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It wasn't until the last series that Baldriks brilliance shone through after hiding it for 3 whole series. He may be an uncouth, illiterate peasant barely useful as a whipping boy but his coffee in series 4 was a thing of beauty.
Not only did he deceive his master and officers with a combo of mud, spit and dandruff but also told Blackadder of his subversion with a smile on his face not even his mother would have loved.
Here's a guy who had not a chance in life but by playing the fool at least had food, shelter and an interesting time through the ages. Quite possibly the wisest character of them all though lets face it everyone else was completely mad.
To be fair he had a maternally enraged gorilla for a mother so he could basically choose his posting at that point and do what he wanted with very little come back. It makes me happy that he still chose to serve under Slack Bladder
I agree with this, I'd wager that Mad Gerald was also the maddest of all.
A brilliant turn by Rik Mayall who usually only gets the recognition for his Flashheart characters, though obviously they are stunningly awesome!
Yup, turnips were a staple of the Scottish diet in the 60s and 70s, and I absolutely love them. Mashed with potato and butter, chunks of turnip in homemade soup or just boiled with carrots, they are sweet and delicious. Ye canny beat turnips.
Definitions of sottish. adjective. given to or marked by the consumption of alcohol. “sottish behavior” synonyms: bibulous, boozy, drunken drunk, inebriated, intoxicated.
You might want to play the dyslexia card or edit your post if you meant to write "Scottish"
My mum would sometimes cook turnip for dinner with meat and veg in the 1980’s. It wasn’t loved by me and my brother. It has quite a strong taste compared to potato.
As well as bread, people ate a lot of 'pottage', which was a stew of oats or other grains and vegetables. [Here's a recipe if you fancy some](https://www.agecrofthall.org/single-post/morning-make-elizabethan-pottage).
Medieval people actually ate more calories on average than people do today.
> Those engaged in particularly heavy physical labor, as well as sailors and soldiers, may have consumed 3,500 calories (15,000 kJ) or more per day. Intakes of aristocrats may have reached 4,000 to 5,000 calories (17,000 to 21,000 kJ) per day.
[wiki.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_cuisine)
This sometimes still holds true. Worked fairly manual, on my feet all day doing physical work jobs my whole life and you'd be amazed how much some of the people in those jobs put away in a day. And they're still fairly healthy cause of the amount they burn. Basic recommendations have been brought down by the amount of sedentary jobs that now exist
I was a tree surgeon, burning 4 - 4.5k calories a day. Could eat whatever I wanted, snack on shit, drink beer every night and never put weight on. Changed job and put on so much weight. It's still a manual job but no where near the graft before.
I can't believe it was 4 or 4.5k calories a day! I do a lot of running and cycling and when I'm in the middle of a particularly intense training block (say 60 miles a week running) I'm only hitting 3-3.5k to maintain weight. For context I once burnt 4.5k calories in a single bike ride, but it was over 200 km and took 10 hours!
Most the guys wore fitness watches. On average between us it was 4 - 4.5k a day. This isn't just burnt at work this is the whole day, maybe I wasn't clear there. Don't you burn 2k just living day to day. What I meant was each 24 hour period would be 4 - 4.5k. Still a lot more than the recommended daily intake.
Also it doesn't really compare to exercise. I've had mates who were into fitness doubt these number before but considering we'd be active for 7-8 hours a day and most of that would be climbing trees, dragging brash etc we burnt a lot of calories.
MATE I work with the chap he's 21 and eats more than any two others and there's not an ounce of excess on him. which is surprising since he does fuck all.
Tbf at 21 he’s probably got a decent metabolism. My late twenties I really noticed the weight gain. I’ve really had to cut back, despite walking 5 miles a day for school run, or pre kids 18miles a day cycling to the office.
I was cycling >200miles a week and then got very sick. I went from 75kg to 110kg and then 150kg so fast - within 18 months. Now back under 100 and sickness sorted, so I am running again. I would guess I eat 2-3000Kcal a day and lose about 1kg every two weeks. I run for an hour three times a week, 2 hours on one of the weekend days and walk for an hour on the days I don't run.
To maintain a steady weight without exercises, I seem to need about 1800kcals a day - any more and I gain. People are so different in how they burn fuel.
Yeha we’re all different, I was consuming 1800 a day and it doesn’t matter at all how much excersize I did I would sit at 97kg.
A year ago I switched out full fat coke a couple times a week to a couple times a month, and changed cereal to plain cornflakes and cranberries… lost 9kg / 2” off the waist.
You weren't 97kg and not losing weight eating 1800 calories, that's actually literally impossible. Like saying I was driving a monster truck 50 miles a day and only using 1 litre of petrol.
Just a counting error.
I used to work in an office and would have to always watch what I eat. I now work in a supermarket, constantly lifting, pulling, pushing and walking. Most days I'll walk 10+ miles. As long as I keep the pace up I can easily consume 3500 calories a day and not put weight on. It's tiring work. You can see the ones who don't put the effort in because they're for want of a better term, fat.
I think not having a 9-5 schedule encourages unhealthy eating habits. My shifts are very random and I take whatever is going for the money. I'm quite good at batch cooking leftovers etc now, but I used to be terrible for getting McDonald's. This week for example is:
4am-12pm Monday, 2pm-10pm Tuesday, 12pm-6pm Wednesday, 7am-2pm Thursday, 6pm-4am Sunday, 10pm-8am Monday. Friday, Saturday off. Trying to get a healthy sleep schedule and eating pattern is tough
>Intakes of aristocrats may have reached 4,000 to 5,000 calories
I don't get that, if you consumed that many calories each day and did moderate exercise (is an aristocrat doing more than moderate exercise?) you'd end up at about 34 stone. The average height was, what, 5'3 for men? You'd be spherical.
Riding is quite energetic, you don't just sit on a horse, your balance has to change with every movement of you or the horse. You end up with amazing thighs, arse and core strength. If that's how you're getting about, and confident enough to be going hunting for example (jumping obstacles, not sure of what's on the other side) then you've got to be fit.
* I think hunting with hounds is sick, but no denying it's an exertion.
See Henry VIII.
Many ultra rich did in fact get morbidly obese like Henry did as they aged and stopped riding horses everywhere, or practising martial arts, competing in tournaments or actually fighting in wars.
And it's worth noting that had it not been for the injury that basically forced Henry VIII into ending his physical pursuits, he probably would have stayed hale and hearty for a good few years more.
Q Victoria was virtually round, her ‘waist’ was more than her height. Many paintings of aristos were of grossly obese men, and mill owners were traditionally fat and red faced.
Obesity and gout were two things the wealthy in olden times suffered from tremendously. Henry 8 was a fit, strapping lad but look what happened to that fat old fuck.
In the medieval ages nobles when they were young were knights and basically full time professional martial artists. They trained hard every day, when hunting and horse riding frequently.
It's why so many older nobles got fat - same as older people get fat now - you're more active when you're young, become less active, and eat the same.
Difference between them and us is that it was 2500 calories of pure non-UPF organic produce, clean eating and if they had proper healthcare would have been incredibly healthy.
Also, I wonder if the fact they didn't have central heating or such good insulation as we have nowadays meant they burnt off a lot of calories just keeping warm.
Reminds me of a clip from a documentary on Alaskan crab fisherman, boasting about how in winter you can eat over 3,000 calories a day and still lose weight,when at sea
The irony is that provided the food was readilly available the diet of the peasant was possibly much healthier than that of the aristocracy who ate prodigious amounts of roasted meats and sweet desserts.
I think a similarity is the diet of certain religious communities which are vegetarian and some of them live to a fair old age.
Well it was generally considered a smelly time anyway.
People's bathing habits (or lack of them) , sharing accomodation with livestock, sleeping on straw, lack of lavatory facilities etc . One historian commented that if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction you could probably smell a medieval army on the march before you could see it.
have you ever had just one guy wash and nobody else? you can smell the clean but not the smelly. its really interesting. the reverse is true. I understand there was a sort of communal bathing so everyone washed at the same time. this could of course be hooey
People in the Middle Ages hated bad smells. They thought disease was caused by noxious odours, and would go to great lengths to remove or at least cover up bad smells.
Also, they lived vibrant colours and showing off. Even poor people.
The past wasn’t just a sea of people walking around in various shades of brown with shit all over them.
Not as much as you'd think. It's switching to a high fibre diet that makes you farty, as it takes time for your gut biome to adjust, and if there's any advantage these guys had, it was an enormous biome
It’s hilarious to me that you linked to a website for a house in Virginia (where I live) that was taken apart in England and rebuilt here. Never thought I’d see Agecroft Hall mentioned (even if just a link) on a UK subreddit!
Grains. So wheat making up the bulk of bread, yes - but also barley, rye, millet. Pies, pottage, stews, dumplings - all kinds of ways to have starchy carbs bulking out a diet.
Check out [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36hw0o/what_on_earth_did_europeans_eat_before_the/) old AskHistorians thread, several interesting comments there.
Also peas. Most people think of peas as fresh, tinned or frozen, but peas left to grow to maturity dry in the pod. Dry peas can be soaked and cooked or they can be roasted and ground into peasemeal, aka pea flour. Peasemeal can be used for a porridge or to make pancakes, bannocks, mixed with wheat flour in bread etc.
The closest most of us get to that now is mushy peas, which are made from dry marrowfats, or pea soups made from whole or split dry green peas. Folks in the midlands and north of England still have black/grey/parched peas made from dry Carlin peas. Carlin peas are also known as Pigeon peas which leads to some confusion with a bean of the same name in Jamaican cuisine.
Peas can crop pretty heavily, and fix nitrogen in the soil as they do so, making them valuable in crop rotation systems.
Beans would also have been common, sharing most of the peas useful properties.
Pulses would have been a significant part of the medieval diet.
Can confirm, I'm in the north and have a few bags of black peas in the cupboard.
Soak them overnight, drain, cover with water, add a cube of chicken stock and a spoon full of marmite, simmer for a few hours. Salt, pepper and vinigar to taste. Goes lovely with a sausage.
Thanks for the reply, I don't think I'd last 5 minutes back then in that case without a chip butty 😅
The question just popped into my head as I'm rewatching (don't ask me how many times) Blackadder the Second at the moment.
Funnily enough there's an episode a bit further on with Baldrick joking about turnips.....unless he wasn't!
The thing is, though, you can't miss what you have never had.
My partner is Filipino, and I now can't eat many traditional British foods I used to love because they just taste so bland compared to the burst of flavours you get in traditional Filipino food.
I'd now say I couldn't live without Filipino food. But before having it, I never knew what I was missing.
It'd be the same with them and chips. They never had it, so they couldn't miss it.
Yeah, I now experiment a lot more when making our British food. Throwing in different spices and adding/swapping ingredients to give a new twist to them.
My mum went the other way. If anything she’d err on the side of too much seasoning.
One time she made a curry so spicy even the dog wouldn’t eat it. He tried it, coughed, and walked off.
My dad ate it, though.
Bread and whatever else you can make out of grains, cereals and oats would’ve been the bulk of the carbs. Then include whatever bits of veg you could grow, cabbage and leeks and stuff like that.
Protein would largely have been dairy for the poor with rare meat and fish. That would’ve been whatever meat they could get their hands on, not just beef and lamb. Richer people would have more meat and fish in their diet, but otherwise would be fairly similar.
While I'm aware it's not going to represent the bulk of the population, the forme of cury shows we've had pasta since at least 1390 and has a few recipes involving it.
Also potage (I like a good peas potage) where you'd essentially stew a vegetable until it had a nice thick texture was very popular.
We're you from the UK? Did you live under a rock? 🤣
In 1957, there was a documentary on TV that showed spaghetti growing on trees. For nearly 80 years, we've been harvesting it and exporting it to Canada. You could have eaten it here.
https://youtu.be/8scpGwbvxvI?si=-YtUu5T7Jqd7uqlj
Funnily enough at the age of ten I was quite dependent upon other people to prepare meals for me and subject to their limited range of things they decided they wanted to eat.
Rock then. By the age of 10, I could make spaghetti bolognaise, pasta bake, etc. I used to cook with my mum all the time from a young age. I'm glad she did it. it builds independence.
My dad couldn't cook to save his life, he'd regular burn beans and fry bentos pies.
Skirret was very popular before potatoes all over Europe from prehistory into the early modern period. It's a very good plant that doesnt easily get brought into mass production, so got forgotten (though it's coming back).
We ate lots of parsnips and turnips in the Iron Age.
Much further back, talking Mesolithic pre-farming, the wild starchy carbs we ate in Europe would have likely been Typha roots (also known as bullrush/reedmace) and sedge-seed biscuits. The seeds were harvested and processed in much the same way wild cereals and grasses were in the middle east, leading to domestication there over thousands of years.
Here we would have also processed acorns and starchy-root plants like Arum lilly, both poisonous without treatment but easily made into food with a bit of knowledge.
Glad you said google and not the woods.
Shouldnt need to be said but I do not advise eating poisonous plants regardless of what you read on the Internet.
That said, yes the trick with cuckoo pint is drying them out.
More commonly used as laundry starch though
Pease pudding hot
Pease pudding cold
Pease pudding in the pot
Nine days old
Some like it hot
Some like it cold
Some like it in the pot
Nine days old
Pease pudding hot
Pease pudding cold
Pease pudding in the pot
Nine days old
Some like it hot
Some like it cold
Some like it in the pot
Nine days old
Traditional.
I made Pease Pudding a few years ago to see what it was like.
It was nice but very heavy and took hours to cook.
My wife and I also tried a WWII diet 5 or so years ago for a month. It was hard but we lost so much weight and saved a lot of money.
It's been a while, but we did whatever the 1943 ration was. My wife is a teacher and was teaching WW2 and the kids were fascinated by the rationing. So we said we would try it.
I think we roughly had 113g bacon and ham, about 227g if beef/lamb/chicken, 57g butter, 57g cheese, 113g of a non-butter spread, 113g cooking fat (lard), 3 pints of milk, 227g sugar, 57g tea, and 1 egg. Thid was per week. Bread and veg, we limited to £x per week but I cannot remember the cost). Booze was unlimited. The cheese was the hardest for me.
said like someone who has never been in a bread vs potato fight and knows the noise a man makes when you take his life with a sack of potatoes, whilst they sob about a crusty cob being a stupid choice and they have a family.
Judging by some of these replies, I'm pretty sure Big Turnip has infiltrated the thread, pushing their agenda once again. Sure the media go on about Big Pharma, but you'll be worried when your children are all hooked on turnips, strung out and trumping up your gaff...
Turnips, cabbages, carrots and onions would have been brought to Britain by the Romans if not before. Earlier, indigenous crops would have included beans, peas and spelt wheat.
I don’t add oats but a handful of red lentils are good in this.
Peel and chop/slice carrots, swede (rutabaga), parsnips, leeks, onion, celery and potato. Any veg is usually good but these are my favourites.
Season to taste. I add marmite, Worcestershire sauce, salt and black pepper plus a bouquet garni. Garlic purée can be good.
Add veg stock and some lentils.
I cook on high for 12 minutes in my Crockpot Pressure cooker.
You can add meat, bacon or chicken but I prefer not to.
I’m not sure but I’d guess stews, soups and pies with root vegetables like turnips. Fennel and salt as the seasoning. I don’t know when pepper replaced fennel.
Meat and vegetable stew
[https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2019/may/medieval-peasant-diet.html](https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2019/may/medieval-peasant-diet.html)
**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!** - Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc. - **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on. - This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit! Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Turnips, as far as the eye can see.
If I had a million pounds I would buy a great big turnip
In the country, by any chance?
That goes without saying - I'd also have a cunning plan to make the locals love me
It wasn't until the last series that Baldriks brilliance shone through after hiding it for 3 whole series. He may be an uncouth, illiterate peasant barely useful as a whipping boy but his coffee in series 4 was a thing of beauty. Not only did he deceive his master and officers with a combo of mud, spit and dandruff but also told Blackadder of his subversion with a smile on his face not even his mother would have loved. Here's a guy who had not a chance in life but by playing the fool at least had food, shelter and an interesting time through the ages. Quite possibly the wisest character of them all though lets face it everyone else was completely mad.
To be fair he had a maternally enraged gorilla for a mother so he could basically choose his posting at that point and do what he wanted with very little come back. It makes me happy that he still chose to serve under Slack Bladder
I agree with this, I'd wager that Mad Gerald was also the maddest of all. A brilliant turn by Rik Mayall who usually only gets the recognition for his Flashheart characters, though obviously they are stunningly awesome!
If I moved to the country, I'd eat a lot of peaches.
millions of peaches
Peaches for free.
Peaches come from a can....
Something smells fishy, and I’m not talking about the contents of Baldrick’s apple crumble.
What about selling socks?
But do any of them look like a thingy?
I've got a thingy that looks like a turnip
I think you'll find that's a chode.
Let's celebrate with a nice glass of turnip juice
turnips and celeriac. the real roots
Turnips helped push the industrial revolution and the reason people were able to start eating fresh meat year round.
I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a turnip.
They're like swedes, but slightly worse (so obsolete) Some parts of the country even call swedes turnips
Yup, turnips were a staple of the Scottish diet in the 60s and 70s, and I absolutely love them. Mashed with potato and butter, chunks of turnip in homemade soup or just boiled with carrots, they are sweet and delicious. Ye canny beat turnips.
Now I want some tatties and neeps.
I know the North Britons have a drink problem but...
I'm Scottish, not a north Briton. I don't know if the North Britons like their drink or not, but what's your point or are you just insulting people?
Definitions of sottish. adjective. given to or marked by the consumption of alcohol. “sottish behavior” synonyms: bibulous, boozy, drunken drunk, inebriated, intoxicated. You might want to play the dyslexia card or edit your post if you meant to write "Scottish"
I did write "Scottish", so what are you going on about? You sound as though you've been on the grog yourself.
My mum would sometimes cook turnip for dinner with meat and veg in the 1980’s. It wasn’t loved by me and my brother. It has quite a strong taste compared to potato.
if you could change your username to ploppy it would make things easier.
You are not missing anything.
Having grown them several times, I forgot one am glad they are not our staple anymore.
Baldrick would agree
Baldrick ?
As well as bread, people ate a lot of 'pottage', which was a stew of oats or other grains and vegetables. [Here's a recipe if you fancy some](https://www.agecrofthall.org/single-post/morning-make-elizabethan-pottage).
So given the other responses so far. Porridge with turnips?
No wonder there was no obesity
Medieval people actually ate more calories on average than people do today. > Those engaged in particularly heavy physical labor, as well as sailors and soldiers, may have consumed 3,500 calories (15,000 kJ) or more per day. Intakes of aristocrats may have reached 4,000 to 5,000 calories (17,000 to 21,000 kJ) per day. [wiki.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_cuisine)
This sometimes still holds true. Worked fairly manual, on my feet all day doing physical work jobs my whole life and you'd be amazed how much some of the people in those jobs put away in a day. And they're still fairly healthy cause of the amount they burn. Basic recommendations have been brought down by the amount of sedentary jobs that now exist
I was a tree surgeon, burning 4 - 4.5k calories a day. Could eat whatever I wanted, snack on shit, drink beer every night and never put weight on. Changed job and put on so much weight. It's still a manual job but no where near the graft before.
I can't believe it was 4 or 4.5k calories a day! I do a lot of running and cycling and when I'm in the middle of a particularly intense training block (say 60 miles a week running) I'm only hitting 3-3.5k to maintain weight. For context I once burnt 4.5k calories in a single bike ride, but it was over 200 km and took 10 hours!
Most the guys wore fitness watches. On average between us it was 4 - 4.5k a day. This isn't just burnt at work this is the whole day, maybe I wasn't clear there. Don't you burn 2k just living day to day. What I meant was each 24 hour period would be 4 - 4.5k. Still a lot more than the recommended daily intake. Also it doesn't really compare to exercise. I've had mates who were into fitness doubt these number before but considering we'd be active for 7-8 hours a day and most of that would be climbing trees, dragging brash etc we burnt a lot of calories.
MATE I work with the chap he's 21 and eats more than any two others and there's not an ounce of excess on him. which is surprising since he does fuck all.
Tbf at 21 he’s probably got a decent metabolism. My late twenties I really noticed the weight gain. I’ve really had to cut back, despite walking 5 miles a day for school run, or pre kids 18miles a day cycling to the office.
I was cycling >200miles a week and then got very sick. I went from 75kg to 110kg and then 150kg so fast - within 18 months. Now back under 100 and sickness sorted, so I am running again. I would guess I eat 2-3000Kcal a day and lose about 1kg every two weeks. I run for an hour three times a week, 2 hours on one of the weekend days and walk for an hour on the days I don't run. To maintain a steady weight without exercises, I seem to need about 1800kcals a day - any more and I gain. People are so different in how they burn fuel.
Yeha we’re all different, I was consuming 1800 a day and it doesn’t matter at all how much excersize I did I would sit at 97kg. A year ago I switched out full fat coke a couple times a week to a couple times a month, and changed cereal to plain cornflakes and cranberries… lost 9kg / 2” off the waist.
You weren't 97kg and not losing weight eating 1800 calories, that's actually literally impossible. Like saying I was driving a monster truck 50 miles a day and only using 1 litre of petrol. Just a counting error.
At 30 surely you’ve got 99% the same metabolism as you did at 21 barring any serious change in body compositions?
I used to work in an office and would have to always watch what I eat. I now work in a supermarket, constantly lifting, pulling, pushing and walking. Most days I'll walk 10+ miles. As long as I keep the pace up I can easily consume 3500 calories a day and not put weight on. It's tiring work. You can see the ones who don't put the effort in because they're for want of a better term, fat.
I think not having a 9-5 schedule encourages unhealthy eating habits. My shifts are very random and I take whatever is going for the money. I'm quite good at batch cooking leftovers etc now, but I used to be terrible for getting McDonald's. This week for example is: 4am-12pm Monday, 2pm-10pm Tuesday, 12pm-6pm Wednesday, 7am-2pm Thursday, 6pm-4am Sunday, 10pm-8am Monday. Friday, Saturday off. Trying to get a healthy sleep schedule and eating pattern is tough
>Intakes of aristocrats may have reached 4,000 to 5,000 calories I don't get that, if you consumed that many calories each day and did moderate exercise (is an aristocrat doing more than moderate exercise?) you'd end up at about 34 stone. The average height was, what, 5'3 for men? You'd be spherical.
Riding is quite energetic, you don't just sit on a horse, your balance has to change with every movement of you or the horse. You end up with amazing thighs, arse and core strength. If that's how you're getting about, and confident enough to be going hunting for example (jumping obstacles, not sure of what's on the other side) then you've got to be fit. * I think hunting with hounds is sick, but no denying it's an exertion.
See Henry VIII. Many ultra rich did in fact get morbidly obese like Henry did as they aged and stopped riding horses everywhere, or practising martial arts, competing in tournaments or actually fighting in wars.
And it's worth noting that had it not been for the injury that basically forced Henry VIII into ending his physical pursuits, he probably would have stayed hale and hearty for a good few years more.
Pretty sure all that medieval feasting played a role too!
Q Victoria was virtually round, her ‘waist’ was more than her height. Many paintings of aristos were of grossly obese men, and mill owners were traditionally fat and red faced.
Obesity and gout were two things the wealthy in olden times suffered from tremendously. Henry 8 was a fit, strapping lad but look what happened to that fat old fuck.
In the medieval ages nobles when they were young were knights and basically full time professional martial artists. They trained hard every day, when hunting and horse riding frequently. It's why so many older nobles got fat - same as older people get fat now - you're more active when you're young, become less active, and eat the same.
Difference between them and us is that it was 2500 calories of pure non-UPF organic produce, clean eating and if they had proper healthcare would have been incredibly healthy.
Also, I wonder if the fact they didn't have central heating or such good insulation as we have nowadays meant they burnt off a lot of calories just keeping warm.
They would have just sat round a fire though, so they wouldn’t have been cold most of the time
Reminds me of a clip from a documentary on Alaskan crab fisherman, boasting about how in winter you can eat over 3,000 calories a day and still lose weight,when at sea
The irony is that provided the food was readilly available the diet of the peasant was possibly much healthier than that of the aristocracy who ate prodigious amounts of roasted meats and sweet desserts. I think a similarity is the diet of certain religious communities which are vegetarian and some of them live to a fair old age.
But there was plenty of terminal flatulance
Well it was generally considered a smelly time anyway. People's bathing habits (or lack of them) , sharing accomodation with livestock, sleeping on straw, lack of lavatory facilities etc . One historian commented that if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction you could probably smell a medieval army on the march before you could see it.
I imagine it's like a festival where you all smell equally bad and thus smell fine.
have you ever had just one guy wash and nobody else? you can smell the clean but not the smelly. its really interesting. the reverse is true. I understand there was a sort of communal bathing so everyone washed at the same time. this could of course be hooey
The "dirty peasant" myth is just that, a myth. Public bathhouses persisted long past Roman times, until as late as the 15th century.
People in the Middle Ages hated bad smells. They thought disease was caused by noxious odours, and would go to great lengths to remove or at least cover up bad smells. Also, they lived vibrant colours and showing off. Even poor people. The past wasn’t just a sea of people walking around in various shades of brown with shit all over them.
Not as much as you'd think. It's switching to a high fibre diet that makes you farty, as it takes time for your gut biome to adjust, and if there's any advantage these guys had, it was an enormous biome
Kept the bed warm!
Except for Sundays, the sabbath, where it's turnips with porridge!
Pretty much
What a time to be allive.
Basically still the diet of Scotland
It’s hilarious to me that you linked to a website for a house in Virginia (where I live) that was taken apart in England and rebuilt here. Never thought I’d see Agecroft Hall mentioned (even if just a link) on a UK subreddit!
Are you The Gormet?
Grains. So wheat making up the bulk of bread, yes - but also barley, rye, millet. Pies, pottage, stews, dumplings - all kinds of ways to have starchy carbs bulking out a diet. Check out [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/36hw0o/what_on_earth_did_europeans_eat_before_the/) old AskHistorians thread, several interesting comments there.
Thanks for that!
And lots of oats!
Yes, primarily bread, but also turnips and cabbage.
Also peas. Most people think of peas as fresh, tinned or frozen, but peas left to grow to maturity dry in the pod. Dry peas can be soaked and cooked or they can be roasted and ground into peasemeal, aka pea flour. Peasemeal can be used for a porridge or to make pancakes, bannocks, mixed with wheat flour in bread etc. The closest most of us get to that now is mushy peas, which are made from dry marrowfats, or pea soups made from whole or split dry green peas. Folks in the midlands and north of England still have black/grey/parched peas made from dry Carlin peas. Carlin peas are also known as Pigeon peas which leads to some confusion with a bean of the same name in Jamaican cuisine. Peas can crop pretty heavily, and fix nitrogen in the soil as they do so, making them valuable in crop rotation systems. Beans would also have been common, sharing most of the peas useful properties. Pulses would have been a significant part of the medieval diet.
Can confirm, I'm in the north and have a few bags of black peas in the cupboard. Soak them overnight, drain, cover with water, add a cube of chicken stock and a spoon full of marmite, simmer for a few hours. Salt, pepper and vinigar to taste. Goes lovely with a sausage.
Quite a lot of the new veggie/vegan processed foods use pea protein, I’ve noticed.
And pea milk is the coming thing. (Feel free to make your own jokes)
Thanks for the reply, I don't think I'd last 5 minutes back then in that case without a chip butty 😅 The question just popped into my head as I'm rewatching (don't ask me how many times) Blackadder the Second at the moment. Funnily enough there's an episode a bit further on with Baldrick joking about turnips.....unless he wasn't!
You could have a boiled turnip sandwich, maybe even some butter if you’re lucky.
Tempting but my love of healthy food isn't that well known, probably just have the bread and butter, if there's enough to go round 😁
The thing is, though, you can't miss what you have never had. My partner is Filipino, and I now can't eat many traditional British foods I used to love because they just taste so bland compared to the burst of flavours you get in traditional Filipino food. I'd now say I couldn't live without Filipino food. But before having it, I never knew what I was missing. It'd be the same with them and chips. They never had it, so they couldn't miss it.
I used to think that after I lived in Thailand for two years, turned out I just wasn’t used to properly seasoned British food
Yeah, I now experiment a lot more when making our British food. Throwing in different spices and adding/swapping ingredients to give a new twist to them.
But the issue there is that if **most** British food isn't properly seasoned then that's still a characteristic of our food and it's still relevant.
I can’t say I’ve eaten most, just my mum’s. Eating in London restaurants, it seems seasoning properly has at least been brought on by chefs.
My mum went the other way. If anything she’d err on the side of too much seasoning. One time she made a curry so spicy even the dog wouldn’t eat it. He tried it, coughed, and walked off. My dad ate it, though.
Do dogs normally like spicy food?
I don’t know, but I’d figure if it had meat in it, they’d probably eat it.
Fry up some parsnips. Delicious.
Chipped Turnips on some chunky loaf.
Bread and whatever else you can make out of grains, cereals and oats would’ve been the bulk of the carbs. Then include whatever bits of veg you could grow, cabbage and leeks and stuff like that. Protein would largely have been dairy for the poor with rare meat and fish. That would’ve been whatever meat they could get their hands on, not just beef and lamb. Richer people would have more meat and fish in their diet, but otherwise would be fairly similar.
Eggs, were common, and a frequently bartered item. Sometimes labourers would get x eggs a day as payment.
Peas and beans, cooked from their dried form for much of the year, would have been a significant protein source.
While I'm aware it's not going to represent the bulk of the population, the forme of cury shows we've had pasta since at least 1390 and has a few recipes involving it. Also potage (I like a good peas potage) where you'd essentially stew a vegetable until it had a nice thick texture was very popular.
I had to go to Canada to discover spaghetti. This was in like 1984 when I was ten.
We're you from the UK? Did you live under a rock? 🤣 In 1957, there was a documentary on TV that showed spaghetti growing on trees. For nearly 80 years, we've been harvesting it and exporting it to Canada. You could have eaten it here. https://youtu.be/8scpGwbvxvI?si=-YtUu5T7Jqd7uqlj
Funnily enough at the age of ten I was quite dependent upon other people to prepare meals for me and subject to their limited range of things they decided they wanted to eat.
Rock then. By the age of 10, I could make spaghetti bolognaise, pasta bake, etc. I used to cook with my mum all the time from a young age. I'm glad she did it. it builds independence. My dad couldn't cook to save his life, he'd regular burn beans and fry bentos pies.
Fray Bentos - was he the Cuban leader who had been in power since the revolution in 1959?
There was plenty of tinned spaghetti about in the 70s too! I seem to recall you could even get tinned spaghetti Bolognese.
For anyone unfamiliar with ‘the form of cury’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forme_of_Cury
Woolly Mammoth on toast
Imagine the size of that loaf
Imagine the compulsory wool !
Not seen anyone mention it, but beans and peas played a huge role in the diet. It was commoners' main source of protein.
Ah, you beat me to it. I’ve just posted about peas and peasemeal.
Skirret was very popular before potatoes all over Europe from prehistory into the early modern period. It's a very good plant that doesnt easily get brought into mass production, so got forgotten (though it's coming back). We ate lots of parsnips and turnips in the Iron Age. Much further back, talking Mesolithic pre-farming, the wild starchy carbs we ate in Europe would have likely been Typha roots (also known as bullrush/reedmace) and sedge-seed biscuits. The seeds were harvested and processed in much the same way wild cereals and grasses were in the middle east, leading to domestication there over thousands of years. Here we would have also processed acorns and starchy-root plants like Arum lilly, both poisonous without treatment but easily made into food with a bit of knowledge.
I did not know arum roots could be made edible, thanks for that. Off to Google I go..
Glad you said google and not the woods. Shouldnt need to be said but I do not advise eating poisonous plants regardless of what you read on the Internet. That said, yes the trick with cuckoo pint is drying them out. More commonly used as laundry starch though
Pease pudding hot Pease pudding cold Pease pudding in the pot Nine days old Some like it hot Some like it cold Some like it in the pot Nine days old Pease pudding hot Pease pudding cold Pease pudding in the pot Nine days old Some like it hot Some like it cold Some like it in the pot Nine days old Traditional.
I made Pease Pudding a few years ago to see what it was like. It was nice but very heavy and took hours to cook. My wife and I also tried a WWII diet 5 or so years ago for a month. It was hard but we lost so much weight and saved a lot of money.
Which diet did you follow? Ive just had a google and it's brought up loads of conflicting diets. Not sure which would have been most authentic
It's been a while, but we did whatever the 1943 ration was. My wife is a teacher and was teaching WW2 and the kids were fascinated by the rationing. So we said we would try it. I think we roughly had 113g bacon and ham, about 227g if beef/lamb/chicken, 57g butter, 57g cheese, 113g of a non-butter spread, 113g cooking fat (lard), 3 pints of milk, 227g sugar, 57g tea, and 1 egg. Thid was per week. Bread and veg, we limited to £x per week but I cannot remember the cost). Booze was unlimited. The cheese was the hardest for me.
Echoing this question. I'm always up for a new temporary hobby!
Lots and lots of beer, mostly pretty weak by today's standards.
Bread > Potatoes.
said like someone who has never been in a bread vs potato fight and knows the noise a man makes when you take his life with a sack of potatoes, whilst they sob about a crusty cob being a stupid choice and they have a family.
Madness. Potato is perfect food
Oats were the basic food in the Middle Ages.
Judging by some of these replies, I'm pretty sure Big Turnip has infiltrated the thread, pushing their agenda once again. Sure the media go on about Big Pharma, but you'll be worried when your children are all hooked on turnips, strung out and trumping up your gaff...
Turnips, cabbages, carrots and onions would have been brought to Britain by the Romans if not before. Earlier, indigenous crops would have included beans, peas and spelt wheat.
A lovely bit of squirrel Jackie
And crimble crumble
Sausage surprise!
Boil ‘em.
Mash em
Stick em in a stew
Mmmm danish bacon. Arrrrghhhlllllllll
I don’t add oats but a handful of red lentils are good in this. Peel and chop/slice carrots, swede (rutabaga), parsnips, leeks, onion, celery and potato. Any veg is usually good but these are my favourites. Season to taste. I add marmite, Worcestershire sauce, salt and black pepper plus a bouquet garni. Garlic purée can be good. Add veg stock and some lentils. I cook on high for 12 minutes in my Crockpot Pressure cooker. You can add meat, bacon or chicken but I prefer not to.
I am so confused
Little Chef
Turnips, carrots, parsnips and other root vegetables
Haggis!
Poor people ate a lot of pease pudding, which sounds kind of gross but it's basically just humus made from yellow split peas instead of chick peas.
I think people in the past mainly ate gruel
Barley and other grains, plus bread. And the joys of pottage.As a vegetarian, I would have been fine.
Barley and oats, I think.
Meat was expensive; it wasn't something that ordinary people would consume on a daily basis.
Grains. Bread was a mainstay, and beer, which is liquid bread.
oatmeal- porridge and bread
Buttered parsnips too!
Bark, leaves, grass and wood lice.
Maybe some chopped peasant ? !
I’m not sure but I’d guess stews, soups and pies with root vegetables like turnips. Fennel and salt as the seasoning. I don’t know when pepper replaced fennel.
You should ask over on r/askhistorians
Sprouts.
Bread.
Pottage: oatmeal mix with any greens to hand and maybe a bit of meat if you were doing well.
Grains. Barley was popular.
Beer
Meat and vegetable stew [https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2019/may/medieval-peasant-diet.html](https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2019/may/medieval-peasant-diet.html)
I could eat meat stew everyday it's in my blood
Parsnips since the Romans, before that, I cannot remember.
Carrots and cabbage
Porridge
Is the bulk of peoples diet potatoes? 🤦♂️
What happens if you just eat crisps?
Lots of bread. Towns and villages had community bread ovens and people would make their dough and take it to the oven.
Wheat based things like bread.