April is a bit of a sparse month with regard to vegetables. There’s nothing in my garden that would form the centrepiece of a pottage, so I bought a head of spring greens from the greengrocer. As the names suggests, they’re in season and the cabbage that a medieval housewife would have had available at this time of year was more open than the tight heads that we have now, so they resembled spring greens.
What my garden does have, as you can see from the photograph below, is a few herbs. From left to right there are chives, parsley, savory, blood sorrel and lemon balm. Thanks to my single parsley plant going mad producing seeds after last year’s hot summer, there’s a lot of parsley, so I picked some of that as well as some chives to take the place of onions as flavouring.
I thought the medieval housewife might have run out of barley by now, so I just used the leaves I had. As usual, there’s no pepper or salt and no stock. The leaves were wilted in the pot, as I didn’t want the pottage to have any liquid.
I did eat some bread with it to give it a bit of body, but the pottage itself was very tasty. I can’t say that it was particularly filling. Lent’s over, though, and the medieval family is able to eat eggs, cheese and meat, if they can get any.
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.
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Do you think they would’ve had this with some eggs or cheese then?
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I doubt it. They would have added meat if they had some. I just meant that they were probably eating other things during the day as well, so it didn’t matter too much that this wasn’t particularly filling.
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Ah yes of course.
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Oh dear, that doesn’t sound very filling – especially as I assume April would have been a busy month for most. It must have been difficult to get enough calories in to match calories out.
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We’re in the time of year called the thin time. There wasn’t much to be harvested, but there were eggs and whatever meat or fish they could get. I have a suspicion that milk and cheese where seasonal, but I haven’t been able to find out much about that.
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Some cheeses keep well. Perhaps they could be stored? I wonder about the supply of milk, too. Nowadays dairy cows are “dried off” but if a household kept a milk cow and managed to feed her well enough over winter would they have been able to keep milking her?
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I don’t really know what sort of cheese was made. So far the medieval dairy world is a closed book to me. It might not even be the case that they had cheese at this time of year. I’m on safer ground with eggs as our sole non-hybrid chicken started laying again last week.
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Dairy cattle are dried off to help the udders avoid mastitis. ( It’s also necessary for them to come into season for mating. ) Mastitis was often fatal for cattle, or could cause a teat(s) to wither permanently. High grain diets in modern dairy cattle causes a great deal of pressure on udders, and mastitis vulnerability increases.
It’s unlikely medieval cattle ate much grain, but mastitis can be exacerbated by trying to wring every last drop of milk, damaging or tearing teats, or exposing them to bacteria in meadows infected with pathogens. Dried hay (the most common winter feed in medieval times) has considerably fewer nutrients, and cows cannot produce milk, be healthy enough for mating, or even stay alive if they don’t get enough nutrition.
Cheese was a solution for the times of plenty, but a lot of milk is required per pound of cheese. And there was butter to be churned from the milk-fat. Jerseys, Guernseys, Shorthorns, Holsteins, & such were far in the future.
Bossie could only give so much!
Medieval milk cattle had to be hardy & serve many purposes. They were also much smaller than the enormous beasts of today. Most were the size of Jerseys, small cattle by modern standards, but without the incredible udders & fat-rich milk of the breed.
Cheese was precious, almost always served with grain products, to extend the commodity. Serving a cheese & fruit course was reserved for the tables of the wealthy. Thrifty goodwives could eke it out, but a late spring would be hard on any supply. In addition, cheeses had to be protected from mold and mildew. Not all molds make Stilton or Bleu!
England’s moist & chilly medieval climate could be rough on cattle and milkmeats.
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Thank you. When the question was raised, I wondered how much butter was eaten in the fourteenth century. I assumed that it was eaten quite a bit, but now I’m not so sure.
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In other words, we should count our blessings as we look in the fridge.
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I do just that.
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Are dandelions plentiful? Europeans imported the seeds to America. Colonists prized early dandelion greens as a tonic, and ate them raw or cooked. Blossoms were brewed into wine.
The plants were too successful in their new environment. They’re considered America’s #1 weed. Too bad colonial thrift was lost to most of their progeny.
As they’re bitter, greens were cooked in two or more changes of water, leaching many nutrients. Raw greens are good, though varying in bitterness. Our Amish love dandelion greens; I’ve observed an entire family casing lawn & garden for their prizes.
Petals are quite pleasant in salads. Remove from center by grasping a bunch between thumb & fingers & gently plucking from the bitter hub.
As a sour nut, I could happily make a meal of your sorrel & chives, but suppose most palates would not tolerate the puckeriness.
Violets are another spring tidbit. Do not confuse them with African violets. They come in a riot of hues, especially the familiar purple. I’ve cooked them, but only for jellies. Cooking reduces them considerably, so a peck might make a dish for 2 people. Their cousins, pansies, are also edible, as are the greens of both.
New strawberry leaves work in salads. Only take about 1/4 of them, so as not to weaken the plant’s ability to nourish berries.
Fresh salads were consumed by 17th century colonists, so I’m thinking they just copied the eating habits of their medieval forebears. Many salad plants were probably tossed in pottage.
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We do have dandelions. My grandmother’s generation ate the leaves, but they’re a weed in my garden. I don’t know if they were common in the Middle Ages.
At some point this week I’m going to have a sorrel omelette with eggs from our chickens. I love it when I can make a whole meal from the garden.
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I love parsley and chives. This sounds like a tasty (even if not filling) dish!
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It was very tasty. I would definitely have it again.
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I love using herbs from the garden too, that does sound tasty!
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I can recommend it.
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Herbs always take a dish up a culinary level. I couldn’t do without them. It is fun making meals from your own backyard.
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It is. I’m trying to grow basil this year, but I’m not having much success so far.
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Basil doesn’t like cold weather. Maybe too early to grow it. More like a June activity?
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It’s in the conservatory in pots. It looks like a couple of seeds have germinated so far. The plants are going to stay in the conservatory until we have consistently warm weather.
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If it’s a cold night I would bring them indoors.
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Will do.
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I grew two varieties of basil last year, both given to me. One had very small leaves & wasn’t much of a grower. Maybe 9″ tall. The large leaf variety grew huge, with branches tumbling over like a philodendron. Gave most of it away, as I really do not care for the taste.
Might try the large leaf plants, if you haven’t already.
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I can’t remember how large the leaves are, to be honest. I hope they do grow, as I like basil.
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The small was most probably Thai basil. It’s more pungent that the Italian.
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Mine’s a variety called Sweet Green. I just looked it up in my records. The website of the company whose seeds they are said they have large leaves with high notes of clove and mint.
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Happy growing 🙂
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Bearing in mind how physically hard they had to work, it’s amazing they managed to do so on so few calories.
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I was just about to say the same thing!
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Ale, partly 🙂
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They got a lot of calories from ale, which they drank all day, but starvation was often a real possibility.
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They also ate some things we no longer consider food. Songbirds could be netted. Any non-raptor birds were Biblically OK. Squirrels, rabbits, & other small mammals could be snared. Not sure if hunting these small creatures was considered poaching, but they provided much-needed protein & fats.
Turnips were critical winter vegetables, and several varieties were grown, much larger than today’s. Mangels, very large, somewhat tasteless beets, could be enhanced with herbs, though they were usually grown for livestock feed. Don’t think saurkraut was an English thing, but cabbages held well over winter. The worst ones were the first eaten, as the better ones kept longer.
Apples & tree fruits, such as walnuts, were gathered, and the best ones might be stored away in barrels or wooden boxes. As with root & cole vegetables, the worst ones were the first eaten. The wormiest went into cider or were fed to animals. The best keepers were often hard, sour, apples and crab apples.
For the poor, many root vegs stayed in the garden until needed. They kept better there than those harvested. Storage was at a premium. Any not dug up could yield nutritious greens that could be snipped early in the year.
As people had little else for comparison, their food probably didn’t seem so bland or inedible as they seem to moderns.
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I think most of this applies to much later in the Middle Ages. Hunting rabbits was considered poaching. Somewhat incredibly, the Normans brought them over and they were managed. Since I’m a vegetarian, I don’t know if you can still buy rabbit, but it was a cheap meat when I was a child and we ate it often.
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