Chapter 9

### Three: The Pitiful and Lamentable Medieval Recipes

After discussing living conditions, it's time to talk about food.

First, it must be acknowledged that medieval Europeans had already invented utensils, so they no longer had to eat with their fingers like the ancient Egyptians. However, modern people would still find it hard to accept that gem-encrusted goblets, though splendid, had to be shared by everyone at the table, meaning you had to share saliva while drinking. Soup spoons were also shared by two or more people, and it was best not to bring the spoon directly to your mouth but to scoop the soup into your own bowl. The fork, an invention of the Byzantine Empire, was only brought back to Western Europe after the Crusades. Before that, Europeans, like the ancient Egyptians and modern Indians, had to tear meat with their fingers. Of course, you could also use a dinner knife to cut steak and bread and then eat it directly, but the problem was that a single knife had to be shared by several people, and only those of high status could have their own knife.

Of course, these are minor issues. As a noble lord, you could have your own set of utensils made. However, when you see the classic medieval European dishes on the table, you will surely lose most of your appetite.

From a modern Eastern perspective, the way medieval Europeans ate fruit is quite strange: they would roast apples and pears, stew plums, and even add salt and pepper... Eating fruit raw was considered a low-class practice.

—Medieval European medical practitioners generally believed that all fruits were cold-natured foods and should be cooked with heat or seasoned with hot spices (such as pepper)... How unscientific!

On the contrary, for most vegetables, such as carrots, turnips, cabbage, and kale, medieval Europeans were accustomed to eating them raw, even pungent onions—of course, there were also onions cooked in meat broth, but that was considered a high-end dish.

—Cooked fruits and raw vegetables... It seems to be the opposite of Chinese habits and would likely cause digestive issues.

However, these issues are not the most critical. Chinese people can eat vegetable salads, and the taste of cooked and salted fruits can be avoided by removing these dishes from the menu. But just the bread, the staple food, can make you feel like you have no place to start eating—medieval European bread is nothing like the soft, sweet, and creamy bread we have today. It is more like a hard, dry, and tooth-breaking unleavened biscuit... Ancient Egyptian bread, though usually without cream, was generally leavened.

At the time, even noble lords ate long, black bread weighing about 4.5 kg (10 pounds) in their daily lives.

Note that medieval black bread is not the same as modern black bread. Modern black bread, in terms of texture and ingredients, is actually similar to medieval white bread, except for the color.

Typical medieval black bread was generally made from wheat flour mixed with a large amount of bran—this was already considered high-quality black bread. Some unscrupulous bakers even deliberately added wood chips and small stones to the black bread, which was more damaging to teeth than the sand mixed into ancient Egyptian bread and even more despicable—after all, the latter suffered passively, while the former committed a deliberate crime!

Well, now you even have minerals. If you add some leaves and bugs, it would be a complete nutritional food...

The fame of medieval black bread lies in its use as a weapon—medieval chronicles often record the embarrassing stories of incompetent thieves who died from the black bread thrown by housewives when they tried to steal from poor farmers' homes. When family conflicts arose, many men also died from the black bread attacks of their fierce wives... As for the taste, you can imagine it yourself.

—In the Japanese light novel "Spice and Wolf," the male protagonist, the traveling merchant Lawrence, refuses to eat black bread directly when he has the option, preferring to break it into pieces and cook it into a thin porridge, because it is too hard.

In medieval times, the biggest difference between white bread and black bread was the time and effort required to sieve out the bran. The Catholic Church of the Middle Ages called the soft, leavened white bread "Panis de Myne," meaning refined and sacred bread. Medieval white bread was generally smaller, with each piece usually not enough for a normal person to eat in one meal, similar to modern "breakfast rolls."

Initially, white bread was a privilege exclusive to church clergy, but it was soon adopted by wealthy families to entertain guests. However, in the daily meals of medieval nobles, there was no clear distinction between white and black bread—under normal circumstances, the kitchens of nobles and the rich did not store large amounts of bread but rather coarse flour, or wheat flour mixed with a lot of bran. When it was time to eat, the flour was baked into bread.

If guests were to be entertained or a celebration was to be held, the cooks and maids would be instructed to sieve the coarse flour. The more noble the guest, the cleaner the bran had to be sieved, and the whiter and finer the bread would be, but the more effort it would require.

Therefore, black bread and white bread could be baked from the same bag of flour, with the only difference being the labor. The bread that noble knights usually ate was somewhere between white and black bread—the wealthiest families could have several servants sieve flour all day. In less wealthy families, to reduce the workload and avoid wasting bran, the sieving was done less frequently... As for whether the final bread was black or white, it was a matter of personal interpretation.

In addition, in medieval Europe, there was a type of "Queen's Bread" (or "Empress Bread") made from fine flour, eggs, milk, honey, and herbs, using beer yeast instead of regular yeast, and carefully fermented and baked. The taste of this small, round white bread was similar to modern high-end cream bread, possibly even better, and the ingredients were absolutely green, healthy, and pollution-free—this was a super-luxury item that even kings could not afford to eat as a staple food every day!

According to a medieval epic, after a certain king won a battle, he rewarded his army with roasted meat and wine, which was common. Then he gave each of the bravest soldiers a piece of "Queen's Bread," which was envied by everyone...

No matter how hard and throat-irritating the medieval black bread mixed with wood chips and small stones was, it was still considered a high-end delicacy by the lower-class people of medieval Europe, as their bowls often contained no bread at all—baking bread required a lot of firewood and was a complicated process.

So, the poor simply put some roughly processed wheat flour (which, though made from wheat, was not really flour) in a bowl, added some hot water to make a wheat paste, and ate this paste every day. If they could get some wild vegetables, salted fish, and meat, they would put everything in a pot and stew it together... It looked disgusting, similar to what we Chinese use to feed pigs, or like vomit, making it repulsive.

—In general, the serfs in medieval European manors generally ate worse than the ancient Egyptian farmers on the banks of the Nile three thousand years ago.

Besides black and white bread, by the late Middle Ages, Italians occasionally ate pasta (macaroni), but this was an absolute luxury item, more expensive than white bread—before the widespread use of water mills, processing wheat into fine flour for pasta was extremely labor-intensive. Moreover, modern pasta was first born in Sicily under Arab rule and only spread to the rest of Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries, and to other parts of Europe during the Renaissance.

Therefore, most medieval Europeans probably never had the chance to taste the deliciousness of pasta.

In addition, rice was introduced to Europe during the Middle Ages. However, due to the high requirements for light and heat, it was only grown in small quantities in southern Europe, such as Italy and Spain, with low yields. Moreover, milling rice was also very difficult, making it very expensive. Therefore, rice was generally not considered a staple food but was used as a side dish, sprinkled into soups—Spanish paella probably originated this way.

After discussing vegetables and staple foods, it's time to talk about meat and fish. Medieval Europe was a mix of agriculture and pastoralism, with vast open land and many wild animals, so the prices of fish and meat were relatively low, sometimes even cheaper than black bread of the same weight.

However, medieval Europeans had no refrigeration, and meat easily spoiled, so even noble lords could not eat fresh fish and meat every day—ancient Chinese cities had strong purchasing power, with freshly slaughtered pigs available in the market every day. But medieval Europe was sparsely populated, and a medium-sized castle might have only forty to fifty people, making it wasteful to slaughter a pig or a sheep every day. Moreover, slaughtering animals was seasonal; animals that had just survived the winter were generally very lean, and it was not cost-effective to slaughter them without fattening them first.

On the other hand, although most of Western Europe was near the sea, the overall latitude was high, and there was insufficient sunlight, making it difficult to produce salt, which was very expensive in medieval Europe, sometimes even more expensive than salt in ancient China, which was a state monopoly. Generally, the warmer the place, the cheaper the salt, and the colder the place, the more expensive the salt. In the coldest parts of Russia, a pound of salt could often be exchanged for two sheep. The infamous Nordic delicacy, Swedish surströmming (fermented herring), was invented by poor Nordic fishermen to save on salt.

—Readers who want to know how terrible Swedish surströmming is can refer to the opening of the Japanese anime "Mushroom Story."

Therefore, medieval Europeans usually ate dried meat, which was dried in the cold wind to the point of mummification. Dried meat could be stored for a long time, and even decades-old meat could still be eaten (medieval Europeans did not care about dioxins and other such things). Before eating dried meat, the surface oil and oxidation had to be scraped off with a knife, then soaked in river water for one or two days, and finally cooked. As for the taste, it could only be described as "not deadly"—medieval Europeans preferred bread to dried meat when traveling because of this.

Even if you were lucky enough to get some fresh meat, medieval Europeans were not very particular in some aspects, and many places did not know that male animals should be castrated from a young age. The resulting pork was older than that of an old sow and had an indescribable stench—modern time travelers who are used to modern dishes would find eating this "stinky meat" as uncomfortable as being tortured.

Besides salt, medieval Europeans had very few condiments on their tables—no curry, no salad dressing, and sugar and spices had to be imported through Arab territories, making them extremely expensive. Sugar was sold in pharmacies and was not a daily condiment for Europeans but a high-end supplement, like ginseng in Chinese eyes.

As for spices, take pepper as an example, medieval European pepper was sold by the grain. If it was ground pepper, it was even worse, and the buyer had to check the scale repeatedly, close the windows and doors, and hold their breath to ensure there was no cheating... Historically, there were even cases of "unscrupulous merchants mixing silver shavings into white pepper," which is unimaginable today.

—In "Spice and Wolf," the protagonist Lawrence exchanged a large bag of coins for a small bag of pepper and considered it a cheap and discounted price.

In medieval Europe, a grain of pepper was roughly equivalent to a florin gold coin and was often used as currency, earning it the nickname "pepper money." If someone could carry a bag of pepper, they would be a super-rich and popular person. Pulling out one or two grains of pepper to pay a bill was more prestigious than a platinum VIP credit card in later times!

Besides sugar and spices, the cheaper condiments in medieval Europe were mainly lemon juice, which is also commonly seen in modern Western cuisine. Northern Europeans generally used butter on bread, while Southern Europeans used olive oil, and honey was a more expensive option.

—In "Spice and Wolf," Lawrence almost went bankrupt buying a honey-soaked peach for the female protagonist Holo, showing how valuable honey was in the Middle Ages. It was not uncommon for two lords to fight over a few boxes of honey.

As for medieval European cheese, it was not the neatly shaped blocks found in modern supermarkets but rather clumps of greenish, sticky substances that looked like toothpaste or mustard—nothing like the cheese we are familiar with.

Due to the lack of modern sterilization methods, medieval cheese generally did not have the aroma of modern cheese and could even have a strong, foul smell, making many people feel nauseous at the sight—although Chinese people eat stinky tofu, few eat it raw!

(Conversely, unless it is for making cheese pastries, cheese is rarely heated before eating.)

After barely finishing the unpalatable medieval meal, you might want to relax, but medieval Europe had no coffee, tea, or hot chocolate, and there were no cigarettes to smoke—cocoa and tobacco were still in the American jungle across the Atlantic.

The habits of drinking tea and coffee only gradually spread to Europe through Arab territories after the Crusades (coffee originated in Ethiopia). After a long journey across the Eurasian continent and multiple hands, the price of tea that reached Europe was as expensive as gold, and even the nobility could not afford to drink it regularly. In such a situation, you could only rely on beer or wine for entertainment.

However, it should be noted that medieval European wine-making and storage techniques were not advanced, so the value of newly brewed wine on the market was usually ten times that of the previous year's aged wine: the latter often turned sour and crumbled, making it undrinkable and suitable only for filtering and selling as vinegar—note that European vinegar is also made from grapes, unlike Chinese vinegar.

Therefore, time travelers to medieval Europe should not make the mistake of proudly serving "premium red wine" from a certain year at a banquet, as the guests would likely think you were being miserly, making them drink vinegar, and even aged vinegar...

In short, before the invention of bottle technology and corks in the 16th century, Europeans had no way to preserve wine for long periods. Thus, the wine that medieval European nobles drank at banquets might be "as sour as a spear, as sharp as a blade, and as prickly as a needle." Only by adding a large amount of spices or sugar could the sour and rancid taste of the "spoiled" wine be slightly reduced, "making the poorly brewed and terrible wine more acceptable."

Additionally, just as ancient Egyptian beer was nothing like modern beer, medieval European beer was very different from modern beer. If ancient Egyptian beer was more like unsweetened sweet rice wine, then medieval European beer was more like Chinese yellow wine—no foam, similar brewing methods to yellow wine, but using barley and oats instead of the rice used in Chinese yellow wine.

In general, in the medieval European concept, beer was a generic term for grain-based alcoholic beverages. Any fermented alcohol made from grains rather than fruits (grapes, apples) and not distilled was called beer.

Therefore, according to the classical European classification, Chinese yellow wine and sweet rice wine, as well as Japanese sake, could also be considered beer.

Finally, if medieval beer was distilled, it would become whiskey, and if wine was distilled, it would become brandy.

Incidentally, although the dietary conditions in medieval Europe were not good, being a noble and feeding a few knights and dogs could be quite endearing (medieval custom: during meals, dogs and servants waited behind the table for the master's bones...), which might satisfy the tastes of some heavy-taste girls. Mobile users, please visit http://m.piaotia.net

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