1400: firewood is scarcer than ever, with just one iron forge using up to 100 oak trees per year. Wild game animals are hoarded by aristocrats on their shrinking forest estates (parks). But beer is flowing, with a surplus of wheat for the smaller population. There’s more bread in bakeries and some people can afford 2 1/2 or even 3 meals a day.
Cheese and smoked pork are the two first big changes in protein foods. Both are ways of preserving surplus food, a rarity just one century before. Butchers begin stuffing ground meat and blood into intestinal casings, creating the famous sausage types of later European cuisine. Cheese is still mostly from sheep’s milk in some places, but cow’s milk is more and more available.
Around this time, bakers start borrowing brewer’s yeast, perhaps first in monastic kitchens where brewing and baking were done in neighboring rooms. Country bread is still sourdough, but wealthier institutions and families start eating light, risen, sweet bread. Of course, baking skill is applied to the new breads, so soon there are breads of all shapes, including sweetened and with imported dried fruits.
There are more sugar refineries and plantations in the Portuguese-controlled islands off Africa; sugar is still expensive but it’s starting to be used more by the rich. This bumps honey downscale into greater availability for the upper middle classes. Sweet desserts proliferate. The spice trade is growing; pepper, cinnamon and ginger are becoming available for the upper middle classes.
As merchants and goldsmiths start peppering their brewet and mixing cinnamon with honey in dessert, aristocrats lose interest in spices. Game animals are now the best show of wealth; roast boar is classier than ever. A new trend starts among the aristocracy that will alter cooking again: serving food in set courses, one type at a time. The fad comes from Spain to Paris. The emphasis is now on volume, since the Fish Course must concentrate enough fish to serve everyone, ditto the Meat Course, rather than spreading everything out in fancy dishes served in random clusters.
The Little Ice Age is making travel in the North Sea difficult. Stockfish’s importance in daily diet drops as fewer ships go out for cod near Iceland and Greenland.
Italy has been developing its characteristic pasta, a quick-cooking wheat food for a region doubly short on firewood. In 1400, you can eat tortellini, ravioli and lasagna as well as pasta soups. Spain’s food has long been influenced by Arabic tastes, chiefly in sweets but also in pickles. Fashionable people in Paris and London begin serving these exotic foods instead of last century’s colored tromp l’oeil dishes.
By 1500, European food as we recognize it has arrived, and there my special knowledge ends.