After talking about living conditions, it's time to talk about food.

First of all, it must be admitted that medieval Europeans have invented tableware, and finally do not have to eat directly with their fingers like the ancient Egyptians, but modern people still find it difficult to accept - the wine glass is magnificently inlaid with precious stones, but the table is shared by one person in turn, and you have to share the saliva with others while drinking; The soup spoon is also shared by two or several people, so it is best not to bring the spoon directly to your mouth to drink, but to scoop it into your own bowl; The fork was an invention of the Byzantine Empire, and it was not brought back to Western Europe until after the Crusades, and before that, Europeans could only tear strips of meat with their fingers, like the ancient Egyptians; Of course, you can also cut steak and bread with a knife and stuff it directly into your mouth instead of a fork, but the problem is that a knife is shared by several people, and only those with high status can have a knife to themselves.

Of course, these are all minutiae, and as a noble lord, you can create a special set of cutlery for yourself. However, after seeing the medieval European classics on the table, you will definitely lose most of your appetite.

From the point of view of modern Orientals, the way in which medieval Europeans ate fruit was really strange: apples and pears were roasted over the fire, plums were stewed in a pot, and salt and pepper were sprinkled...... Eating fruit raw is seen as an inferior practice.

- Medieval European medical circles generally believed that all fruits were cold foods, and if they were to be eaten, they should be cooked hot or with hot spices (such as pepper...... It's really unscientific!

On the other hand, most vegetables, such as carrots, turnips, cabbage, cabbage, etc., were used to eating them raw in the Middle Ages, even the pungent onions – of course, there were roasted onions soaked in gravy, but that was a haute cuisine.

- Cooked fruits and vegetables eaten raw...... It seems to be the opposite of Chinese habits, which will definitely lead to gastrointestinal discomfort.

However, these problems are not the most fatal, Chinese are not unable to eat vegetable salad, as for boiled fruits with salt are not to taste, just remove these dishes from the recipe. But bread alone as a staple food can make people feel that there is nowhere to put it - the bread eaten by medieval Europeans is not at all the same thing as the fluffy bread of our modern people that has been fermented and added with white sugar and cream, but a kind of unleavened cake similar to a compressed biscuit, which is dry, hard and cracked...... The bread of the ancient Egyptians, although it was usually not creamed, was usually fermented.

At that time, even the noble lords ate long strips of brown bread with an average weight of 4.5 kg/10 pounds in their daily lives.

Note that medieval black bread and modern black bread are not the same thing at all, and the so-called black bread is actually similar to medieval white bread in terms of taste and composition, except for the color.

Typical medieval black bread was baked with wheat flour mixed with a large amount of bran – a practice that was already considered a fine black bread in the Middle Ages. There are even some black-hearted bakers who cut corners, and often deliberately add wood chips, small stones and other miscellaneous things to the black bread, which is more abrasive and hateful than the sand that the Egyptians mixed with bread - the latter is a passive crime, and the former is an active crime!!

Well, now even the minerals are there, and if you mix in some leaves and bugs, it's a whole nutritious food......

This medieval black bread is famous for its use as a weapon - in the chronicles of the Middle Ages, there are many records of stupid thieves who sneak into the homes of poor peasants to steal, but unfortunately die under the black bread of housewives; And when family conflicts occurred in the Middle Ages, countless men died from the black bread attacks of the...... As for the taste of this thing, please imagine it for yourself. …,

- In the Japanese light novel "Wolves and Spices" set in the European Middle Ages, the reason why the male protagonist, Lawrence, a traveling merchant, is reluctant to gnaw black bread directly when he can, but breaks the black bread to cook gruel, because this thing is too hard.

In the Middle Ages, the biggest difference between white bread and brown bread was that it took a lot of time and effort to sift through the bran, and the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages called the fluffy white bread made by fermentation "Pendermaine", which means refined and sacred bread. The white bread of the Middle Ages was generally relatively small, and each one was usually not enough for a normal person to eat, probably similar to the modern "breakfast bag".

Initially, white bread was the exclusive preserve of the clergy of the Church, but it was soon overturned and became a first-class meal for wealthy families in the Middle Ages. However, in the medieval aristocracy, there was often no clear dividing line between white and black bread - under normal circumstances, the kitchens of the nobles and the wealthy did not store large quantities of bread directly, but semolina, or wheat flour mixed with a lot of bran. When it's time to eat, bake the semolina into bread.

If you want to entertain guests or celebrate something, you will instruct the cooks and maids to sift the semolina. The more distinguished the guests, the cleaner the bran in the semolina, and the whiter and finer the bread will be, but the more effort will be expended.

Therefore, black bread and white bread can be baked completely in the same bag of flour, the difference is only in the labor. And the bread that the noble knights usually ate was actually between white bread and black bread - the wealthiest families could keep a few servants and sift flour from morning till night. In less affluent households, the number of times flour was sifted was reduced in order to reduce the workload of the servants and to avoid exhausting them, and also to avoid wasting the bran that would also satisfy hunger...... As for whether the bread baked by zuihou is black or white, it can only be seen by the benevolent and the wise.

In addition, in medieval Europe, there was a "queen's bread" (which can also be translated as queen's bread) made by adding eggs, milk, honey and vanilla with refined flour and replacing the ordinary dough with brewer's yeast. The taste of this little round white bread is basically the same as that of modern high-end brioche bread, maybe better, and the ingredients used are absolutely green, healthy and pollution-free - but this thing is already a super high-end luxury that even a king can't eat as a staple food!

According to a medieval epic, a king after a victory in a battle rewarded his army with a lot of barbecue and wine, which everyone was accustomed to. Then he rewarded each of the bravest soldiers with a piece of "Queen's Bread", but the others were envied to death......

No matter how tooth-wrenching and throat-hurting medieval black bread mixed with wood chips and gravel may be, it was still a high-class delicacy in the eyes of the lower classes of medieval Europe, who often didn't even have bread in their rice bowls – it took a lot of wood to bake and the baking process was cumbersome.

Therefore, the poor people simply took some rough wheat flour (although it was ground from wheat, it was not flour no matter how you look at it) and put it in a bowl, add some hot water to make wheat paste, and then eat this wheat paste every day. If you can get some wild vegetables, salted fish and meat, you can also pour all these things into the pot and stew them with wheat paste...... In short, it looks disgusting, similar to what we Chinese use to feed pigs, and a bit like vomit.

- In general, the serfs in the estates of medieval Europe generally ate worse than the ancient Egyptian peasants on the banks of the Nile three thousand years ago. …,

In addition to black and white bread, late-medieval Italians occasionally ate pasta (pasta), but this was an absolute aristocratic food, more expensive than white bread – before water-powered mills became widespread, it was a great effort to process wheat into fine flour for pasta. Moreover, pasta in the modern sense was originally born in Sicily under the occupation of the Arabs, and it was not until the 13th ~ 14th centuries that it spread to the whole of Italy, and as for the spread to other parts of Europe, it was already after the Renaissance.

Therefore, the vast majority of Europeans in the Middle Ages probably did not have the opportunity to taste the delicious taste of pasta.

After talking about vegetables, fruits and staple foods, it's time to talk about meat and fish dishes. Medieval Europe was supposed to be half-farming, half-pastoral, and the land was open and wildlife, so the price of fish and meat was lower, and sometimes the price of fish was cheaper than the weight of brown bread.

But medieval Europeans did not have refrigeration conditions, and even noble lords could not eat fresh fish and meat at a time - the ancient Chinese had many cities and strong consumption power, and there were always freshly slaughtered pigs for sale in the market every day. But in medieval Europe, it was sparsely populated, and there were at most fifty or sixty people in a medium-sized castle, and it was too wasteful to slaughter a pig or a sheep every day.

What's more, slaughtering livestock also depends on the season, and the livestock that have just survived the winter are generally very thin, and it is too uneconomical to slaughter them if they are not fattened.

On the other hand, although most of Western Europe was bordered by the sea, it was difficult to dry salt due to the high latitude of Europe as a whole and the lack of sunlight, which led to the high price of salt in medieval Europe, and in some places even higher than the price of salt under the government-run monopoly in ancient China. Basically, the warmer the place, the lower the price of salt, and the colder the place, the higher the price of salt, and in the coldest Russia, one pound of salt can often be exchanged for two sheep. And the notorious Nordic specialty, Sweden's stinky canned herring, was also invented because poor Nordic fishermen wanted to save salt.

- Readers who want to know how terrible canned Nordic stinky herring is, you can refer to the beginning of the Japanese anime "Moe Mushroom Story".

Therefore, Europeans in the Middle Ages usually ate air-dried meat, which was dried in the cold wind to mummify. Air-dried meat can be stored for a long time, and it can be eaten even if it has been kept for decades (the Europeans didn't care about dioxins and the like at the time). Before eating this air-dried meat, use a knife to scrape off the grease and oxide layer on the surface. Then soak in the river water for a day or two before the zuihou can be cooked and eaten. As for the taste, it can only be said that it is immortal - when ancient Europeans traveled, they always liked to eat bread instead of dried meat, and it is for this reason.

Even if you are lucky enough to get some fresh meat, the Europeans of the Middle Ages were too unparticular in some aspects, and many places did not even know that meat was castrated from a young age, and the pork cut by Zuihou was older than the old sows, and there was an indescribable smell - for those who are used to eating modern dishes, it is guaranteed that every time you eat this "meat" will be as uncomfortable as being tortured.

Apart from salt, there were very few seasonings on the European table, no curry or salad dressing, and sugar and spices were imported through the Arabs, which was frighteningly expensive. At that time, granulated sugar was sold in pharmacies, and for Europeans it was not a daily condiment, but a high-grade tonic like ginseng in the eyes of Chinese.

As for spices, take pepper as an example, pepper in medieval Europe was always sold by the grain. If it is pepper powder, it is even more unlucky, when weighing, not only to close the doors and windows, hold your breath, but also the buyer has to check the scale over and over again for any fraudulent ..........

- Lawrence, the protagonist of "Wolves and Spices", exchanged a large bag of coins for a small bag of pepper, and thought it was a very cheap price.

In addition to sugar and spices, lemon juice was the cheapest condiment in medieval Europe, and it is often found in modern Western cuisine. Northern Europeans generally coat bread with butter, while Southern Europeans use olive oil, in addition to a more expensive option: honey.

- Still in "The Wolf and the Spice", Lawrence almost goes bankrupt in order to buy a honey-stained peach for the heroine Herlo, you can imagine how valuable honey was in the Middle Ages. It wasn't particularly unusual that there was a war between two lords over a few chests of honey back then.

The cheese of medieval Europe is not a neat square in a modern supermarket, but a lump of green slimy, like toothpaste and mustard paste, but not like the cheese in our concept, which makes people lose their appetite at first sight.

You'll probably want to relax after a palatable medieval meal, but in medieval Europe there was neither coffee nor tea, nor hot cocoa, nor cigarettes to smoke – both cocoa and tobacco were still lying in the American jungles across the Atlantic.

The habit of drinking tea and coffee did not slowly spread to Europe through the territory of the Arabs until after the Crusades (coffee originated in Ethiopia). And, after a long journey across Eurasia and a lot of changes, tea arrived in Europe at a price higher than gold, and even the great nobles were reluctant to drink it regularly. In this case, you can only drink beer or wine for your own pastime.

However, it should be noted that the production and storage of wine in medieval Europe was not very good, so the value of new wine of that year was usually ten times that of the next year: the latter often turned sour and slag, could not be eaten at all, and could only be filtered and sold as vinegar - note that European vinegar is also made from grapes, unlike us Chinese.

Therefore, those who travel to medieval Europe, don't make this common-sense mistake, and proudly serve out the "best red wine" of a certain year to entertain distinguished guests at the banquet, it is estimated that people will only scold you in your heart for being too stingy, and actually let them drink vinegar, or old vinegar......

In addition, just as the beer of ancient Egypt was completely different from modern beer, the concept of medieval European beer was very different from that of modern beer. If ancient Egyptian beer is more like sweet wine without sugar, then medieval European beer is more like our Chinese rice wine - not necessarily foamy, brewed in a similar way to rice wine, except that the raw materials are barley and oats, rather than the rice that the Chinese make rice wine.

In general, in the concept of ancient Europeans, beer was synonymous with a grain liquor. Any fermented liquor that is brewed from grains rather than fruits (grapes, apples) and has not been distilled, whether with or without foam, is called beer.

Therefore, according to the classical classification method of Europeans, our Chinese rice wine and sweet wine, as well as Japanese sake, can also be regarded as beer.

Zuihou, if you distill medieval beer, then it's whiskey. Distilling the wine will result in brandy.

By the way, although the food in the Middle Ages was not very good, it seems that it is quite loving to be able to raise a few knights as dogs as a nobleman (in the Middle Ages, when the nobles eat, the dog and the retinue are guarded behind the table and wait for the owner's bone ......), which should satisfy the preferences of some hardcore girls.

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