Today I thought it was about
time for a return to Forme.... of Cury. See what I did there? Yes, I'm going to that medieval
cookbook which I know and love so well, The Forme of Cury, for a dish called makke.
It's basically beans and fried onions, good hearty peasant food, and that is exactly
what we're going to be discussing today. So thank you to 'The Great Courses
Plus' for sponsoring this video as we try to suss out what a
medieval peasant might eat. This time on Tasting History. ♪ Now if you've ever watched an episode
of Tasting History where I cook from The Forme of Cury, and i'll put a
link up here to one of my favorites, you'll know that the recipes in the book
were actually written for King Richard II. Hardly a peasant, but the problem is we don't
have any recipes for peasants because nobody cared what they ate but
we can look through The Forme of Cury and find some recipes that would have
the ingredients that might be available to peasants. So that really narrows it down
because almost every recipe in the book has a ton of spices, and peasants would not have any
spices, but this recipe for makke has only a few ingredients that will kind of have to change up
otherwise it's nice and simple good peasant food. Makk: Take drawn beans and boil them well. Take them up of the water
and cast them in a mortar grind them all to dust till
they be white as any milk, warm a little red wine, cast
thereamong in the grinding, do therto salt, pour in dishes. Then take onions and mince them small and
seed them in oil till they be all brown, and flourish the dishes there with and serve it forth. Wonderfully simple, and frankly pretty
good side dish for Thanksgiving if like me you insist on subjecting your family to
medieval cooking. So what you'll need is: 3 cups or 450 grams of beans. Now most of the beans that we use today would not
have been available in medieval Europe. They're all New World beans. If you want to use something
that is appropriate to the era the closest thing that you're probably going to get are broad
beans, or fava beans, though they're not going to be white like in the recipe so no matter how much
you grind them up they're never going to be white, they're more of a green but those are going
to be the closest thing, fava beans.
That said, I say use whatever
bean makes you happy. A half cup to one cup of red wine or ale Now here's one of the ingredients
that we're going to swap out. The recipe calls for red wine but in England in the Middle ages red wine not
really available to many peasants, so we're going to go with ale you could also
use mead perhaps if you want something sweeter. Also the amount that you use is
really up to you it doesn't say so it's kind of how thick you want your bean dish. Salt to taste, an onion minced, and then oil or butter for frying. So here's the other ingredient that we're
going to swap out because the oil in the recipe probably refers to olive oil which King Richard
would have been using imported from Italy. Way too expensive for a
peasant but a peasant might be sharing a cow with their neighbor
or maybe even have a cow themselves, so they would have had plenty of butter. That said the low smoke point of butter, gonna be hard to fry onions in. Not impossible but you might want to add in a little
bit of olive oil just to cheat. You could also use lard which
many peasants would have as well. So first take your beans and wash them,
and then fill a pot with water and boil them. Now depending on what bean you're going
to use they're going to have different consistencies. Fava beans kind of tend to
disintegrate and just take up a lot of water so the water pretty much all
disappeared I kept adding some, but it would boil away and or go into the
beans and then the beans turn to mush. If you're using something a little bit harder
like a red bean then those will probably stay firm that said we're going to be mashing
them up anyway so it doesn't really matter. Once they're cooked remove them from
the pot and grind them up in a bowl. Then pour your wine or ale into a small saucepan, and gently heat, then pour it over
the beans and mix it all together. Then mix in your salt and
dish the beans into a bowl. And now for the onions: take a
pan and put it over medium heat, and then pour in your oil or melt your butter,
and then add the onions, and fry them until brown. Now browning the onions can take between
7 and 10 minutes which is perfect because i am just aching to tell you
a bit about Medieval peasant food. Now people are always asking me how do I do my
research and frankly if i went through the process I would bore you to tears, but
I often start with a course on The Great Courses Plus. It's a subscription
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link in the description to start your free trial today.
It's also going to make a great Hanukkah or Christmas gift, I would think. Anyway let's get back to Medieval peasants. Actually before we delve into what
a medieval peasant might eat, let us turn to that 14th century
chronicler Jean Froissart to see what a medieval
peasant or serf actually was. "It is the custom in England,
as in other countries, for the nobility to have great
power over the common people, who are their serfs. This means that they are bound by law and
custom to plow the fields of their masters, harvest the corn gather it into barns,
and thresh and winnow the grain, they must also mow and carry home the hay, cut and collect wood and perform
all manner of tasks of this kind." So yeah, today we're talking about the
bottom rung of society and that is fine. The problem is that if you're
busy winnowing your lord's grain, that didn't really sound right, then you don't have time to log
everything that you're eating. It was long before Instagram so we don't have
any recipes, but we can still extrapolate from other writings and other recipes of the day
as well as archaeology what they would have eaten. Also Medieval peasants are not a
monolith and nor was their diet because the Medieval period covers up to a thousand
years depending on who you talk to. Things are going to change in that time, also the the space that we're talking
about, all of Europe it's huge. People in Italy are going to
be eating differently than people in England or the holy Roman empire, or Russia so take everything in
this episode with a grain of salt. Which is a perfect place to start. See a lot
of people think that salt was really expensive during the Middle Ages, and that could be true but it could also not be true it
really depended on where you were. See most of the sources of salt in Medieval Europe were either inland salt springs or the ocean so
if you lived on the coast getting salt wasn't going to be that hard or expensive because
you could just evaporate your own. That said separating salt from sand actually takes a lot of of work so you might have some sand in your
salt but you know at least you have salt. That said most people weren't using it to spice
their food but rather to preserve their food so a little sand ain't gonna kill you, but if
you were looking for flavor then you might have some salt but you weren't going to you
have any of the spices that the wealthy people had, instead you would probably rely on herbs, which you could grow in your own garden
attached to your cottage called a potager. They would grow all sorts
of herbs in these gardens from sorrel, and sage, and mint,
and rosemary, and thyme, and frankly a lot more herbs than we would use today, and one that they grew which technically isn't
an herb but they treated it as such was garlic. And for most of the period it
was associated with the poor. There's actually a wonderful quote from the
15th century rather snooty Italian author Sabadino Degli Arienti where he says, "Garlic is always a rustic food but
at times is artificially made elegant if placed in the cavity of a roasted duck." Artificially made elegant,
what a snob. Anyway like garlic which is technically a vegetable they
would also grow other vegetables: carrots, and cabbage, and beans,
and peas, and leeks, and onions, and if they were really lucky
they might even have a couple fruit trees or wild berries. Though some
fruits were actually kind of kept away from the peasantry and were rather prized
depending on where you were in Europe. Peaches for example in Le Porretane by the
same author who talked about the garlic he gives a wonderful story about
a peasant and he gets caught for stealing and eating a peach that was meant
to be for the local knight, and he actually blames it on a donkey but the knight does
not believe him and beats him mercilessly. It's kind of sad actually but it was
rather common see punishing peasants for the poaching of prized provisions was
rather a popular pastime for the posh. The laws varied wildly through Europe but in Norman England they had
something called Forest Law. All hunting in the silva regis, or Kingswood, which is basically all of the good
forestry where there was game animal was forbidden to actually anyone except for the
king unless he gave a special dispensation which he could probably you know often give to those
friends that he had but if you didn't have Lord in front of your name, you weren't going to be having
any boar or venison or pheasant anytime soon. And if you were caught poaching one of these
animals then the punishment could be rather severe it could be as innocuous as
castration or losing a hand, or maybe blinding but then it could also be
death and there are stories, though I wasn't able to find any contemporary sources but there
are stories that in parts of what's now Germany it was practiced to take the skin
of whatever animal had been killed and wrap it around the person and then
set dogs on them to kill them. Very like Game of Thrones Ramsay Bolton,
possibly not true but who knows. So it's no surprise that the
poor tended to get their protein from eggs and dairy, and
one of the things that they ate a lot of was something called
green cheese which was an unaged cheese that no wealthy person would be caught eating but the poor tended to tend to like it because it
didn't take a lot of time to make and actually my very first episode of Tasting History was
on making this green cheese. Ah, memories. Now peasants did eat some meat, some animals
were raised and there was some hunting allowed. Hedgehogs, rabbits, small birds, badgers, and of course the occasional pig, because
pigs were everywhere in Medieval Europe. Especially in England because
they kept the streets clean. There were actually pigs in London during the
14th and 15th century called Saint Anthony's Pigs who roamed the city wearing
bells around their necks. It was actually considered an act of charity to feed those pigs and then when the pigs
got fat enough they would either be sold or slaughtered and given to the poor. Now if you weren't lucky enough to have a pig
then another great source of protein was fish. They had a lot of it depending
again on where you lived. If you lived near a river you could
catch salmon or trout, or beaver, yes beaver was a fish and I discuss
that in my episode on Lenten foods, there were a lot of weird foods that were
considered fish including puffins. So if you live near the coast you could have a puffin, or eel,
or crab, or any of the fish that come from the sea except no porpoises and no whales
which were also considered fish, because there were laws where only
the king got to eat those. In fact there were actually a lot of laws on fishing
just as there were laws on forestry but it was much more common and that was a
great source of protein for peasants. But there was one great equalizer in the diets of
both the rich and poor alike of Medieval Europe, and that was carbs. Most often in the form of either a thickener for pottages or as bread. The quality of bread of course varied wildly. While the wealthy might be dining on wastel
and restons made of fine white wheat flour, the poor would be having barley,
and oats, and rye and maslin, but when times were tough
and times were often tough they would make horse bread which
was made of dried peas and beans and whatever else you could find. Oddly enough one of the "good things" that came out of the Black
Death in the mid 14th century was the increased availability
of wheat to the masse. In 1394 a ploughman in Lincolnshire
received 15 loaves a week as payment, seven of which had to be made of wheat. Now the last and perhaps best way
to get your calories through carbs was to drink them, and at least in northern Europe that
typically meant either ale or mead because with every meal you'd have a bit of ale
or mead unless you were drinking water, and yes they did drink water in the Middle Ages
despite what you may have been told , but they also drank a lot of mead and ale because
you didn't need to worry if it was clean or not. Had alcohol and it killed everything. Though many of the ales at the time were called
small ales which were much lower in alcohol because the purpose was not to get drunk it
was simply to have something safe to drink. Now the further south you go
in Europe the more likely wine becomes the drink of choice even for the peasants, but in England not so and frankly that
might be for the best because it seems that even then just like today France kept the good
stuff for themselves and shipped the swill abroad. Around 1175 on visiting the
English court of King Henry II, Peter of Blois lamented, "The
wine is turned sour and moldy; thick, greasy, stale, flat and smacking of
pitch. I have sometimes seen even great lords served with wine so muddy that a man must
needs close his eyes and clench his teeth, wry-mouthed and shuddering, and filtering
the stuff rather than drinking." And that is why I
swapped out wine for ale today in our recipe. Speaking
of which it should be about ready. So once your onions are nicely browned
you can do as The Forme of Cury commands, and flourish the dish there with, then serve it forth. And here we are: makke. Or, beans and onions. Let's give it a try i'm
going to get lots of onions because i like grilled onions. :D It's very hearty. Honestly this could be a whole freaking
meal. It's just like a bunch of beans it's it's very simple, it's not
flavorless by any means, but it's very simple. That said I wouldn't fault you for throwing in some other spices or herbs or
something to to kind of liven up the flavor, but if you like onions especially just add more
onions. That's what i'm going to do because they really kind of give that wonderful sweet
caramelized onion flavor to it but it's good. It's not amazing but you know it's peasant
food this alongside a piece of salmon, muah! It'd be lovely i could get that at Whole Foods.
Now if you enjoyed this video let me know because maybe I could do a whole like
mini-series. I could cover the foods of medieval monks and the medieval tradesmen and
what a knight might eat during the Middle Ages. If you'd be interested let me know in the comments.
So make sure to click the link in the description for your Great Courses Plus free trial and
I will see you next time on Tasting History.
