During the Hundred Years' War, people ate bread, cheese, pickled fat, stew, poultry and eggs. Feudal owners also had wild boar, deer and other game to eat, as well as sweets, castle-shaped baked dough and gray fat sausage with batter, honey and fruit.
Bread at that time would not taste very good.
In ancient Europe, because there was not enough feed, all livestock that were not kept as breeding animals were often slaughtered to make bacon in winter.
Without spices such as cinnamon, cloves, cardamom and pepper, bacon tastes terrible. One advantage of bacon is that you don't have to bring salt when you go out. You just need to cut a small piece and cook it with other dishes, which explains why bacon tastes terrible.
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Therefore, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch and the British … are all exploring the spice channel.
Spice, gold, silk, these are the things that western countries dreamed of in the Middle Ages.
The former occupies an important position.
Every ship full of spices returned from the East has made huge profits, driving people across the ocean without fear of stormy waves. Unfortunately, they became ghosts of foreign countries and became rich overnight.
The resulting unscrupulous and mercenary plunder, the blood and fire of the colonial era ...
A catty of cardamom can be exchanged for a flock of sheep, and a catty of cloves is equal to three times the weight of gold. In this business, even if you kill your head, someone will try to do it!
"The spice used by a poor man in Nanyang for every meal is an unimaginable luxury for the king of Europe ..."
Also, I read a story about the diet of a poor child in Southeast Asia, saying that he could only eat rice mixed with mashed spices (I don't know what spices) every day. ...........................................................................................................................
The smell of bacon has a lot to do with smoked wood.
In the past, rural Germany was like us.
Smoke with branches such as cypress. It will have a good fragrance.
In fact, the real smell of bacon is not spices.
But the fragrance released by the interaction between meat and smoke.
This is the most natural.
In medieval Europe, where could ordinary people actually eat meat every day?
It is likely that some bread is good.
Busy all day, and I don't have much time to pay attention to cooking.
Only noble lords are so particular.
(But compared with modern people, Louis XIV and frederick the great are just so, hehe)
Here are some staple foods, bread, which many people can't get used to.
For example, bread here is usually made of raw wheat grains.
Sometimes sunflower seeds (not fried) are added
It tastes sour, but it is said to be nutritious.
In fact, the nutrition of Europeans in the Middle Ages was quite bad.
/kloc-the average height of Germans in the 0 th and 9 th centuries was only 1.6 meters.
You can tell from those castles and knight armor.
Now the real ancient castle is narrow and short in many places.
The armor of those knights is too narrow for me to wear.
Knights are like this, people can imagine.
Class differences and regional differences must exist at the same time, not absolutely.
By the way, another feature of southern European cooking is that it likes to flavor with wine.
Alcohol in wine can react with fatty acids in animal tissues to form esters, which have a strong flavor.
And can remove the fishy smell of fish, which is very useful for southern Europe with marine culture)
But regional differences do exist.
Poor, people in some places may have to be able to cook.
It is said that gypsies often use dead dogs, dead cats and discarded water from Europeans.
Make delicious food
The rapid growth of European height can be seen from their facilities.
Many facilities ten or twenty years ago, such as trams, have become very unsuitable for today's height.
I've always wondered why they don't make things bigger and save materials.
Of course, the staple food of westerners is bread, but the main component of bread is not necessarily wheat. Throughout the Middle Ages, Western Europe was often in a staged food crisis. The causes of the crisis come from many aspects. One of the main aspects is low yield-anyone who knows a little about agriculture knows that the unit yield of wheat is the lowest among the three main food crops (wheat, rice and corn). Coupled with the low level of agriculture, the climate in Europe is much colder than it is now, so on the whole.
So all kinds of substitutes, including barley, rye and double-grain wheat, were made into bread, and even chestnuts and beans were ground into flour to make bread.
Poor people eat bread with complicated ingredients for a long time, while white bread belongs to the rich, nobles and privileged classes of the church.
At that time, there was a kind of white bread called pastor's bread, and there was a kind of refined white bread that used milk and beer yeast instead of ordinary dough, which was called queen's bread.
According to French revolutionaries, it embodies the ugliness of the integration of politics and religion.
Meat:
This is a complicated problem. At that time, Europeans ate a lot of meat, but it was not the steak we remember now, but pork.
At that time, there were many forests and wasteland in Europe, and pigs were basically stocked, so there was a profession of pig herder.
Pork has always been the main meat in the West in the Middle Ages.
Beef and mutton also account for a certain proportion, but not high.
Sheep were raised mainly to obtain wool and dairy products. At that time, cattle were rarely raised on a large scale, mainly to obtain dairy products-cheese and butter.
By the way, Europeans are puzzled by our eating pig water now. In fact, Europeans at that time also ate pig water and pig blood.
This habit still exists in Eastern Europe in the 20th century.
Game is also a big source of meat, but it is basically enjoyed by lords and nobles, including deer, wild boar, rabbits, freshwater fish and so on.
Hunting was the first entertainment of European aristocrats in the Middle Ages, so private hunting was strictly prohibited.
However, poaching by farmers still happens frequently. After the rise of the city, game began to permeate the public's table.
Poultry:
Capon (for tender meat) and fat goose are medieval delicacies.
There are many wild birds to eat, and swans and peacocks used to be the main dishes of gourmets. As for the taste, I can't imagine.
Fish:
A historian said that in the Middle Ages in Europe, herring was a historical figure.
During the Catholic fast, fish and eggs were the only edible meat dishes.
Therefore, pickled herring (including other fish) is a very popular commodity, and the poor eat it almost all the year round as a source of protein.
The change of herring migration route even decided the decline of Hanseatic League and the rise of Amsterdam to some extent.
Grease:
The Mediterranean region mainly eats olive oil, while the north eats butter.
Alcohol:
Wine and beer were the two main wines at that time. Unlike China, wine is a regular food for Europeans, not a stimulant at a celebration party.
No matter rich or poor, wine is indispensable for every meal.
At that time, there were detailed regulations on how much wine and how much bread each soldier sent for each meal on the military supply list, which was no less important than bread.
Of course, there are good and bad wines, and there are 369 grades.
Generally speaking, wine is a popular drink in wine producing areas (southern Europe).
At that time, there were two kinds of wine, white wine and dividend, but shochu (brandy as the shopkeeper said) had not yet appeared.
Wine is mainly shipped in wooden barrels, which may not be technically up to standard at that time. The value of the newly brewed wine in that year is generally ten times that of the aged wine in the second year-because the latter is easy to turn sour and cannot be imported.
The concept of beer in the Middle Ages was different from ours. It is not appropriate to say that the similarity between modern beer and our yellow rice wine is not high. At that time, some basic beer technology had not yet appeared, and the use of snakebabs was a recent thing.
Beer is synonymous with grain liquor, but it is still fermented liquor, not distilled grain liquor (whiskey is grain liquor).
Beer is popular mainly in areas where grapes are not produced. Wine is generally expensive for people in the upper class, and beer is mainly a drink for the lower class.
Spices:
In a word, in medieval Europe, winter was much colder than it is now.
The lack of feed makes the farmers who raise livestock have to slaughter the livestock that can't be fed before winter comes. Both bacon and cooking need spices.
To remember the painful experience, it is necessary to use the original bacon to educate future generations that it is not easy to start a business. Otherwise, we always think that our ancestors always had French bread with English cheese and German sauerkraut sausage as side dishes every day.
Hahaha!
Attached:
The property list of Charlemagne Imperial Manor.
We saw a royal stone palace on the royal manor in Asnapima, which was very well built.
There are three halls, all surrounded by balconies, and eleven women's toilets; There is a basement below, and there are two cloisters in front of the main door; In addition, there are seventeen wooden houses in the yard, with the same number of rooms and other equipment.
The building is very good; In addition, there is a stable, a kitchen, a mill, a barn and three feed rooms.
Covers include: sheets, tablecloths and towels.
Belt: two copper pots, two wine glasses, two bronze kettles, an iron pot, a wok, a weighing scale, an iron shelf, an Eden, a second-hand axe, a stone (it should be gold-bottomed, not stone-bottomed), two drill bits, an axe, a knife, a big wooden wrench, a small board, two long-handled sickles, and two.
Agricultural products: Nine baskets of German wheat harvested last year can be ground into four or five catties of flour and 100 meter of barley; This year, 10 baskets of German wheat were harvested, 60 baskets were used for sowing, and the rest were preserved. Wheat is 100 meters, sowing wheat is 6 meters, and the rest; The 98-meter Ig of rye is all used for sowing; Barley18000m,1100m for sowing, and the rest; 43 ml of oats; Soybean is one meter; Twelve meters of peas, in five mills, have 800 meters of flour; Four breweries, in addition to the two or four o rice wine that has been paid to the manor priest, there are six or five o rice wine. On two bridges, there are six meters of salt and two shillings of money; Eleven shillings for four gardens.
Three meters of honey; One meter of butter; Ten pieces of lard were saved last year; New lard 2oo slices, with minced meat and fat, have collected four or three Jin of cheese this year.
Livestock: five big animals, five at the age of three, seven at the age of two and seven at the age of one; 10 two-year-old pony, 8 one-year-old pony and 3 stallions; Sixteen cows; Two donkeys and five cows with calves, two calves, three one-year-old calves and three bulls; 260 pigs, 100 piglets, 5 boars; One lamb, five sheep, two one-year-old sheep, one two rams and three.
Goats with young goats, three one-year-old goats and three male goats; Three o geese; Eight o chickens; Two peacocks.
Manor belonging to the above-mentioned imperial court: In Grixiuzhuang, we saw the manor building, three forage houses in the province, and a yard surrounded by a fence.
There is also a garden with trees, ten geese, eight ducks and thirty chickens.
In another manor, we saw the manor building; A walled yard with three forage houses inside; There is a vineyard, a tree garden, fifteen geese and twenty chickens.
On the third manor, there are houses, two forage houses, a barn, a garden and a fenced yard.
There is dry rice and wet rice, just like in the palace.
There are no goldsmiths, silversmiths, blacksmiths, hunters or others serving.