Okay, so imagine you are a person living in medieval England around the year 1100.You are a peasant, working a manor-field, and your back is hurting from constantly spading strips of hard-packed earth. You can see the manor-house in the distance, and you see the sun falling over towers and catapults made from stone. You’ve been working since the first slivers of pink sun broke the horizon this morning… now it is past mid-day and you’re starting to wonder what you will have for dinner. Already the smell of meat turning on a spit has wafted through the air. Your stomach churns.
In 1100, unfortunately, you were living on the edges of starvation. You could expect to reach your thirtieth birthday if you were fortunate; having survived many bleak, harsh winters you were adept at scavenging for things like nuts, berries, roots, herbs, nettles, and wild grasses. You probably also realized the importance of bark from the forest trees… this could be ground into a fine powder and mixed with your meager supplies of flour. Sometimes you would make a cake from this bark-flour and it would be warmed over a bed of hot rocks.
You were happily resistant to things like dirty water, tainted meat, molded bread, the cold, the heat, and (for the while, until 1348) fleas and rats. You lived close to the land, even if it was not yours, and aside from the “sport-hunting” of the nobility in the forests… you came to poach in those same wilds in order to preserve your very own existence.
If you were able to get meat it was usually in the form of rabbit or deer. (The word “venison” comes from the Latin root “venor” which means to hunt) You might choose to roast the rabbit or deer meat over a large spit; you might also choose to make a pie from the innards of the deer. Unlike your future generations of descendants, you were used to eating extremely lean meat. There was no real fat to be had, and you might count yourself lucky not to have a high cholesterol count.
Sometimes you might get a chicken… but poultry was reserved as a luxury food for the nobles, so you would have to take care in your poaching habits. The nobles were able to make a watery chicken broth and chicken soup from their stock. And you could smell it, sometimes, when you were working in the manor-fields. Probably best to turn to the teeming forests and look for things like pigeons and other game birds.
Bread was your mainstay, as long as there was enough grain to be harvested. And you also had a staple food with your pigs, as long as they remained fed on the grains you could give them.
You might also catch a fish now and then, and things like eels, pikes, minnows and lampreys were common. These were more like slimy snakes with the raw taste of oil and water, but you might find a way to eat them when mixed with your flour cakes.
You might also find a very able way of complimenting foods when you considered the common drinks known as “Mead” and “Ale.” If you preferred Mead (and who doesn’t) you were taking in very sweet mixture of fermented honey and water. Mead was also made with things like clove, ginger, and various fruits or berries that could be found. If you preferred Ale, you were drinking a beverage that was safer, even, than water. Grains could be mixed with water and soaked for days to make the brew, and like Mead, mixtures of herbs could be added. Because of the natural fermentation processes, these mixtures tended to have a powerful alcoholic punch.
The nobles may have had wine, but you preferred your Mead and Ale with your buffet of rabbit roast, deer pie, eel, and flour cakes. Wine was kept in rotting wooden barrels, anyway, and the thick, almost meal-like consistency was not the way to wash down your dinner. Not after you’d spent the whole day toiling in the manor-fields, right?
