The Medieval Locavore

What does it really mean to be a locavore?

Next week, I’ll start receiving deliveries from my neighborhood CSA, which means I’ll have a summer’s bounty of organic produce, grown locally in the Hudson Valley. Sometimes being a locavore means supporting local businesses as opposed to the big chain stores. As I sit here drinking direct trade organic coffee at Indian Road Cafe, I see that the menu boasts bread from Balthazar Bakery of NYC, meat and sausage from Vincent’s Meat Market in the Bronx, and vegetables from Migliorelli Farms in Tivoli, NY.

Eating locally is a choice that requires a lot of effort. Ironically, it’s far easier to go to your local grocery store and buy meat raised and processed in Kansas, fruit from Chile, and seafood from Indonesia. I contemplated what my food choices would be if I lived in the Middle Ages, when one’s options were to eat what was raised and grown locally or starve.

Then I started researching exactly what people were eating five hundred years ago in Western Europe. The upshot is similar to the scene today: Food in Italy, Southern France, and Spain was quite good, while the diet in Germany and England left much to be desired.

People along the Mediterranean enjoyed a diet rich with grains like spelt, olive oil, fennel, fava beans, and fresh fish. Almonds were used to sweeten and thicken food. Today, almond milk has gained popularity and I’m constantly seeing farro (spelt) on upscale menus.

The inland regions ate much of their food dried, pickled, or salted. Porridges of grains including spelt, barley, and wheat were the staples of most everyone’s diet. Pottage, a general term for a boiled vegetable stew, was also standard. Wild game like pheasant was a mainstay of the aristocracy. The nearly impermeable class divisions also dictated how well you ate. The closer you lived to the land, the closer you ate from it. In the Middle Ages, you were what you ate.

Monks and nuns were largely vegetarian, except for the sick or elderly, who would be permitted–mainly game–if the holy calendar did not dictate a time of fasting. The famous nun Hildegard von Bingen, known for her music, mystical visions, and treatises on science and nature, advised against eating the “flesh of quadrupeds.” Well, Hildegard, when you put it like that…blech.

One of the very best sources for medieval recipes is The Goodman of Paris, written by a 60-year-old Parisian burgher for his 15-year-old bride. Now before you start imagining the Goodman as R. Kelly, it’s important to remember that people in the fourteenth century, particularly women, didn’t live very long. The Goodman’s book was essentially a manual for his young wife that taught her how to tend to her kitchen garden, wash and store linens, and manage the household staff. The Goodman would eventually die and leave his wife not only well-cared for, but equipped with the skills to run a household and find a second husband. (Many people in the Middle Ages married at least twice.)

As a New Yorker who can get her hands on tacos and Thai food anytime I crave them, it’s hard to imagine the lack of variety that must have existed. Yet, this urge seems to be satisfied by the fact that during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we see recipes for food that is very highly flavored. One recipe for a salad includes chives, garlic, rosemary, leeks, and a few other pungent herbs. People also colored their food with dyes created with pot marigold and saffron.

Fruit and vegetables were seldom eaten uncooked, which leads to my big reveal: Even during the Middle Ages, people weren’t restricted to local eating. In fact, a great deal of trade was based around food, and when it came to people’s tastes for different flavors and aromas, they reached across continents. Consider about how much longer folks would have gone on thinking the world was flat had Christopher Columbus not gone out looking for Indian food.

Crusaders traveling to Jerusalem found many tasty things along the way and brought them home. They included garlic, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, anise, caraway, and mustard.

Treats like oranges were always candied because they had to travel a long way from their vines on the Mediterranean. (Oranges originated in Southeast Asia.) Sicily was invaded by Arabs in the 9th century, who brought blood oranges as well as spinach, raisins, and rice. Saffron was also a major Arab import. Oh, and that story you’ve heard about Marco Polo bringing spaghetti from China to Italy is hogwash. A Norman surveyor in the tenth century observed Sicilians eating long strings made from water and flour he called atriya.

It’s hard to imagine Italian food without tomatoes, but they simply didn’t exist in Europe until the Spaniards brought them back along with peppers from their New World explorations in the sixteenth century. Corn or maize was also imported from Mesoamerica, so I suggest you all start referring to polenta as Mexican food.

Even animals were imported. After the Battle of Hastings was won in 1066, William, the Norman victor, brought rabbits from France to England. They multiplied like well…rabbits, and became an important staple of the Saxon diet. While locals could certainly roast the trout fished in their own streams, they could also enjoy cod from waters further away, which was preserved in salt for travel and storage. Today’s gourmand calls it baccala.

And God bless the Germans, who, though not noted for their culinary prowess, are masters of the drink and started flavoring beer with hops, an innovation that spread throughout Europe as hops also act as a preservative and an anti-microbial agent. Water supplies were unclean since people both washed and dumped their trash and sewage in the same source. As a result, beer and weak wine were the drinks of choice morning through night for everyone from children to adults.

Now, the big question left is this: Was everyone in the Middle Ages perpetually buzzed? To be researched as soon as I order a locally brewed Brooklyn Lager.