The Vegetarian Society tells me that August is the month for :Aubergine, Beetroot, Blackberries, Blackcurrants, Broad Beans, Broccoli, Carrots, Cauliflower, Cherries, Chicory, Chillies, Courgettes, Cucumber, Damsons, Fennel, French Beans, Garlic, Greengages, Kohlrabi, Leeks, Lettuce, Loganberries, Mangetout, Marrow, Mushrooms, Parsnips, Peas, Peppers, Potatoes, Plums, Pumpkin, Radishes, Raspberries, Redcurrants, Rhubarb, Rocket, Runner Beans, Samphire, Sorrel, Spring Greens, Spring Onions, Strawberries, Summer Squash, Sweetcorn, Swiss Chard, Tomatoes, Watercress.
I’ve crossed out the many things that have come to England since the fourteenth century to show you how much more choice we have now in our own gardens before we even need think of imported food. In my own garden I’m overrun with courgettes (zucchinis) and my aubergines (eggplants) are filling out very nicely. Unfortunately, neither was available 700 years ago. My beetroots are doing well and I’m trying for a second crop of peas while it’s still very warm.
As you can see in the picture above, my leeks are tiny, but need thinning. I decided to try leeks and beetroot. I also managed to find a few beetroot leaves that the caterpillars hadn’t eaten. As usual, there’s no pepper or salt.
I know this is almost the same as I had last month, with the exception of the carrots, but that’s the way of it when you eat food you grow yourself in season. I’ve been eating courgettes every other day for what feels like weeks now and the chickens are laying two or three eggs a day whether I want them or not. If you have a recipe that uses both, I’d love to hear from you.
When I saw the pottage in the bowl I was less than impressed and it tasted as bad as it looked. Last month small pieces of hot beetroot went very well with carrot. On their own they were unpleasant. I had to eat something else to take the taste away. Then I had to have a glass of homemade strawberry wine.
The experiment is proving to be a bit hit and miss and this was a definite miss.
Sources:
Medieval Gardens – Anne Jennings
April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.
Available now:
A Writer's Perspective 
Samphire was imported? I thought it grew wild.
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I think you’re right. I was misinformed.
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It’s a pity you are inland. August is also a month for harvesting seaweed like dulse, which would help with seasoning.
Have you tried making cake with the courgettes? Zucchini cake is very similar to carrot cake and uses both eggs and courgettes, plus you could batch bake and freeze them?
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Zucchini cake is very yummy and I highly recommend it. Good choice Sonia. Seaweed is a great product for many savoury dishes!
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I grew up with it, some people find it an acquired taste, but dried and crumbled it would be a good seasoning given the pepperyness of the seaweed itself.
Personally I can eat bagfuls of the stuff – if I gave in to it!
April look out for a PM via FB messenger
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I’ve seen it, but it didn’t make sense until I read this 🙂
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I’ll definitely make courgette cake. I’ve got about eight large courgettes waiting to be eaten and another five or six out in the garden ready to be harvested. One of my aubergines is ready to be picked and I’ve got a few more growing to a good size. I was with a friend today and managed to get rid of a dozen eggs.
It makes me wonder what people did with gluts in the fourteenth century. I can freeze some things and pickle others. Perhaps they just grew lots of things like peas which could be left to dry and eaten later in the year.
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There were no doubt plenty of hungry non fussy people and animals to be fed, nothing went to waste.
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Yes, you couldn’t afford to be a fussy eater then.
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We don’t see a lot of seaweed along this bit of the coast and I hadn’t thought about it as a food ingredient in the past, but I’m sure they ate it.
I’ll try courrgette cakes. I’ve got a recipe for courgette bread which I haven’t tried yet, but which sounds good.
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I’ve made it once, and it works better with home grown courgettes as they aren’t just a wet as the shop bought type, it is delicious
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You’ve already sold me on it.
If everyone grew their own courgettes, they’d never buy one from a shop.
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That’s an interesting list, April. I wonder why garlic was regarded as more of a continental flavouring – at least when I was growing up – as it’s been around for so long. I’m sure you’ve made umpteen courgette omelettes but we sometimes liven ours up with a dollop of creme fraiche sprinked with chives.
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The garlic that was around in the fourteenth century, like many of the vegetables, was different. It was more like wild garlic. My experiment is really a huge cheat, because everything is so different now.
I have made courgette omelettes. I’ve also made frittatas with courgettes and runner beans. The runner beans didn’t like the heat, so I don’t have a glut this year. I like the idea of creme fraiche on them, though.
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April, you can freeze eggs, without their shells. Great for say cooking or making omelettes later on. You right that dish does not look very appealing!
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I didn’t know that you could freeze them. I’ll try it. One of the hens does stop laying over winter (Livia, the one who lays the blue eggs) and the other two don’t lay when they’re moulting, so there are times when we’re short on eggs.
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Two schools of thought on the freezing of eggs. One is freezing the eggs yolks and egg white separately. Or freezing each full egg in say a muffin tin. We did it on the farm years ago and can’t remember how we did it. Ask Google for more precise information 😊
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I will.
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Like Ellen, I’m surprised by the absence of samphire, as per
“…half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire – dreadful trade!” (King Lear – significantly later, I know, but how did it get so well-established by then?
You could always poach an egg in your pottage,
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I was misinformed about the samphire. It wasn’t in the book and I couldn’t find an early reference to it. In my head I knew that it had to have been around.
I’m going to do a pottage with an egg. I’ve found a recipe to follow that calls for one. In this particular pottage, though, I think an egg would not have helped.
The experiment has taught me that medieval people must either have grown a lot of different things in their gardens or bartered produce with their neighbours. You would have needed access to most of the things on that list to have had a varied diet.
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Egg poached in a pottage of mixed greens could be tasty.
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Definitely.
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You could also make a fritatta with eggs, courgettes, any other vegetables you find, and some prefabricated pesto (just scramble the pesto into the eggs). Pesto makes anything taste better. It’s a pity they didn’t have it in the middle ages.
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I hadn’t thought about pesto in a fritatta. I tend to make them with a sprinkling of cheese, but pesto sounds good.
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Wow, I hadn’t realized that so many of those foods aren’t native to England.
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Even some of the ones in the list aren’t native. Many of them came with the Romans.
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Think I’ll stick with Asda. I’m very jealous of your home grown veggies and chickens.
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The thing about having chickens is that you can’t go back to supermarket eggs. Even the ‘free range’ ones don’t taste anywhere as nice.
There is something very satisfying about eating food that you’ve grown yourself.
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I love it when I get some proper chucky eggs. Good stuff April.
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My sources state that samphire is native to the British Islands. Dried, it retains a good deal of salt. Wonder if it was traded inland?
Never realized England was salt poor, surrounded by seas full of the stuff.
Many cultures diverted seawater into diked areas, repeating as it evaporated
until the salinity caused salt to encrust against the edges or “bloom” into crystals. But due to England’s “green and watered” nature, it might have been futile if repeated rains thwarted the venture.
Also heard that salted fish from the Mediterranean and Baltic regions provided the vital mineral, and that the brine was frequently reused for other purposes. Is this correct or facetious license?
Being too much addicted to the stuff, the pottage sure didn’t seem appealing to me!
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I never thought about why England didn’t have salt coming out its ears. Good point.
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There weren’t enough salt marshes along the coast. Salt had to be imported from France and Italy. I have no idea why they had salt to spare.
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There was, and is, salt in England, but not much. Salt marshes along the cost provided a lot of it, as did brine wells in Cheshire. As you say, salt was taken from the salt marshes by evaporation in salt pans. Salt did have to be imported, though, and it wasn’t cheap.
I don’t know if England imported salted fish from the Mediterranean or the Baltic. I know that fish caught off the English coast was salted to be sent inland. Salt was a popular preservative of fish and meat. Reusing brine sounds disgusting, but nothing would be wasted.
I’m assuming that my household can’t afford salt, so I use other things to flavour the pottage. There are lots of herbs in my garden and they do make a difference.
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I often wonder what I’d eat if I was a Medieval peasant, especially as rice, potatoes and pasta are later introductions to Britain.
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Back in January 2017 I wrote a post about what peasants might eat. They didn’t have access to much and ale provided a lot of their calorific intake.
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Thanks. I never thought about Ale providing a sort of meal.
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Because peasants had such small plots to grow their sustenance, they depended upon growing things that yielded the most bang for their efforts.
Pulses (lentils, peas, beans), barley (oats for the northerners & Scots), rye, spelt, lambs quarters (and seed — added to breads and soups), plantains, onions, mustard, leeks, and many, many herbs figured largely in their diets.
Legumes & grains stored well, which was critical when brewing ale, which didn’t keep well & needed to be consumed soon after it was ready.
Ale provided many nutrients that were released from the grain, and was more readily digestible. Barley malt offered one of the few sweets available, and gave fuel for hard labor. Everyone drank ale, even weaned babies.
Water was suspect & rightly so in the days before pathogenic diseases were understood.
Ale was thick & cloudy with the dregs, which were often stirred up so nothing could be wasted. Sometimes dregs were settled, and allowed to sour for barm to leaven bread. These were not the fluffy loaves of today, as the leaven was weak & the meal heavy. Sort of a cross between naan bread & pumpernickel. Woe to any who did not watch the loaves as they baked on hearthstones! Remember King Alfred & the scorched cakes! Uneaten bread was dried and broken into new batches of ale. Nothing was wasted.
If a family was better off they might have a few chickens. But the birds had to scratch for all their food, as grain was too dear to feed them. Small wild birds provided some protein for the poor. They were netted and their nests raided for precious eggs. Sparrows, pigeons, wrens, robins, jackdaws, curlews, — all were pot worthy. Some demenses didn’t allow netting birds if they were needed for the lord’s tables.
Fishing was common, but some lords were not generous in allowing it. Poaching anything declared as belonging to the lord was gruesomely punished. It was worth the risk when hungry children begged for food.
If a lord was magnanimous & the crops were good, meat & bread might be available on saints’ days and holy days. There were a lot of those, and may have provided many peasants with the little protein they legitimately ingested. These would be eaten publicly, where reeves & sheriffs watched for wanted people & listened for clues to whereabouts. Entire families could be outlawed, with children being sent to the feast to try & bring back food for the rest of the clan. As always, hunger drove desperation.
Potherbs, even bland or barely palatable, would have been eaten, as food was not wasted, and bitter things were considered medicinal. Herbs could be added to bread or ale if necessary to stretch things.
Not all years were hard. There were times of plenty and times of famine.
A good lord would garner extras, as Joseph did in Egypt, for dispensing in bad times. All depended upon the fertility and amount of arable land, as well as the conscience of the lord and his reeves.
I enjoy reading about April’s adventures in medieval pottage. She has more gumption than I care to muster, and will probably have more survival skills as well!
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I don’t know why, but this comment (and another) went into the spam folder.
It reminds me that I need to write about the special days when the whole manor was fed by the lord.
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Not surprised this ended up in spam. Often have a dickens of a time trying to post things. Sometimes they show up immediately. Other times they just “POOF!” disappear into the ether.
Anyway, have a lovely September!
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I couldn’t see any reason why it should go into spam. It is a reminder, though, that I need to look at the spam folder more often.
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I forgot to say that September is going very well so far.
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