Lesson 1: What people ate and when
Travel, regions and medieval food
When people travelled, they brought ideas home. Crusaders brought brighter colours into England, for instance, and introduced some useful spices e.g. cardamom. When people went on pilgrimages, or travelled as merchants, they would taste local food from the place they were staying, and might learn how to make it, or decide to cook something that looked or tasted a bit similar. These dishes appear in surviving recipe books because they were often luxury dishes – made for special occasions.
If you lived in great trading cities like London or Paris, some of these luxury ingredients would be more readily available and cheaper. Likewise if you lived at an important port (Marseilles, or Dover) or near the site of one of the great fairs (e.g. the Champagne fairs). The further you lived from any of these places, the less exotic ingredients would feature in your cooking and the more dependent you would be on local ingredients.
This gives medieval Europe its great variations in cuisines – the sense of locality and the dependence on what grew where and when. Northern Europe was more bread based. They enjoyed their dairy food, preferred beef to mutton and, except for the Jewish population, loved their pork. The main alcoholic drinks were cider and ale, with wine being a luxury beverage. Salads were eaten in England, but were not much admired.
In the south, the main grain was wheat –with most bread being wheat-based. Many people drank wine, because the climate encouraged grapes. Vegetables, nuts, fish and eggs were important staples. Olive oil and olives were common – but butter and dairy products less so. Lettuce salads were popular in summer, especially in the south of France and in Spain. In fact, Jews often had a salad as a Saturday afternoon snack in Spain.
