and pepper and saffron into medieval Europe, but that
doesn’t in itself tell us details of how they were used. And crucially, to my mind, we don’t
know what the medieval palate was like. It wasn’t spoilt by the quantities of salt and sugar we’ve

(13:43):
been used to for… at least a hundred years or so now. And a lot of recipes don’t have the kinds of

measurements that would enable us to say (13:49):
this is  definitely what they meant by sweet, or spicy, or
sour. Moreover, while archaeologists can do work that shows us average soil fertility in places
that were under cultivation in medieval Europe, we can’t know details of how changes in soil
nutrients between then and now changed the nature of the food that was grown in that soil. Recent

(14:11):
comparisons between organic and conventional, intensive agriculture have shown us how dramatic
those changes can be, but that just leaves us with bigger questions, in some ways. So… I really wish
I could know what a medieval apple tasted like, fresh off the tree. Or a fig, or as many figs as I
could fit in a basket. Or spiced wine, or turnip stew, or the chicken and barley recipe that at

(14:34):
least one medieval hospital served to help people get over chest colds in the winter. And these are
all things that, alas, we can’t know. But we do know that people weren’t dependent on sad gruel.
This and all of our Footnoting History episodes are available captioned on
our YouTube channel. Thank you for listening and subscribing,

and until next time, remember (14:54):
the best  stories are always in the footnotes.