What would a medieval adventurer EAT?

[Music] greetings i'm shad and let's do a deep dive on the types of food a medieval adventurer would eat while traveling and on his adventures now what's fun about this subject is actually kind of also a bit of a broader subject on medieval food because that's what i'll be focusing on if we're going to be doing medieval fantasy let's look at what they actually ate in the medieval period but more even though we're looking more broadly at the middle period are going to be a bit more specific to longer lasting foods that you'd be able to eat while you're traveling because the whole subject of medieval culinary culinary culinary is is very broad and we'll be covering everything but we'll be covering the types of food that were available in the medieval period and that people were able to use for traveling for rations that would last longer and so that means no we're not going to be looking at potatoes or tomatoes no corn no sugar it's funny sugar was very rare in the medieval period and also we wouldn't be looking at the food that's more expensive looking food that is uh more easily available for the commoner the adventurer because they wouldn't be forking out massive amounts of money for the expensive food of the day so not only will there be foods that you think might have been common but aren't and so you know i love a lot of the rings it's fantasy and i guess that's the caveat that should be mentioned because you know you're dealing in fantasy you do have the freedom to introduce foods that weren't actually in the medieval period but if you wanted to give it a more authentic medieval flavor pun now intended uh you would want to use uh more authentic food but you know lord of the rings it has taters what's tata's precious all right so you can do it it's fantasy but it's good to point out that well no potatoes is not a medieval food so a lot of tropical food we wouldn't find so no bananas either and stuff though some fruits you might be surprised actually are medieval types of fruits for instance they had plums there was european types of plums and i'll go into more detail when we get into the specifics but just on the matter of climate that'll also go unaffected so for instance dates is a good example but dates you only find really in warmer kind of climates as well as uh like interestingly enough citrus uh the medieval orange is not the same as the orange that we think of it's actually a very bitter type of fruit that would only be really palatable and eatable when you boil it down and actually uh cook it and work with it just by itself not the nicest thing and uh references to orange in medieval texts you need a it's not our orange okay it's actually yeah a different type of orange because that's the thing food evolves and changes over time and a lot of the fruits and foods that we have in the modern day have been carefully cultivated by basically eugenics but on fruit it's food so you can do it right where it modifies it okay through breeding and selection and things and uh because like the bananas you eat right you notice that there's there's no seeds in bananas or if there are they're the tiny little black specks they're sterile okay we've been with bread bananas so they're sterile and we don't have to deal with the seeds but that means to actually have banana trees we need to clone the trees um yeah clone trees right actual bananas have big seeds like that that's a an actual fruitful banana right and so we change them a lot and one of the really kind of contrasting influence melons yeah there were melons and stuff in the medieval period but have a look at paintings of a watermelon from their even their renaissance and have a look at it the flesh in that is barely any red flesh okay and we've grown and modified our fruit by selection okay to make them into a lot more edible a lot sweeter often times where you select for uh the amount of pulp or flesh on the fruit the flavor as well and so things change over time and so some of the foods and fruits and things that i'll be mentioning here will be slightly different and where i know the differences i'll mention them and if i miss a couple share in the comments below if you know them as well on the note of expensive food it's actually remarkable how cheap and affordable some really great food is in the modern day in contrast and one of the things that really stand out to me is like spices do you know how prized cinnamon was in the medium well you're probably coming here to find that out yes cinnamon was very prized in the medieval period as well as other spices they often came from very far-off places and as a result were very expensive and prized in the upper class but as i mentioned in the modern day we can get access to all those spices at a very affordable cost but what's interesting is that we often don't take advantage of the great culinary options we have available because we get stuck into the basic run-of-the-mill stuff that we usually get into which is why the sponsor of this video is not only very topical but also will help you open up your options in your diet and that is hello fresh for this hellofresh we are cooking uh crumbled chicken dippers i first tried hellofresh long before they were ever a sponsor and it was through a similar promo as the one i'm able to offer to you through the sponsorship i was able to get a free meal i tried it out i loved it and i've been using it ever since i mean it's free food why not give it a go and it's really delicious with this meal it's not necessarily all uh medieval ingredients that's some of the so sweet potato okay but we are using a very medieval uh rosemary authentic medieval flavoring which was actually very available you know you didn't have to be rich to get the hands of rosemary and for me there were heaps of reasons to keep using it there are so many delicious recipes to choose from each week and it really did help break up what we were eating there is this recipe 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i can recommend wholeheartedly and it did exactly that it actually it won't improve my diet but also the food that we're eating was just more varied and more nutritious and delicious on top of that as well so i really recommend it all right let's get back to food that an adventurer would eat from a more kind of medieval historical perspective both things that you can forage but things that you can take with you as rations so the first kind of obvious thing before we actually get to rations that you will store and carry with you which obviously there's going to be those but there's going to be foraging okay the rations are longer lasting and so they should really be the last resort these are things that eat when you can't find anything else because they'll last longer but if you come across food that you can simply forage catch or hunt definitely going to get that first and eat at first because you don't have the means to preserve them so they last longer so looking at native european types of foods this is foods that you could find in britain or europe sometimes in both locations but sometimes in one or the other definitely many types of berries so you're looking at blackberries strawberries blueberries raspberries red currants cowberries elderberries and then some berries i've never even heard of like roma berries hawthorne berries and things but yeah medieval berries you can forage them find them and of course these really only be in the summer so time of year would be important for these ones as well uh nuts though you can certainly forage for nuts hazelnuts acorns walnuts and there's one called beech nuts i think beech must they are and they look a bit like chestnuts now aside from berries nuts there's also fruits of course one of the more common ones that you'll be able to find would be apples but here's a bit of a difference okay the more common type of apple of the medieval period would be more like a crab apple than the actual fleshy big apples we have in the modern day there are some examples of possible you know early predecessor types of these apples around in this time but crab apples are far more common there's also grapes pears plums cherries and all of them would vary by region or climate but there's a good variety of fruits berries nuts all that you could try and find and be much more successful in the summer of course in fact i found an interesting reference called the neutralis historia it's a period source that lists the types of fruits that are you know available in italy specifically 15 varieties of olive the pomegranate peach grape 12 kinds of plum 30 kinds of apple 41 kinds of pear 29 varieties of figs nuts which is more the generic term for uh walnut hazelnut and almond the chestnuts and cherries and a few fruits that we don't really have around the modern day the sorb and also the carob which is the fruit of the european cornell there's a lot of vegetables that you could forage as well and a lot that you probably don't really are aware of because they're more kind of considered now survival food the way it's not cultivated a lot but there are cultivated greens you'd be able to find such as brussels sprouts cabbage beans peas onions turnips and many more in addition to the types of things that you can forage then there are sitting traps and also hunting if the adventurer has time rabbit being a very you know common and available one also the pheasant and sometimes even rat and mice if uh the adventure's particularly hungry but then there is a larger game that can hunt boars can be a bit dangerous if you're going after wild boars all right they uh they can be actually very dangerous animals uh but deer as well if it's actually legal to even hunt deer in the area you are in is this the kings forest but these are just a number of examples of food that you could find along your travels which i think the average adventurer is always at least gonna grab something like especially if he's traveling and he passes like a berry bush or a couple of nice screens that he could throw into you know uh the food at night everything you just grab along the way just pause for a couple of minutes grab what you want put them in pouches and stuff uh as you're traveling especially if you also see game and you have you know the equipment to be able to take down like a bow or something you see a rabbit just there venture is a pretty good shots you know and then there's dinner and then you have longer lasting kind of preserved foods that you can fall back on but not only that you would actually kind of combine them because if you're foraging along the way you'd actually want to try and push the food to go a bit further and also some of the um rations that you can store are not very tasty and so you'd want to combine them and mix them up and this is where we come to just what about basic flavoring and i think the average adventurer would always carriage like a pouch of salt or some garlic cloves all right uh salt of course very common in medieval period it was not worth as much as gold lloyd of lindybage actually has a great video and while we're giving shout outs if you want to see some in-depth kind of examples of historical food not just from the medieval period but from many areas check out tasting history it's a phenomenal youtube channel and he actually finds period recipes makes them as accurate that is as he can and then also gives a bit of a taste as well awesome guy brilliant channel check that out as well if you want even further kind of examples of historical food that you can adapt into your fantasy whether that's something you're writing or role-playing or anything so as i was saying i think every adventure would definitely be carrying salt the amount it will vary sometimes you'd only want to carry enough to flavor your food but you might actually want to carry some so you can preserve some food along the way as well salt is a great preservative it draws out the moisture from the food and it can preserve food up to months and so imagine you know if you uh nabbed a deer and look a deer will already provide way too much meat for you to carry just a regular person but if you've got a pack animal but if you just wanted to dry or preserve a good haunch of the deer okay you just need to rub salt around it put it in a sack and as long as it's covered in salt you don't need the sack full of salt so if you had like a pouch of salt maybe yeah big that might actually be enough to preserve some stuff and then you have like a whole haunch of meat that you can carry with you on your horse or whatever that could provide food for easily maybe a week or more in terms of flavoring okay there's actually things that an adventurer could forage and if they've grown up in this world just like a medieval person they'll be aware of the types of flavoring that they could find along their travels and if they see it they might just grab some as well i'll chuck that in my stew tonight because it is a huge misconception i hate this and i've come across it more than once where people think the food of the medieval period was bland tasteless and dull and it's not i mean well a good example watch some of the videos from tasting history but only that like they had salt people they loved garlic and man garlic is one of the great flavors i love garlic right just garlic steak garlic pork you know but there are also a whole heap of other very affordable easily accessible flavoring options mint thyme oregano rosemary chives horseradish basil pepper sage nutmeg ginger and that's not to mention other flavor additions that you can find along the way like uh honey eggs milk cream if you those don't last too long but you can still carry some with you for a day or two but eggs that'll last a good couple of days but they could be fragile cheese and butter though my goodness that'll last a good while and remember you can flavor your food with the other sweet things like fruits and berries as well they might also carry a bit of honey with them on top of that and honey basically last forever and this is just some examples of the wide variety of the herbs they can add to give flavor to their food as well as other things and so you could make some banging dishes in the medieval period and as to the adventurer well if he just had a couple of these things or he finds along the way hey there's a bit of sage grab some sage along the way oh rosemary hey look at that and people would be very familiar with these things so covered a lot of things that you can find along the way in terms of foraging hunting trapping um and dimension fish of course you would be catching fish if you're near a water source and this comes up to the next part is actually water all right not every water source was clean in the medieval period but it's an utter misconception to say that none of them were clean there would have been so many clean sources of water and medieval period and people drunk water a lot we kind of live off water all right uh the misc i've already addressed this in uh well i think it's my first medieval misconceptions video where people say that many people only drink ale all right now of course there were some risks of unclean water and if you didn't have access to clean water along your travel that would be the preference but if you don't have access to it you need to carry something with you so definitely in type of water skin or water containing vessel and when you carry water with you there is actually a chance the water it could be clean when you first get it but water can turn bad all right there are certain microbes and germs and everything that can grow and multiply uh depending how it's stored that can it can just go sour bad and you can get sick drinking it and so one of the things that we see historical people doing like for instance romans even did this adding some alcohol or other types of things to the water to help kill germs basically they weren't aware of germs but they knew it helped preserve the water and it wouldn't be like you know just carrying wine with you it'd be very watered down but they would add wine to it or ale sometimes vinegar okay and yeah like vinegar water was a thing and it helped preserve the water made it get last longer it's not to say they just drank straight vinegar gee i know what that would be like uh but all right so preserving keeping water clean and this is a fun interesting thing that you might want to do if you're role playing or something like that is just roll a chance to see if the water or rations they're carrying something could go could certain bugs get into them or could the water turn bad did they take account did they preserve it right now the players probably wouldn't know this but if they're playing characters in the world they would most likely be aware of these normal everyday things that you do in life to just get by and so you could pretend they just do it automatically but it's good to just be aware of it and all that especially for writing stories and things and so with water covered we come to the actual rations you can carry and you might have noticed i have some food in front of me and these are choice examples of types of longer food that would be some of the first options i feel a medieval adventurer would carry and we start right here where the more affordable food okay is food that is derived from grains primarily wheat or barley but you're not going to carry raw wheat or barley with you because it takes time to prepare and it's nowhere near as dense or so heavy okay by actually processing the wheat and barley take you know grinding it down into flour and then cooking it you make the nutrition far more dense now in terms of bread though bread actually has a decent amount of air in it and it can be very fluffy and so bread isn't the best thing that you would carry because it would take up too much room you would want dense types of bread like flatbreads and other types of wheat flour dried things like um they would have had something like hardtack hardtack is a more modern term and this is uh just a water cracker but it's a placeholder for a hard tack which is basically um flour water salt baked and it's really stiff really hard it lasts for a good long time all right and i think stuff like this many people have known of it for a good while and so that would be one of the first things and hard tack like biscuits or crackers would be a pretty affordable not very tasty but if you're looking at some of the cheapest long-lasting readily available food yeah just like this and eventually have it in the pouches it wouldn't be too palatable but there are other ways you can do it to make it more enjoyable to eat because i'm not saying this wouldn't be the only thing especially if the adventurer you know traveller has a bit more money to spare but if they got nothing else they could live off of simple cooked flour that was combined with a bit of water and salt and water you got a really solid kind of thing or again like some dense types of breads as well would be common on top of that because the main theme or rule of thumb that you'd have with rations is things that don't weigh too much but are dense and so dense can grow weight but if it's dense it has high nutritional value for little volume and that means a lot of dried foods okay and so i've got dried fruits here and if you wanted something sweet easy to eat dried apples okay you could have dried plums as well things like that very very common and so just for something sweet a pouch of just some dried fruits as well dried meats and this is smoked meats dried meats and so also other types of preserved meats like salami is a type of preserved meat that lasts a good long while and jerky okay that'll last you a good while and ham would be the more common type of meat yeah because that's what the more common meat was for average people in the medieval period pork ham pig it was eaten a lot and then of course we have cheeses now there are some foods that i'll mention a little bit later that you might not think were actually eaten just by themselves but they really were historically because their nutritional density is very high and they last for a good while but before we get there there is of course the idea of just combining it because if you have water and this would depend if you had the means to prepare or cook because the adventurer might not have it any cookery with him all right so no pots no pans or anything he just kind of if he catches a rabbit he makes a uh spit out of some tree branches sticks or whatever and then he just needs to eat his rations a bit raw right out of his pouches and stuff but if you had at least like a pot or a pan and this could include like a ceramic jug medieval people often cooked in ceramic jugs and they were called pottages and so a pottage is basically a stew cooked in a type of vessel around a very common metal period and if you had anything like that well that's when you could probably improve your options if you had because what you can do to thicken up a stew is chuck some hard tack or whatever that's flower derived it'll boil and then render down in the stew thicken it up adds more nutrition you're adding flour to it and everything like that and it's a lot better than just eating raw baked flour like that and you can have a somewhat nice stew especially if you got you know dried meat okay it's a bit hard and tough but as soon as you put in a stew it infuses the moisture back into it makes it soft makes it more enjoyable and then you can find all those flavor options along the way add salt and everything and so you know i think it'd be fairly easy for inventors just carry some type of pot or something to just throw things that he finds along the way if he has water bang you can make a stew you can make it really flavorful make it enjoyable nutritious and you can carry then some very dense nutritious long-lasting supplies but make them more enjoyable to eat at the end of the day because i don't think adventurers i mean if they have no other option they're going to eat whatever they have to survive but if they can improve the the taste a bit along the journey and it's not too much effort if they only need to carry some type of vessel to do it i think they would and then they can add other things like cheese is a very dense longer lasting type of food and that can add a lot of flavor to a stew and it could just be eaten by itself of course and then you might be carrying some other things that you might not have really thought of that could have been just based food that you ate raw by itself and yeah so what i'm talking about lard and say butter both those things have huge nutrition and then blood is basically just fat but if you wanted to eat something that had huge amounts of energy that can keep you going and yes guess what sometimes roman legionaries were just given a ration of lard as part of their daily food intake all right and butter as well sometimes people just ate butter straight high nutrition very dense lasts a good while um there we go breaking down some of the common rations of course you would have hard tack like biscuits and crackers flatbreads dried fruits dried or smoked meats cheeses and anything that you can really forage along the way and we you have a fairly good basis for the types of rations an average medieval adventurer would logically have of course i don't think i've covered everything is there anything i missed are there some common types of foods rations long-lasting things that you could share in the description below i mean i was going to talk about pemberkin but pemmican is a later kind of period thing and it's basically dried meat with lard mixed together and then dried again into like these bricks lasted for ages had hoops and heaps of nutrition in it i didn't find any references like pemmican again is more 18th century townsend's great youtube channel again has videos about pemmican how to make it and stuff i wouldn't be surprised if the medieval period had a pemmican-like kind of thing made because it's literally just dried meat and lard kind of put together lasts a good long while uh but i haven't found any references for it and so but it's still really interesting about long-lasting kind of trail food that you can find and i'm mentioning it because remember you are in fantasy and so if you wanted you could if you do it knowingly add certain things that perhaps weren't in the medieval period into your own fantasy if you wanted it if it suited the setting you're working with or if you could justify it and so it's kind of good to know what other options are there and i'd love to hear some of the things that you could share in the comments below as well yeah of course if you want a wholly more authentic kind representation of the what the medieval period was like and you're doing fantasy that is very medieval inspired i hope you have a good kind of basis to go off so thank you very much for watching i hope you've enjoyed and of course i hope to see you here on the next video on chat adversity so until that time farewell [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Shadiversity

Views: 1,130,189

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Id: -HfljPdCEC8

Length: 27min 16sec (1636 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 10 2021