All Things Medieval

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.

The collapse of the medieval farm economy had a very wide impact on European society. Farming had been based on semi-slavery in which tenants owed the landowner certain days of free labor. They weren’t allowed to leave this contract without buying freedom, although I’ve never heard of any problems with runaway serfs being tracked down like slaves. For the most part, the conditions were just good enough to be accepted, and the landowners owed the serfs things like a harvest feast, which made it feel okay.

But the price of labor skyrocketed after the third visitation of the plague. Survivors demanded wages; landowners could not easily pay, since there were also fewer food customers and the price of wheat dropped. There was a long period of social instability in which landowners petitioned the King to control wages, and the peasants refused to cooperate or mounted armed revolts. Inevitably, towns (by definition free of feudal farm duties) grew and manor farms shrank. Landowners had to pay wages; farms had to make do with fewer workers. There were no significant technological leaps in farming at this time, but the progress of the past centuries (horses, harrows and plows, better seed) allowed them to tinker, improve and do more with less.

The political upheaval led directly to modern institutions and was a big part of the later religious wars that shaped modern Europe. But at table, the main effect of all of this change was that old women who survived through several plagues saw unbelievable price changes at market.

Wheat became affordable; there was a surplus of wheat for the first time in Europe’s history. Not only could more people eat bread on a daily basis, but there was even wheat left over for beer. The working classes had always drunk watery ale in preference to contaminated water, but now they could actually afford a pint of beer that contained enough alcohol to feel the effect. Tavern business boomed, and so did the associated cook-shops.

Animal products became affordable, too. Eggs and a lump of hard cheese, previously the highest protein to which a poor man could aspire, became taken for granted. Although cows had been affected by the plague (and murrain, an animal disease, regularly carried off flocks of domestic animals), there were more farm animals per human mouth now. Cheese-making expanded, creating export markets for isolated Swiss and French villages.

Game animals were scarcer than ever, and so was firewood. But pigs (who could and did catch the plague) became plentiful. Europe’s diet began to swing decisively toward pork consumption…

Although historians count the Middle Ages as running through 1450, when Constantinople fell to the Turks, there’s a compelling argument for ending the era a century sooner, in 1350. By that year, Europe as it had been for the last 500 years was mostly dead. The shape of European culture struggled into new life over the next 50 years, and during that time, nearly everything I’ve written about medieval European diet ceased to be relevant.

Of course I’m referring to the pandemic plague known as the Black Death. At the time, it was called the Great Mortality or just the plague. Although the plague has been identified as Bubonic Plague, it was not fully the same as Bubonic Plague today. It was a new sickness at the time; it probably jumped from an animal species, the Central Asian marmot, around 1345. Traffic on the Silk Road was a big part of initial transmission, but we don’t know if they caught it directly from the marmots and their fleas. There’s strong evidence that it was airborne, both pneumonic and septic, during the early pandemics. The bacteria we know today as the cause of the Bubonic Plague is only spread through blood contact, by flea bites, and it does not mean certain death. Either we’ve developed immunities or the bacteria’s original form was more toxic.

The plague came to Europe in a particularly gory, gross way. 1347: Genoa had a trading colony, Caffa, on the Crimean Peninsula. Tatars and Mongols ruled in Russia and were besieging Caffa. As the plague spread to the Tatars across the central plains, the besiegers grew too sick to fight, so they catapulted dead bodies into Caffa. Terror-stricken plague survivors ran to their ships and put out for Genoa. In the days it took them to leave the Black Sea and cross the Mediterranean, most of them got sick and many died. The ships tried to stop at closer ports to get help, but the residents in each city realized the ships were contagious and drove them off. Even Genoa, which heard of their coming before they arrived, drove off the ships with flaming arrows.

But it was too late. Perhaps at their first stops, ports had permitted them some brief contact before sending them away in panic, and the plague immediately began to spread at those ports. It was like a bonfire lit in six different places; the plague spread outward from these port cities until all the coasts were infected by the end of 1347. In 1348, it spread inland to Florence, and then from port cities like Marseille into Spain. Paris had its first cases in June 1348. By fall, it was in London. In 1349, the Swedish were sick. The plague also spread north from Italy into Austria; Germany got it from both directions in summer 1349. It reached Poland in the fall and hit Scotland in 1350. Moscow, capital of the Tatars who had started it all, sickened via European routes in 1352.

In each place, the plague lasted about a year and then began to abate. At peak, people died too fast for gravediggers to keep up. Notaries who signed a dying man’s will found the executor and beneficiaries dead the next day, then died, themselves. In some places, the mortality rate may have reached 50%. Historians can only estimate based on indirect measures and contemporary claims, but a general average of 30% seems about right.

At first, manor farms still got in their harvests even as peasant workers were dropping dead. There seem to have been a lot of unemployed serfs in that time. Ten years later, the plague came back again, and in addition to taking out some who had survived in 1350, the disease hit children very hard. By the time the plague came back a decade later, it settled into an average 10% death rate. By this time, farms were short on plowmen and harvesters…on the other hand, there were not as many people to feed. When the food could be harvested and brought to market, its value dropped dramatically. The farm economy began to tumble, but survivors could buy food they’d only imagined before.