What Did People Really Eat In The Middle Ages?

Believe it or not, there are several dozen handwritten cookbooks that have survived since the Middle Ages, revealing recipes and descriptions that are invaluable to historians and eye-opening for the rest of us who are just plain curious. Unfortunately, most of these recipes and traditions describe the culinary scene for just one class of medieval muncher: the nobility. Books weren't cheap in the Middle Ages, so it stands to reason that only the wealthier households would have stacks of books at all, let alone ones specifically dedicated to cooking. We shouldn't be surprised that their cookbooks were geared toward helping their staffs prepare the dishes and banquets served in their own homes, not those of the poor.

While peeping into the lives of the wealthy and extravagant in any period is exciting, you may be just as curious about what regular folks ate during the Middle Ages, though, and plenty of this information has been passed down, too, though not often in cookbooks. As such, we have more of a general sense of their ingredient availability and daily habits than of specific recipes they prepared, but it's unlikely you were aiming to whip up some medieval peasant dishes of your own anyway (and once you see what the nobles were eating, you probably won't want to prepare many of their recipes either). So, what did people really eat in the Middle Ages? You're about to find out.

Today we know that many fruits and vegetables are packed with nutrients that help our bodies, and your parents may have begun forcing them on you long before you liked them. Apparently, some things never change, because medieval recipes for fruit and veggie dishes abound, from fried beans and pea porridge to apple bread pudding and cherry pudding (via Gode Cookery). These prove either that the good people of the Middle Ages were also aware of the many potential health benefits of these natural beauties or at least that fruits and veggies were easy enough to grow. But not everything about the produce preferences of medieval diners is consistent with today's practices.

Some proponents of raw food diets believe that too many nutrients are lost when fruits and veggies are cooked, preferring to eat them only in their rawest form (or nearly so), but medieval chompers believed the opposite. Not only did they prefer not to eat their produce raw, but they actually thought that raw fruits and vegetables were dangerous, with one book bearing the alarming warning, "Beware of green salads and raw fruits, for they will make your master sick" (via the British Library). As some foods are dangerous to eat raw, and we may be able to assume food washing was less thorough than it can be today, it certainly may have been safer overall to just cook all produce before serving it in the Middle Ages, so let's not judge too hard.

Continuing with the theme of splendid showpieces bedecking the tables of medieval banquets (hey, we already told you most of the surviving intel we have about what people ate in the Middle Ages comes from banquet cookbooks), sugar creations often stole the spotlight. They were the centerpieces of the table, much as deliciously decadent desserts are today. Unlike today, though, meals in the Middle Ages rarely included a distinct dessert course, presenting sweet dishes throughout the meal alongside the savory courses, as Bucknell University reports.

Much like we use sugary fondant to sculpt beautiful shapes and scenes for some of our most eye-popping desserts today, sugar sculptures called sotiltees (for those of you not versed in Middle English, that would be "subtleties" today), graced the medieval banquet table. Despite their falsely humble name, these sculptures were anything but subtle. They were complex designs intended to dazzle and impress the host's guests at any good Middle Ages banquet. Per the Abbey Medieval Festival, you could expect to see shapes like castles, animals, or even entire scenes from popular tales, and though sweet dishes could come at any time, subtleties generally announced the beginning of a banquet, serving as an introduction, not a conclusion. We only wonder if anyone ever actually ate them.

We admit this one may seem a bit on the obvious side at first, but there's a teeny bit more to this story than may appear on the surface, so we're going take a somewhat deeper plunge here. Many of the more substantial dishes we've come across so far were reserved exclusively for the upper classes of medieval society, but fish was not necessarily relegated to the nobles. For those who lived near the sea, even the poor had ready access to fish. This made their diets different from those of the inland poor who dined on very little meat or fish at all.

Per Medieval Times, regardless of social status, living near the sea provided medieval eaters access to fresh cod, herring, eel, and even whale (not actually a fish, but let's move on). Those by streams and lakes similarly had access to freshwater fish, though the rules became a bit more classist here. As the History Learning Site explains, many medieval villages were built by rivers, and villagers were able to fish and eat species like dace, grayling, and gudgeon if the local lord permitted. But even in these cases, proper salmon and trout were generally reserved for the lord only, as were the contents of the stocked ponds they often kept on their large estates. Violators of this fishy hierarchy were subject to serious punishment.

Let's take a step back into the universal favorites of Middle Ages diners. Like bread, just about every set of taste buds in medieval Europe was accustomed to enjoying some version of a widely popular soupy stew known as pottage. But also like bread, different classes ate different versions (via Medieval Recipes). At its most basic, pottage is not much more than a mishmash of ingredients boiled in stock and often thickened with a grain. It's the differences in the ingredients added to the stock that set apart rich-person pottage from poor-person pottage.

We'll start with the poor. Peasants made their pottages primarily from oats and flavored them most often with whichever vegetables they had available in the tiny little growing patches found alongside their homes. Leek was a favored pottage ingredient, but, of course, this depended on accessibility, and more meager times may have called for less zingy pottages like those made with peas and beans instead. If you could grow it, it went in the pottage. Cheap cereal-based pottages were classed as frumenty, while a more upper-crust pottage, known as mortew, would likely feature considerably more meat and a wider variety of vegetables than a peasant's oat pottage. At the end of the day, though, they're all pottages, no matter what they called them.

We'll start by identifying the difference between ale and beer in medieval society, and that difference rested solely in beer's addition of hops to the ale recipe of water, grain, and the all-important yeast that was needed for fermentation. While you may come across some sources that say that beer was a common drink for all in the Middle Ages, the reality is that ale, by the medieval definition of these distinct beverages, was the drink flowing freely for people of most classes during these times.

You may have noticed that most of the foods and drinks consumed by medieval peasants were those that were readily and cheaply available, and it's certainly not difficult to understand why that would be. Ale, though, is a major exception to this rule. Unlike everything else peasants enjoyed, ale was not easy to produce in the Middle Ages (via the History Learning Site). On the contrary, it took several days to brew and required careful preparation by trained individuals. Regardless, ale remained the primary beverage of any good medieval village and was consumed by rich and poor alike with every meal of the day, including breakfast.