I always remind myself that way back then … if you happened to cut yourself badly, there was a high likelihood that you could lose a limb or die from infection. They had treatments for stuff and they could be careful but all you needed was a chance infection (that is easily protected against today) and you could end up severely affecting your life or dying.
Even just a prick from a thorn while outside could give you tetanus, which was a super shitty way to die. People’s muscles spasmed so hard they could literally break their own bones.
Be sure to get your booster shot every 10 years!
That does sound rather unpleasant
RIP adhd people
Hell, even half of their “treatments” ended up making the problem worse or killing you even quicker
One common treatment for chickenpox was to drill a hole in the skull. Shockingly this wasn’t very helpful
No patient complaints were registered, so it couldn’t have been that bad either.
But drilling a hole in your head did solve some other problems like brain swelling, so without knowing better and having no alternatives, I could see why one would try
It would have dealt with the swelling immediately but chances are the patient would have died from infection from the operation.
I spent the next three years in a POW camp, forced to subsist on a thin stew made of fish, vegetables, prawns, coconut milk, and four kinds of rice. I came close to madness trying to find it here in the States, but they just can’t get the spices right.
Once during prohibition I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.
– W. C. Fields
I mean they had a lot more than that if Tasting History has taught me anything.
Granted very little of it was anything like what we think of today in terms of your typical meal. Ketchup started as a fish sauce from SE Asia and the French some the fuck how figured out how to burn a mead so bad the whole thing is charred, and decided to label it high cuisine anyways.
I think a lot of foods were invented by accident. Bread and beer, for example, can be made if you leave a gruel uncovered for a while. (And then heat it, for bread.) If you crush grapes and leave them for a while you’ll get wine, in the right conditions.
Barbecue, I maintain, is a natural phenomenon. Animals overcome by fumes in their dens by forest fires and then cooked by the smoldering embers is probably the first time our species tasted that delicacy.
Was beer really an accident? We were getting fucked up on fermented fruit for a long long long time before beer was a thing so I guess I always assumed we made that on purpose. But thinking about it I guess it makes sense that it was discovered on accident much like the fermented fruit.
Unlike fermented fruit, beer requires some processing by boiling the mash. I figure if someone was making porridge and forgot about it they’d end up with something beer-adjacent.
Did beer start with women chewing grains and spitting into baskets? No boiling.
I was thinking someone dropped a piece of meat into the fire by accident.
What do you get when you burn mead?
Bochet. Basically caramelized honey mead.
Huh. That sounds good!
And it is if aged well. Fresh it is disgusting for some reason.
When they say wine they don’t mean what you’re thinking. When they say bread they definitely don’t mean what you’re thinking and I’d hate to think what the cheese was like.
People really don’t have a grasp of how much effort goes into modern food production to make it the quality that it is.
It’s fairly obvious when you think about it, there’s a lot of documented evidence of people living on ships surviving almost entirely on beer. If that was modern beer they’d all be incapable of operating the ship after about 2 days, dead shortly after from alcohol poisoning, clearly that didn’t happen.
Ive known alcoholics that drank 12-24 packs daily and still were perfectly functional. This is 4-5% abv beer, and they did all of the normal activities you would expect. If you didnt know they had a disease/addiction, you likely would never have noticed how much they had to drink that day. They easily consumed 2-3000 calories/day just from beer.
Human tolerance for alcohol is way, more adaptable than youre implying.
You’re both right. The beer people drank back then was usually very low alcohol content. It was essentially fermented just enough so that it would stay safe to drink for a while. There was stronger stuff, yes, but especially the stuff they had on ships was very weak.
not saying anyone’s wrong in this thread, but i would love to read sources on this
Here you go :)
Same with the famous pirate rum.
I don’t know about the wine or cheese but I have to disagree with you on the bread thing.
There are people that make multigrain, wholegrain, sourdough, etc bread based on medieval recipes and while they’re not wonderbread they’re also not unrecognizable as bread to a modern person and they’re not terrible either. There are even people who buy the grains and stone grind it themselves to make it more authentic.
People tend to grossly overestimate the hardships of pre-industrial life. Not that things were easy because of course a lot of labor went into simple things but people have always been cooking, the biggest difference between now and then would have just been consistency since people were cooking smaller batches more frequently with less precise tools.
Bread was water and flour and dirt, wine was vinegar, and cheese was “milk”.
Cheese is still “milk”!
If your cheese is still milk then it’s milk.
In much the same way that cheese isn’t yogurt
Cheese is milk in the same way that beef is grass. It’s all carbon chemistry in the end.
Replace dirt with salt and that’s modern artisanal sourdough.
I expect medieval bread that goes to peasants to be hard enough to work as hammers. The wine would probably be half water. The cheese, funnily enough, would probably be the best tasting thing in the home. We’re talking about cheese that is supposed to last months on end without refrigeration. A wandering cockroach that gets to the cheese might be some extra seasoning for the peasant, too.
Wine would definitely not be water because clean drinking water was more valuable than wine for sure.
Probably meaning taste/consistency wise if we compare them to wine we can buy
If you water down something alcoholic, the alcohol kills microbes in the water, allowing you to drink water that you can’t drink straight. As long as you have basic filtration and you’re not watering down your drinks with mud then you’re good.
That only works with spirits or very strong wine though.
It wouldn’t be the highest quality, but generally if you were eating bread you were eating bread that had been baked that morning. Anything left over would turn hard as a rock by the end of the day, but they’d throw that into the perpetual stew.
Wine that has less than 60% water is just brandy.
If peasants were given brandy, sign me up. I’ll have it with cake, thanks.
You know they meant watering down wine.
the cheese wasn’t even individually wrapped
And there was a chance your bread was moldy. But, hey, get the right kind of mold, and you get to start accusing people of witchcraft.
And the wine would be safe, but possibly heavily watered down to keep a barrel for longer.
It’s highly unlikely the witchcraft accusations were caused by ergotism.
It’s kinda crazy how easily the ergot theory took over. For 200 years, it was widely accepted that it was a case of mass hysteria, moral panic, and religious extremism. Then someone hypothesized it could be ergotism because the reported symptoms are similar.
And people immediately took it as a fact, because a clear, single cause is much easier to explain.
Y’know, like how they blamed the “witches” for anything bad?
Why didn’t anyone else develop ergotism? If their source of rye was contaminated, more people would have fallen ill.
Why did it only affect a handful of adolescent girls, who happened to be friends?
Why did another town 20 miles away have more accusations of witchcraft around the same time?
Why didn’t they recognize the symptoms at the time? St Anthony’s Fire was well-documented and treatable since the Middle Ages.
The wine would be served in a lead cup to make it taste sweeter.
delicious heavy metal salts
The wine may have been spiced with mercury to make it healthier
The bread was full of sand and grit and it would wear down your teeth to nubs by 25 tho…
To be fair, that sounds like fast food.
Add a piece of fish and it’s perfect.
Fish cooked with sorrel and salt. But not as much salt as modern cooks use.
And then some fruits, berries, or veggies if they were in season.
Yum. But I say…
Fish with whatever herbs you have and all the salt you want!
(I coincidentally enough have not one but two separate medical conditions which require increased sodium intake, and I am all about that salt. It is delicious.)
Fish with sorrel is specifically listed as a peasant meal in a few different medieval manuscripts.
Is people having the phone in their social media profile pic a deliberately-shit thing like when Youtubers are holding their tiny clip-on mic?
Old school selfie style, from before screen facing cameras.
Yeah, it was the lack of air conditioning and indoor plumbing that was the real problem. Oh into the disease. So much goddamn disease.
That person should try to eat a medieval peasant bread sometime. It was made from a coarse meal, not refined flour. It wasn’t leavened. And it had zero salt inside. It also had sand in it. The taste of that shit is god awful and it destroys your teeth.
It wasn’t leavened.
What’re you basing that off of? The only reason you’d make a flatbread is if you couldn’t cobble together some sort of oven/stove communally. Otherwise sourdough is a no brainer even with sandy rye flour.
They also had yeast that they could get from the local brewer.
And since bread was highly regulated, it was generally made by a trained baker, who used the highest quality flour they could get… which was still often very coarsely ground with the occasional bit of sand from the grindstones.
But it was leavened, and had salt, because everyone could get salt. The stuff was everywhere. And still is.
They also had yeast that they could get from the local brewer.
Yeah even the iron age gauls did that.
I don’t think you could stick it together though unless it was fine grain. Also they presumably wouldn’t have had yeast so it would have been flatbread.
Leavened bread was a pre bronze age thing. The whole point behind passover unleavened bread is the refugees theoretically had no time to let dough proof (not that I think the Exodus actually happened). As long as you’re dealing with something that has gluten, leavening it is trivial. Iron age armies would make rolls, proof them with sourdough starter, and cook them on skewers over an open fire while on the march. Coarse grain rye might take a day or more to proof with sourdough, but it’ll be sweeter and easier to digest after.
When it comes to if you make flatbread or not, it’s more a property of does the grain itself have enough gluten to even rise (which things like barley does not). Usually if it doesn’t, you’d make a porridge with it, but keep in mind that even making a porridge takes hours to really break down the grain. Leavening is almost always available.
If you just leave dough outside you’ll have yeast. Yeast is already around you. How do you think best was discovered?
But that’s the nature of memes, isn’t it? I also try to attribute as best as possible
