If I start a series on food in the Middle Ages, I’ll take my time and meander through time and region. I’m one of those “begin at the beginning” fanatics. So I’m thinking I’d start with what Europe had as raw materials for food around 600 AD, then move forward.
600 is a nice starting point because we’ve got the heartland of Europe basically settled by the folks who put down permanent roots: the Franks are in France and Germany, the Anglo-Saxons are in England, and although the Goths and Visigoths have intermarried in Italy and Spain, the Muslim expansion hasn’t yet begun. Plows haven’t been improved and horses are not farm animals. Invasive animals aren’t arriving yet.
600 also catches Europe at the upward swing of the Medieval Warm Period. Nobody considered it a bad thing; sure, the ocean crept upward on the shore, but they hadn’t built as seriously and expensively at the water’s edge as we have now. The north seas had smaller ice packs. Mountain-slope land opened up for farming and prehistoric copper mines were rediscovered as glaciers melted.
The story of medieval food in Europe follows a typical story plot outline: man meets land, man loses land, man kills for land, man settles land; land get warmer and warmer and man has more and more babies (boy meets girl, too); then, a crisis: land gets too wet and cold, man can’t find better land, babies die; in the happy ending, man adapts. Man drinks beer, eats hearty meals of meat and bread, and builds well-fed cities right down to the shoreline.