What would a medieval adventurer EAT?
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- Опубликовано: 9 дек 2021
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From authentic medieval rations to foraging and hunting, let's look at the types of food a medieval adventurer would eat when traveling and on their quests!
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SHAD! Thanks for the shoutout! Been a fan for years!
ha, I was wondering whether you'd show up eventually
Was waiting for the clac clac with the hard tac, damn you max for ingraining it on my mind
Mr. Miller you are an amazing person and your channel rocks congratulations on getting married and I hope one day you and shad could do a co-lab on food. Anyways wish you nothing but the best!
Max, you ever think of taking a visit over to the Shadlands at some point? It might be fun if you can get to go with Shad to one of those Ren faires like he did in the past!
Also, shad, why's this not pinned?
Love both your channels!
Shad, don't forget pastries. Medieval people loved their baked pastries, sweet honey cakes, various fried dough's, and of course the infamous pies.
These were not modern pies, but more like self canned meals. You would bake a fancy, thick, deep crust bowl with lid. Then make a filling (usually meat and veggies), then bake that in your already baked crust. You would then open the lid and eat what you wanted, then close the lid and keep it for the next day, and the next, and the next. If you ran out of filling, use the crust to bake more! Then when the crust was finally worn, you could eat it as it was still technically food, or feed it to the animals, or throw it in a stew as thickener/crunch. Apparently popular out in the rural communities.
yep the baked pie, liek cornish pasty great way to transport meat, the miners would just throway the crust that would be grubby. Hunting party food was made by simply quick baking meat in wrapped plain flour pastry , if the meant wasnt used on return, just rewrap and bake and old pastry often fed to the dogs, which love the meaty flavour, a better one is as you decribed where the pastry is designed to be eat, i make all the time using hot water crust pastry- melted lard and flour, simply delicious
That is a NIFTY way to use a pie. :o
But is it a good traveling food? even a thick crust is fragile. also the higher water content makes it heavy for it's energy value.
@@samuelberry4186 This isnt MRE, its not grunt proof and designed for dropping in crates from planes. preservation from spilage is more the issue, a way to move a hearty meal and not get ill from it.
@@samuelberry4186 Pemmican, and the african bag of goatmeat and fat, these are more suited for rigourous travel, or even a sack of oats for a porridge.
i had a dnd game where the wizard constantly prepared the sleep spell not for use in combat but to put a large game animal to sleep so they could kill it without risk. it was a lovely little rp action that they took in order to provide some reality to the game. any time he had to use it in combat he would say something along of the lines of "god damn it i was going to use this for dinner!" which got a good chuckkle.
lmao sounds like a fun campaign
That's BRILLIANT!
i Adore the idea of using the Sleep spell for hunting small game.
heck a boar or deer are only 11hp and level 1 sleep will almost always knock one of those out as it ranges 5-40hp of sleep hp damage it would have to be a shocking number of 1s and 2s not to make that hunt trivial.
Scurry up a flock of quail. *sleep.
A dozen or so birds fall to the ground. If you happen to not find all of them, they’ll just wake up later and be on their way.
No harm. No fowl.
Grab your ketchup and crunch away my friends.
That sounds like one really smart wizard.
Lembas bread, how could you miss the historical best ration that is definitely based in reality. One cake will feed a full grown man for a day, and a Pippin for an hour.
Pratchett's Disc World "Dwarf bread". It'll last for the whole journey, however long it is.. every day you take a look at the Dwarf Bread and you go "nah.. I'm not at that point yet".
@@tohaason dwarf bread, always keep some in case you need to trade. As a means of self defense, or robbery
@@tohaason "A traveller can think of just about anything to eat rather than dwarf bread including their own foot and even pumpkins..." (c)
Pippin had four....
"We've had one breakfast, yes. But what about Second Breakfast?"
Many plants considered to be weeds these days would've been part of the staple diet,too. Not just fruit. Dandelions for example. Every part is edible. The roots can be roasted and ground into a coffee substitute (dandelion is in the same family as chicory), gors flowers steeped in water could make a wine or cordial, even the roots of bull rushes could add to a meal.
My mother once made jelly out of the nectar. It was amazing. The flavor was similar to apple jelly, but sweeter.
There was a great civil training video and pamphlet during WW2 in Britain that showed housewives what and how to forage locally. Things like roots, nettles, inside pulp of some trees, weeds, even many grasses and wild grains that could supplement a meal. This was on top of being encouraged to grow gardens anywhere there was space.
I'd mention nettles, fiddleheads, many types of wild fruits and even some flowers..
A personal favorite of mine are cattails, almost the entire plant is edible: The top part, while not bloomed is small and green, looking somewhat like a tiny green ear of corn. Gather some up and wash, steam them like corn, add butter and salt to taste.
The inside part of the stalk can be boiled and can be pretty tasty.. usually, it's added to soups or sometimes eaten raw after washing.
The root balls which form down along the roots can be washed, peeled and cooked, used as potatoes would be, they're usually the size of golf balls. I find slicing them thin and patting out some of the liquid, then cooking them like potato chips is amazing, I've often heard the recipe called "Cayahuga Chips."
@@iacobushadrianus7889 My mother makes nettle soup, sooo good!!
Dandelions coffee? I am using this for a character thank you
Just a note on the Hawthorn berries, they are one of the easily foraged foods that you would easily turn into a long life ration by turning it into a fruit leather.
Simply:
-pulp the berries
-boil
-pour on a surface
-let it dry (usually by the fire)
(All can very easily be done in the evening at a campsite)
And now you have a tasty fruit leather that will keep from weeks to months...
Only if you can keep it dry over time. That's the hard part in a medieval society
Hawthorne used to be a common hedging plant in medieval England, because the bush is like a living barbed wire fence
How easy are they to cultivate ? Where can you find them?
You can do this with a lot of diffrent fruits and it is really delicious! My grandma sometimes makes it out of quinces or cornel cherries and it lasts the whole year (or longer, but it usually gets eaten before it can get this old).
So… Like Fruit by the Foot, but not nearly as unhealthy?
FYI, as far as "drinking vinegar" goes, our modern vinegars are far more acidic than homemade vinegars tend to get (especially ultra-processed types like distilled white vinegar). I've made fruit-based vinegars of the sort that could be easily be made in any Medieval kitchen and they can actually be quite pleasant and refreshing to sip even straight from the bottle, and are downright delicious when watered down a bit to make a tangy "soft drink."
The thing about homemade vinegars is that you can customize the types and amount of fruit or wine you use for flavor and complexity, and stop them at any level of fermentation and sourness that you want. And considering the average Medieval homemaker would be more likely to be using honey than sugar as a fermentation nutrient (if they used one at all), it would basically an acidic type of fruited mead. I once made a pineapple vinegar that was so delicate and complex it was basically like sipping a tangy yet still slightly sweet picnic-type sparkling wine (it still had a bit of fizz in it when first sampled). 10/10 would recommend making your own fruit vinegars at home. It's super simple and the results are so delicious (and infinitely interesting to tweak and play with).
There is an old recipe where vinegar and raw honey are mixed in water to preserve it. I've tried and it's is refreshing as there is not alot of either in the water. I don't remember the exact amount but it was something like only 2 tablespoons of each dissolved into 1 liter/ quart of water. You can not leave it in the refrigerator for more than around 4 days or it starts to ferment into a kind of weak mead type drink.
Would there be any chance you could send some of these recipes? Out of curiosity.
it would seem that we would make great friends if that is a hobby of yours, as I myself am known to make cider (and other assortments) and I'm sure you'll love some good plum chutney
@@hs4619 Who doesn't love a good chutney! And we make some mead and cider here at Casa Pitts as well. So much fun to play around with the recipes.
My guess it's similar to dry wine with the vinegary taste. It's not overpowering but you can taste it
Also on the note of hard tac that's more of a ship-based food, not a traveler's food. Travelers typically used Manchet Bread made of flour, salt, yeast, water, eggs, and milk. Unlike modern fluffy loafs Manchet Bread is dense and has very little yeast used in its making; think of the density of a heavy cake but the flavor profile of bread.
not exactly since waggen travelers on the Oregon trail would eat hard tac while yes its a different time period it was a very obtainable and easy food for travelers
@@Masked_ghsot_riley.offical hard tac became common after the American War of Independence due to their common use between the US army and naval forces. Like you said different time. Hard tac didn't become common until after the age of sail for non naval uses.
I think I'd actually like that tbh
Unrelated to this comment ,But what are those books at Shadaversky bookshelf background, The books near the golden dragon figure? I'm new at reading books and just started this habit in 2020, And those books look interesting to me. Can't read it from this veiw.
That actually sounds a lot like pita bread. I used to love eating that stuff as a kid.
If you've ever visited Nuremberg for its Christmas market, you'd see these huge things of gingerbread. I am told these can last a long time, and was sold as the sweeter option to hardtack-like foods.
The greek sailors used something similar as rations: some type of bread dripping with honey.
Johnny reb used to cut sawdust into his hardtack.
The thing with true gingerbread: It is actually expensive. Like it uses a LOT of Ground Spices.
But yea, it can, or even should for taste reason, stay for months.
This Is true, hard gingerbread lasts almost as long as you can keep pests Away from it. It can be almost inedible at the beginning. You have to let it soften
@@abrahamlincoln9758 Austro hungarians did this deliberately with their army bread for medical reasons
This actually gave me a great idea as a little quirk for my character. She should be planting these kinds of foods on the side of popular trails during short rests. If everyone brought a packet of seeds with them and planted say 3 a day on the side of the roads, everyone would benefit from it.
So, she'll be Johnny Appleseed?
Remember that apples don't grow true to seed. So she'll end up littering the countryside with crabapples. i heard peaches and nectarines do grow true to seed though.
Someone had the bright idea to plant blackberry bushes all along the cart paths in our city. They're so big now! There are blackberries everywhere in summer.
@@jonmichaelgalindo What are cart paths?
@@stepheninczech paths for carts
One thing I find interesting that people did all the way up to the turn of the century, but almost no one does these days, is preserve meat in lard. Placing meat in jars (either earthenware or glass in more modern times) and pouring hot lard over the meat to seal it in. Protects the meat from bacteria and prevents it from spoiling for up to a month on a shelf. I would be surprised if they didn't make use of this method in the medieval period, considering how easy and cheap it was. Even considering the weight, carrying a small jar of lard-preserved meat would be a solid choice for an adventurer, especially if you had a cart or wagon, letting you carry a good stock of food at a time.
Would that work with un-glazed pottery? Would the lard seal up the pores or would you have to use glazed pots?
@@himssendol6512 I’m not sure how old glazed pottery is, but I know that nomads of North Africa have preserved meat in lard in clay pots since the Middle Ages.
Then you eat the lard when the meat is done!
this is called "corned meat" or "corned Beef" the word corned meaning canned and this is still eaten today...
Because we now have fridges, there is no need to preserve meat by sealing it with lard.
A good alternative to garlic is Allium ursinum, wild garlic.
It grows in many forests around all of Europe even today. Probably tasted much the same as today since it was never really cultivated properly. Basically a drop in replacement for garlic.
There are wild onions in the US......but they are rough to eat.....small and very very strong taste.
@@bmphil3400 Perfect for adding some taste to boring rations
I've eaten those
It's not as hot or aromatic as garlic, and with more flavor
Also known as "bear garlick" in some countries.
And garlic chives (Allium tuberosum)
Probably one of my favorite lines injecting realism into a book was in the first Wheel of Time book where the group is traveling and eating the same cold rations over and over again since they can't stop to make a proper camp.
"I used to like cheese."
i wish more books/movies/shows mentioned that fact. If they didnt have time or ability for a fire soldiers and travelers back then went crazy eating stale, sometimes moldy, often flat bread with cold cheese and salted meat two or three times a day, day after day.
I can't believe you haven't mentioned mushrooms! Mushrooms are delicious, abundant in forests pretty much throughout the year (except when it is freezing cold), easy to prepare in many ways. You only have to know to identify and avoid the dangerous ones, something an average medieval traveller certainly did know.
You're Nuts! ;)
Hmm... That's scrumptious
@UClUJ9O8SdxI9r6Vg43PBc9Q there are more rural places in Europe where pretty much everyone goes and get wild mushrooms and knows the save ones to eat. Given the medieval population was overwhelmingly rural I bet a lot of them knew it then. You don't need to be a full time hunter and forager, I bet a lot of people supplemented their diet with occasional hunting, fishing and foraging as most communities would have succeed to managed woodlands and only just produced enough food for themselves.
You have to be careful when traveling to a foreign area though. Mushrooms that look like the edible mushrooms at home may actually be a different, potentially poisonous, species.
Mushrooms have periodically not been used. Because they may taste good, but they contain almost no nutrients. And deadly mushroome are common and often resemble edible ones. This means that you must have some knowledge about them to be of any use.
Depending on where you live, they can be very seasonal.
I've brought myself a slow cooker as a makeshift cauldron for food. I've went mad with it that I started phrasing dune quotes about spice:
"Thee who controls the spice, controls the universe"
i say the same when i see a brick of drogs
Cept in dune they wernt talking about food spices... They were talking about drugs.... Lol
@@joshsemo4214 the spice in dune isn’t just a drug, it’s got uses in practically everything
Fun fact: to make salami you usually need black pepper, which was quite expensive at the time - because of this in the Tuscany region of Italy they made a type of salami with wild fennel instead (which was extremely common) in order to reduce costs. The cool thing is that fennel is rich in menthol, which is an anesthetic: that's when the winemakers figured out they could exploit that by serving this type of salami to their clients in order to mask the taste of wine and sell them lower quality wine at a higher price!
Fennel seed is also good for constipation.
Here's a few related medieval traditions of Eastern Europe that you may not be aware of (some are still carried out today in rural areas):
- Clean water wells were considered community assets and often dug outside or inline with the property fence (on the road side) to be easily accessible for everyone. Isolated communities also used to dig wells way out of the village near the main access roads as a way to support traveling to and from neighboring settlements. Also it was considered extremely rude (or even a sin) to refuse access to clean water to travelers. By the way, drinking wells were maintained both by cleaning debris and by dumping lime into the water once a year (it's a much more effective antiseptic than modern people think and not harmful in low dose water dilution).
- People who had orchards planted at least one fruit tree outside the property perimeter (usually alongside the closest road or path) for travelers to pick fruits freely if they wanted.
- Giving a free meal to a hungry traveler was quite common in Christian communities. This could vary from a small takeaway offering to actually inviting the man to sit at a table and sharing whatever you've got prepared for your family.
Also they were incentivized to invite travelers in because that was the only way to get outside news
@@KatieGimple Hell, some people made a living that way, just travelling around the lands with news from around the kingdom(s).
I've seen little plaques in people's homes about long-honored traditions of inviting in strangers for supper, ranging from Irish in root to German.
Ireland was very similar, with the laws of hospitality found in the Féinechais (Brehon Law) being pretty much sacred to both Pagan and Christian Irish. It worked both ways, with the host and guest both obliged to hold to the laws, but it was pretty rare for someone to violate it. So travelers generally had an easy time of it compared to what most modern media portrays, IF- and this is a huge if- you approach during the day. At night, yeah, with the hounds that were set out at night you might not even survive to get to the gate or door. Hell, that's how Cú Chulainn got his warrior-name.
That's fascinating about the wells, I had no idea.
Once, when I was a kid, I was pretending to be an adventurer hunting a monster and I found a patch of wild mulberries. They were quite delicious until I made the mistake of eating some that weren’t ripe! Not only are they the most sour things I’ve ever tasted, but they also cause nausea and hallucinations! So that was a bad day for me. It was like the world’s worst acid trip.
Time to go out on a *trip,* brb
@@Circ00mspice ;)
That was good. That was pretty good. (XD
Leveled up your Alchemy skill at least
Blackberries are red when they're green.
The ranger's apprentice series does many things really well, one of which is their travel/camp life shown in the books. Fantastic books.
Never heard of it... Might be worth a look.
@@DiogenesDworkinson, written by Aussie John Flanagan, it's a HUGE series of stories set in a mythical land. Lots of practical field tips, too. Rangers are the king's covert ops guys, wearing camo cloaks, and shooting longbows with uncanny accuracy.
One of the best series I’ve ever read. I hope he never stops writing them
Pemmican seems like a “later kind of thing” because it’s indigenous to North America-the name is literally a Cree word. Did medieval Europeans have something similar? I don’t know, but pemmican itself was entirely invented by Native American peoples, and later adopted by European fur traders and arctic explorers.
There are a number of regional variations, but many include dried meat, tallow, and sometimes berries. Some versions contain no meat, but consist of corn, tallow, and fruit.
I think other people had similar food. My grandmother is german and had a 200 year old cook book that a recipe for "boar loaf" that is pork, lard, hazelnuts ,and raspberries.
Some metal helms can double as pots. Characters can stir and eat with their daggers. Some WWII soldiers cook and ate out of their helmets and used knives.
Would probably ruin the steel heat treat tho.
I guess they salted their food with the sweat stored in them throughout the day?
@@saintsfan9578 what is the temperature threshold for ruining heat treat?
@@Poluact best answer I could find is 400 degrees. Camp fires are normally about 600 (roughly)
@@saintsfan9578 but would it heat to 400 with water inside? Of course, depends on helmet design but if we take some average. 🤔
Dandelion leaves also work as a vegetable. Medieval people would also be fairly knowledgeable about mushrooms so they could forage the edible ones while staying clear of the poisonous ones.
isnt pretty much the whole plant edible.. i know you can make dandelion coffee from the root.
@@psal8715 yes, which is why it was transplanted by the Pensilvania deutsch when the moved to America
You can also put thein a jar like cucumbers, just flowers or other parts. There's a whole lot of plants which were used as vegetables or herbs, some were replaced by spices like pepper.
Mushrooms really depend on the culture. I believe that in most of Scandinavia mushrooms were considered fundamentally inedible until the early 20th century and people just didn't even consider them as an option for food.
@@Lightice1 Maybe they were more for rituals and shamanic potions. Perhaps only their shamans had the knowledge which ones were good and bad, and they would give you what you needed at that time. Fly amanitas were commonly used as a psychedelic, as they're much more potent the more north you go. They also didn't have the diversity like in slavic countries.
But I find it hard to believe they never considered any mushrooms an option when they had access to one of the easiest identifiable family: boletes. All dark headed boletes are edible, and they are absolutely abundant in pine forests, in the right time of year.
The "water + vinegar" thing is actually something that had a "recent" boom here in Japan (actually already a couple of years old). You find these bottles of watered down "fruit vinegar" with certain flavors like pomme grenade, pine apple, peach, muscat(spelling?) in almost every supermarket here. Just search for 美酢 ミチョ. It tastes pretty nice, depending on the ratio of water to vinegar. There are some varieties that just have a too high vinegar part for me to taste good, but then again those drinks are perfect to heat up a little bit and enjoy with a bit of mixed in shōchū (Japanese distilled beverage made of either rice, wheat, or sweet potatoes and usually between 20% to 25% alc content), especially in winter.
the Muscat family of grapes includes over 200 grape varieties belonging to the Vitis vinifera species that have been used in wine production and as raisin and table grapes around the globe for many centuries. the Vitis rotundifolia, or muscadine, is a grapevine species native to the Southeastern and South-central United States. there are dozens of varieties of muscadines grown 'commercially' by small scale wineries near where i live here in Alabama. some are reds, some are blushes/pale reds, but the majority are green ones used to make white wines. some muscadine farmers grow theirs for table fruit, but not many are made into grapes due to the muscadine's ... naturally low fructose content. most of the varieties here in Alabama are barely 'tamed' with the wineries cultivating the bushes and vines only 3-4 human generations ago.
Shad giving shoutouts to Tasting History and Townsends made me smile
You have to realize there's a huge difference between eggs you buy at the supermarket and eggs from you backyard chickens. There's a protective layer on eggs that are often removed for supermarket eggs, and it ruins it when they're refrigerated. This is called the "cuticle". Fresh eggs from your backyard chickens dont need to be refrigerated.
These eggs can last like two weeks, by the way. Not just two days. That would be very useful for a medieval adventurer!
That's only in America, outside, the countries that do it can be counted on your hand. The rest of the world doesn't remove the cuticle of the eggs
Plus, my father has done some research that you can burry eggs in something, though I forget the exact substance, to keep them good for many more months. It's apparently a very old method for keeping eggs good long term, as chickens often don't produce as much through the winter. Feel free to double-check this though.
@@simcraft9060 they do that to meat using lard... keeps meat for months, my grandparents would fry meat up and set them in slices into recipients filled with lard and then closed tightly to not alllw bugs to ruin it
@@tandemcharge5114 yeah consumerism got to it they cleaned them so they look clean on the refrigerator shelves back in the do say they made heath regulation around that now you legaly have to
@@simcraft9060 Yep, I believe its called water glassing.
Shad forgot to mention dandelions. It's an herb that everyone has heard of and has been eaten for most of recorded history.
Yeah, I love them, still eat them every spring/summer I pick them and best thing is you can eat every part of the plant and use them for different things. Make a sort of tea from the roots, use the leaves as a salad, soup the flower heads or use them to flavour water.
I can't tell if you're both trolling, or not.
@@knownas2017 Dandelions were imported to the new world in the 1500's as a staple crop and as an additive for meals, if that helps.
@@R0GU351GN4L I think that if you boil only the flowers you can get something similar with honey. I could be wrong though.
@@Stefannice You can make a sort of syrup with them but it takes a lot of flower heads water and time. The nectar/pollen breaks down and gives a sort of sweetness.
I am really surprised you didn't mention salt cod, it was the standard long life military ration of the medieval period.
I was actually talking with my mom just the other about the kind of vegetables they'd have available back then, one very good resource we found for that was the Capitulaire de Villis, a text from around 800 detailing how Charlemagne's royal domains should be managed, including lists of the animal to be kept and plants to be grown.
Do you happen to have a link for that?
Oh, big thing here, do NOT eat acorns.
Some species are safe to eat, but some others contain large amounts of tannin. Many foods contain these compounds, but usually it's not a problem for humans.
With oak nuts however, this can cause severe health problems, which is the last thing you need on an adventure.
BUT, they were eaten in medieval Europe, usually as a replacement for better foods. What you can do is crush them and soak them in water several times to extract the tannin, then dry them. Now you can use them to make bread, a coffee knock-off, and many other things.
Just a warning to not eat them off the tree, as you probably aren't an expert in oak species to be sure which ones are safe!
I've actually tasted an acorn once, it was bitter as hell. No wonder it was considered a replacement
Got some oak trees around my house and yeah..not a thing you wanna eat straight off the tree. Wanna work with that a bit before you even try..you'd be better off making tea with pine needles from evergreens, high in vitamin C as well, they would be pretty easy to find in forest even in the winter so you could get some needed vitamin C during a time when fruits could be scarce.
Yeah, Native Americans used them a lot too, in the manner he talked about, but a lot of work, grind, soak, rinse many times, and dry, but if you don’t have flour or corn, it’s a good starch to have.
I eat a buttload of acorns as part of my normal diet. It's a very common korean dish made by soaking the acorns in water and leaching out the tannens. IYou're left with a starch that is made into a slightly bitter tasting jello called "dotori mook". You eat it with soy sauce and green onions usually. Kind of an acquired taste, but not bad. It's kind of a specialty in my area, though it's very common any place where people do a lot of mountain climbing.
Yeah, acorns for the most part must be processed either by soaking or steeping with water changes until the water remains clear. Then one of the best uses is as a high calorie flour substitute. Think almond flour.
That's the joke, the adventuring party might try to eat anything that doesn't successfully eat them first.
Elves' back on the menu boyz! XD
I just imagine the adventurers slaying a dragon, stealing his treasure, then they camp here to salt and smoke some dragon meat XD
WARNING! Slimes are not Jello!
@@cioplasmmajic8327 though small amounts diluted with water makes a great tenderizer
Hellhound kebabs.. self-cooking, with just a hint of brimstone..
Slimes, mmm Forbidden Jello.
Gryphon? Fried chicken: hard mode!
Dragon: strips and nuggets to feed the whole village, celebrate saving the peasants in style.
Treants? Grumpy firewood. Though who knows.. crack 'em open, see if there's any hives in there. Then honey, to make dessert.
When you mentioned our modern day luxury of having cinnamon I was able to smell suddenly the beautiful smell of cinnamon much stronger than I was expecting a memory to have...... When I realized I happened to be washing a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch at that exact moment 🤣
I remember watching a video about pemmican. It was a staple in the Native Americans for a long time as an emergency ration/travel food, since the medieval period as well. The guy who gave it the label "pemmican" just took the recipe and marketed it.
From my own adventurers, I can attest that salami is an excellent travel food, can be eaten as is or cooked into a soup or fried. Something important to consider, especially for Rangers or Scouts, is whether or not you will actually be cooking your food. As the smell of cooking, smoke and the light of the fire may give your position away. Townsends has what he calls a "kitchen spice" which is salt mixed with other spices all in one easy to carry container. And then preserving extra meat, if you hunt, can be done via smoking, rather than using your salt ration. My solution to carrying eggs is simply to boil them first, don't have to worry about them breaking and they should last a bit. I also have made a Medieval Recipe for a honey and vinegar syrup that can be added to water, video on my channel which my viewers have tested and say is good for hydration if not outright helping preserve or clean water. I'd be curious to know what in the way of pickled goods might be carriable as an adventurer. Great video Shad!
Keep your fire under a tree and the smoke gets diluted through the branches, limiting the visibility.
Fun fact : biscuit comes from French and originaly means "baked/cooked twice" : once is the regular baking, and the second is to dry it entirely. It was originaly ment for sailors and soldiers, precisely to use as ration. It was often of mixed flours, and kept whole grain, to limit leavening and increase density. According to everyone, it was barely edible, and so hard to digest it could give diarrhea. But it had basically unlimited shelf life if properly stocked and was very compact.
I think dry hardtack-like biscuits of that sort were often crushed up into small pieces and soaked in whatever liquid was available (ale, wine, plain water, whatever) to make basically a carbohydrate-rich bread sludge that travelers could consume quickly for energy. Not appealing or tasty, but it'll keep you going on the road.
I have eaten hard tack for days and not had any issues. Home made with oat wheat and spelt. No weevils though. I also used dry meat of my own making (cooked slowly for 8 hours while thin as bacon).
"zweiback" is the German version of the word, literally meaning, "Two Bake".
@@wasd____ yeah, exactly. the US soldiers in the civil war had hard tack which is basically the same thing. They'd soak the biscuits in coffee, tea, soups, stews, fried them in bacon grease, etc. Adds more bulk and calories to what you're eating to fill you up and keep you going.
@@wasd____
They could always add a drop of honey or crushed fruit. Like Shad said, food didn't have to be bland.
This is so fun to listen to. The first game I ever modded (added mods to) was Skyrim, and it was precisely to add relevance to food and weather, basically adding adventure survival. Since then, I've gravitated to more Survival/Survival Adventure games, as it just adds that much more realism to the experience. And of course, that gets me thinking, how would this go in real life?
And now we know! Thanks, Shad!
50 barrels of honey, 20 kilo of cheese bread or/and meat. Probably some "dungeon rations" from a friendly spiderweb covered, skeleton over the top, chest marinated rations that havent seen the light of sun in estimated 10-5000 years
For preserving foods, don't forget SMOKING it! If your character downs a deer, cut some wood, smoke it, and put it on a pack animal. Save the salt for flavoring. You can also smoke fish and shell fish.
Prestidigitation to insta smoke
Smoking meats is not that easy. Smoking an entire deer without a smoke house would take days. And it would need constant supervision because the moment a breeze starts, or the wind changed direction, you are no longer smoking the meat.
Also, to get the density of smoke you would need to have a chance, you would need the meat close to the fire, which means you are just cooking the meat and likely burning it.
@@KurNorock unless you got the right cantrips
@@KurNorock assuming this is a setting with that kind of magic
Smoking doesn't work without copious amounts of salt, can take days, and usually some kind of a chimney that concentrates the smoke. Rural households around here in Eastern Europe still frequently have smokehouses in the yard, most often about the size of a large fridge, but there were actual walk in communal ones found from the medieval period. You'd probably bring a lot of smoked stuff with you, but you wouldn't do it on the road.
Beech grows about everywhere in western Europe (Northern France, the low countries etc.) The nuts are quite a bit smaller than chestnuts, about the size of my fingernail, and there are three of them within the husk, forcing the nuts into a triangular shape. Chestnut husks typically only contain two nuts with a flattened and round side. Beech nuts have no round sides. In autumn, the ground under a beech tree is just covered with them. Each tree seems to produce thousands. You have to be quick when collecting though, because insects will hollow them out quite rapidly.
As a side note, European beech wood is an excellent wood to make furniture, veneer, flooring and staircases because it doesn't splinter. It's also good for campfires and smoking meat and fish.
Beech nuts are also really tasty. There are several beech trees around where I live and they dropped huge amounts of nuts this year. Almost everytime I've taken my dog for a walk for the last couple months I've grabbed a handful to snack on. The pignut hickory and black walnuts also had a productive year. I probably have 75+ pounds of nuts I've collected on walks over the last couple months.
Beach is also good a good material because it is reasonably hard compared to other woods.
Beech wood is great for furniture, tools and other little objects, but not for carpentry or large planks for example, as it is a very nervous (I don't know if this word can be used for that in English, in French we do it), meaning it get twisted around itself quite a lot while drying, so not a huge problem for little things, the twist won't be problematic, but for large things, it definitely is.
@@Hobbit_libertaire True but you can laminate several small pieces together if you need a large piece, for say, a counter top.
@@Entiox I love Beech nuts because they are easy to come by. We also have walnuts and edible chestnuts but they are quite rare and you have to be fast to get some or there are no left overs
The advertising break was so entertaining I didn't skip through it. Nice work! Love this channel
Potatoes are such a staple food for Europe that it wasn't until I played Kingdom Come Deliverance and realize I have no potatoes in my inventory and wanted to know where I could get some and then googled it and saw it came from America. It's so wild to me and having seen a certain kingdom building anime a while back where potatoes were a thing, it sent me on a wild goose chase of hypotheticals about how Europe would have developed had it gotten potatoes earlier.
So I've been running a very low cash Dungeons and Dragons campaign and on their first foray out into the wilderness one of the guys found a crab, and then ran into the issue of not really being able to cook it, so he had to let it go. When they got back and cashed out some of their loot that guy made sure the first thing he bought was a pot.
I was actually thinking about this exact concept while watching this. I have some limited experience DMing, and I was thinking about the viability of a campaign where they're just broke. Normally I've fallen into the trap of letting my players end up getting somewhat wealthy through their adventures. A few gemstones here, a pouch of gold coins there. I know it feels good to find treasure, and I wanted my players to feel like they were being rewarded. They always had enough to eat and drink their fill in a tavern, and enough to stock up on supplies for the road. But I'm liking your low cash idea, so they're more inclined to forage and spend money on the more mundane things.
Do you feel like your players feel rewarded even when they're not sitting on a pile of gold large enough to make a dragon blush?
you can eat raw crab lol
@@Numl0k Ask the players what they want. I’m a medievalist and would love nothing more than a slice of life D&D game about trying to survive the medieval period and forage for food, but I think most people want gold and magic weapons.
I love the spirit of this post, but people have been cooking food hearth-side for ages. It definitely wouldn't have been pretty, but I imagine a chitinous creature like a crab would roast just as well on a rock in or next to a fire. Maybe even better than you'd think because the shell might protect the meat from burning.
Still, I love that you add that ounce of extra thought and realism. My DM is the kind to hand wave stuff like this because clearly not everyone is into hyper realism in fantasy role play, but I personally- well, there's a reason I clicked on this video. Mess Kits, Cook's Utensils, and the iron cooking pot are adventuring tools for a reason! I'm glad I'm not the only one who likes to at least consider the realism of survival and eating while on the road in a medieval fantasy setting.
@@leonrowe5445 Lemme know how that goes bud.
Completely recommend "Tasting History" - thank you, Shad, for promoting Max, who is lovely, inquisitive, funny, honest and very intelligent.
Weirdly, I came to this video immediately AFTER watching a Tasting History video
Thank you, Maria!
Absolutely, I've been subbed to him for a good while. I especially like the way he explains how dishes came to be, how ingredients were traded and transplanted and so forth.
Great shoutout to the Townsends channel - I kept thinking of them throughout this video. They do cover a later time period than this, but they use a lot of ginger. I've tried a few of their recipes and some of them are actually really good.
What people tend to forget is that adventurers going to explore a remote area aren't going on a weekend camping trip. It would be a real expedition, where just reaching the area to explore could take weeks (traveling uncharted lands without roads is slow). The adventurers would need pack animals just for their gear (tents, blankets, cauldron, tools...), food (large bags and barrels of dry beans, flour, oil...) and drinks (barrels of ale and wine). They'd probably need guides and porters too, who all would need food and drinks. Maybe, they'd even have to make some semi-permanent camps midway, where some people and stuff would be stored there until they return.
I don't know if someone has said this already, but, that bookshelf is of great beauty!
A note about honey - I could see any adventurer who can afford to keep some honey on hand making absolutely certain to keep enough on hand. Not only for flavoring food, but it's also antiseptic (the reason it does not spoil) and can be used to sterilize wounds or treat minor sickness the adventurer may pick up along the way. Especially an adventurer who's going into dangerous situations where he's likely to get injured from time to time, and may need to sterilize his wounds. That's a huge benefit of honey that most people in modern times, even many doctors, are totally unaware of, but people up until colonial times were very much aware of this.
Honey as an antiseptic isn't all that useful, sure, if you're in a pinch then it helps, but it's better to just cauterize the wound.
Mint, in particular peppermint, can soothe a sore throat and peppermint tea (or just peppermint water) is good for an upset stomach. European willow and the American Birch are both sources of the active ingredient in aspirin. Lots of tricks for an adventurer to use.
@@harambe4267 cautherization has its on risks and dangers. I reckon you would want to avoid it for minor wounds.
If I ever run a D&D game for a mage who treats a wound by flavouring the bandage with honey, I would be so happy
True, but; honey has its own set of issues. In particular, moisture. Bringing honey into an area with a lot of moisture, without proper methods of safeguarding might... not be such a good idea. For instance, a swamp, lake or rainforest. If water gets into the honey, you'd start to get a lot of microbes breeding in there, like a fermentation gone wrong.
Then again, depending on setting, Purify Food and Drink is a thing...
Speaking of foods being changed over time. Tomatoes were originally golden, and only after growing it changed into red
Speaking of pottage, there’s an Italian recipe which is still eaten to this day which can be traced back to the 13th century, you can probably ask Metairie about it but in Florence during the construction of the Duomo’s dome, the construction workers would bring all their cheapest toughest cuts of meat and put them in a clay pot, sear it with oil and add LOADS of black pepper (hence the name of the recipe: “Peposo”) then cover all the meat in red wine, and leave it to stew in front of the oven where they cooked the dome’s bricks and after about 6 hours when it was time for their lunch they’d eat it, another recipe which can be traced back to Medieval times is “Pasta alla Gricia”, and yeah Italians have been eating pasta since the 11th century at least.
the Redwall series of books by Brian Jacques greatly highlights food of the medieval period, both for settlements and travelers, even with a characteristic lack of meat due to the protagonists' herbavoic nature.
Like two pages of in depth description of pastries. Man those books were good.
The lard made me smile. Here in Hungary we have a type of bacon that has barely any meat, but basically a block of fat. I remember it having some with me, when we were doing a multiple day long hike. It got out in the last couple of days, and it gives a huge boost of energy. :)
That makes sense because Fats are the slowest source of energy but the most energy-efficient form of food. Each gram of fat supplies the body with about 9 calories, more than twice that supplied by proteins or carbohydrates. Because fats are such an efficient form of energy, the body stores any excess energy as fat.
Ah, szalonna, or some say сало!
In Poland we have "Słonina" and it can be smoked as well. Russians have it to but call it "sało" or sth like that. "Lardo" in Spain or Italy (I can't remember) is their local version. In Europe if it was availabe in any country than everyone had it uner a diferent name.
One other food thing that would, likely, be common would be "dried soups" which were basically taking a stock, straining it out, then cooking it down with a higher fat content kept in and mixed to get the water out of it. In the end, you let it cool and harden into what is close to a brick that would be dried even more and wrapped to protect it from water.
When you're wanting to eat, drop it in your pot with some water
is it like James Townsend's portable soup?
@@arthas640 that's exactly what Townsend is making: dried soup.
@@arthas640 Somewhat.
In many ways, it's a lot like a bullion cube, except you'd have a larger thing of it that you'd be breaking off chunks to make and there would be other, dried solids in the chunks.
Another way it would be made is with a lot of dried and ground fruit and vegetables, then mixed with a little hot fat and dried meats along with some grains to form a paste that would be cooled/dried again before broken up for a similar use.
It's stuff that would also be used with armies for supplies that are rather easy to make and transportable without much of a work requirement to make at the end of the day.
College kids in medieval europe love those
@@arthas640 Pocket Soup! And yes he's the only one I know who introduced it, but its not his recipe.
At 25:41
Pimican....
Depends on where you are as to whether it is a later food or an earlier food. In the Americas it was eating for thousands of years that we know of....long before the time you are referring to. The first time I remember hearing about pemmican for European types, it was brought over from the Americas.
We seriously need a whole "Cooking with Shad" series.
I was about to say "but Shad, surely the most dangerous part of hunting would be that you could be considered a poacher" and then he brought it up. Good on you Shad.
One could always say that the adventurers have received a special dispensation from the lord granting them hunting rights for services rendered. But then again, maybe they have to earn that dispensation from the adventure the DM is putting them on. Could be a form of payment in lew of gold coins which would be rare in a more realistic setting.
Other common preserved food are pickled or potted. Pickled goods are heavy and would be for wagon travel. Potted foods were often salty, mixed with butter or lard, and sealed with wax in clay pots. Oats were carried as they cook well but can be simply eaten raw if needed. In addition to forage and hunting, gleaning was also practiced in many areas.
Pemmican is the ideal traveler's food, but was very pricey due to the amount of labor needed to make it. Same with dried powdered meat, which could be worth its weight in gold depending on the taste. The main issue with powdered meat is that lacks necessary fats to replenish the body, and braising it in its own fat just makes Pemmican.
I like pickled and potted foods but they're too cumbersome to carry on long travels. I'd bring some potted meat for the first day or two of food, and Sauerkraut as a snack/garnish.
A problem with pickled foods or anything that is stored in water or other liquids is that jars with screw-on lids are a modern invention. Back in the olden days people would probably close their containers by tying a piece of leather over the opening. And that makes it far too likely to spill.
You can probably get the string tight enough that having it on a cart would be mostly fine if you don't care about a limited amount of spilling, but having it in your backpack and engaging in the slightest amount of acrobatics would probably mean that you get liquid into some folds of the leather from where it will leak out for the rest of the journey.
@@MK_ULTRA420 I've actually seen a video on how to make Pemmican and it's relatively simple. Dave Canterbury makes some, my Dad replicated the recipe and it turned out all right
@@travis9495 The labor needed to grind the meat and knowing which seasonings to add was where most of the price came from, besides the cost of materials of course.
I'm also a fan of Dave Canterbury, and I also know that his Pemmican recipe was still one of his most labor intensive.
Back then that stuff was a luxury depending on where you lived.
16:44
Honey also has medicinal properties. Putting honey on an open wound and then covering it was done very often as it stops infection.
Good video! It's pretty amazing how much food has changed in just a few short centuries.
It's great that you linked Tasting History and Townsends - I love the food covered on those sites!
Shad, a lesson from Scotland, oats! Mix them with water and cook to make oatcakes, add milk for porridge, or even bleed one of your animals for some lovely black pudding! They were a staple for Drovers (animal herders) and are a base for many of our national foods.
If you want an interesting channel that tries to replicate camping and hiking as a Scottish 1700s drover would then check out Fandabi Dozi.
Ach aye, laddie! I was going to mention that, too. Rolled grain to make porridge, dried cakes, or soup/stew would have been a travelling staple.
There is a nut cake they used to have further north that the secret of was all but forgotten. Ray Mears and Gordon something or other researched them for "Aboriginal Britain".
@@kredonystus7768 He is pretty good.
Yes. Extended clan Murray here....the traditional Scottish breakfast:
1 dram whiskey
1 haggis
1 collie dog
You wake up, drink the whiskey, and feed the haggis to the dog
My understanding is that biome mattered a lot as far as diet was concerned. You'd eat locally available foods in season, not oranges imported from the opposite hemisphere in your winter, for example. The Mediterranean diet was very different from the northern European diet, although generally there were direct equivalents--olive oil instead of butter, for example. I've been giving myself gray hairs trying to shift some original fantasy stories of mine from a generic traditional European diet, lifestyle, and biome, to a more Mediterranean one, to match my worldbuilding, it's going to be worth it, just for the sense of place.
Other regions have their own ideas: the Native American tribes of the Northwest Coast cultural region often made their own fruit leather, centuries before it was re-invented as a children's snack. Being made mostly out of berries with insane vitamin C content, and no added sugar, it lasted long enough. Without honeybees, the only sweetener was camas bulbs... but if you wanted a quick energy fix, you could enjoy something really fatty, like oolachon (candlefish) oil. And if you haven't eaten salmon smoked over an open pit fire made with green alder, you're missing out. All of this only refers to a part of North America the size of Norway, though... like I said, diet used to be closely related to the biome and climate.
I'm sure all of the anachronisms that slipped into this video have already been commented on, I don't think I need to go there.
I’m trying to do the same thing with worldbuilding! Got any tips? I’ve got this sinking feeling that all the good sources aren’t in english haha
Honeybees aren't the only bees that make honey. Native Americans could raid wild hives of native species, and apparently the Mayans cultivated stingless bees. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingless_bee#History
Just a minor correction: oranges are a winter fruit, it's when you get them on summer that they are from the opposite emisphere. That's one of the reasons they were so widespread in southern Europe, to make up for vitamins in the winter. Northern Europe got cabbages mostly (fresh or pickled), and before oranges, quinces and jujubes arrived in europe from the east a variety of local fruits had the same role, such as different varieties of apples and pears (most of them cooked), sorbs and medlars. Most of these fruits (with the exception of oranges) came out of fashion with the use of fridges, mostly because they need a really long time to grow, or are not suitable for industrial farming
Not just bees but also wasps are still around to this day. When visiting Guatemala I saw a stingerless wasp nest that was positioned over a doorway. The wasps were no bigger than ants but they symbiotically had a home and dealt with insects around it.
The north and south of Europe are naturally separate civilizations, with different crops, government types, technologies, and kinds of cultures, and only the particular way Christianity spread north, with it's central authorities in Rome and Constantinople, caused the people of the continent to view themselves as one, and therefore be one, since that is what unification means.
The bowl.
In a clay bowl, melt some butter near the fire.
Add whatever flour you have on hand (wheat, barley, oatmeal).
Some salt.
Peel some onion layers, mince them and add them to the mix.
Add whatever greens you picked on the way.
Shape some pancakes and cook them on the stone.
Enjoy with some pine needles infusion. Or birch bark. Or whatever you picked on the way to flavor the water.
Needs, your knife, your (clay) bowl, your flour pouch (conveniently fits into the bowl), your salt box, some butter (wrapped in leaves for flavor), your iron pot to boil water.
And whatever you've picked on the way.
Cheese was noble food, found at the castle or manor. Serfs and other peasants ate a stiff butter in its stead. Dead right they ate lard, often a slice on their bread. But bacon was carried more often than ham. A ham is a leg with a bone in the middle, crusted with saltpeter. Bacon is a compact flitch just smoked into submission. Hams have to be scrubbed clean before using, and then they're no longer preserved much.
Actually, cutting game into very thin strips that dry easily and dry them in the sun/wind is much more sensible and was practiced this way by several nomadic civilizations, sometimes with fires helping in the process. The drying process reduced the weight, thus increasing the energy density by weight, was able to preserve meat for months and did not require much more equipment than some cordage and maybe basic tools to create racks. The time invested was well worth it, since the dried meat provided a lot of calories and thus removed the necessity to acquire food a great deal.
Yeap, thin salted strips. Could be let just a few days to dry, them smoked at cold smoke and then let to dry somewhere where air circulates or where is windy.
This is kind of similar with how my father prepares bakon.
I Don't know anything about sun drying though.
they also made pemmican with the fat cut off the thin strips of meat. it really was a full case of using every bit of animal
AKA biltong
@@Stefannice ok stefan tataru
#BILTONG
Some fruit "experts" have suggested that the watermelon in that painting was just dehydrated or poorly cultivated and not necessarily of a different breeding. But of course you could argue that if the painter thought that was normal, and all farmers were neglecting their melons, it's splitting hairs whether or not we changed the fruit or our cultivating habits.
Wild watermelons (in Africa) look like that, today
@@Fridelain you can search in youtube wild watermelons and u can see some guy spliting open a few of this type of melon by yourself
Sam o’ Nella did video about how farming plant and fruit was really bad back then which pretty accurate
In some ways you could say they were neglecting the melons. Most melons are actually grown in greenhouses where you have a level of optimization for those plants far beyond what any farmer could achieve.
@@justnoob8141 Yoo he came back
Hey, this answered a lot of my questions surrounding medieval foods. However I happen to have one final one. Did they have condiments in the Medieval period, and if so, what kinds, and how did they store it? I'm working on a food obsessed Gnoll character for LARP and would like to have him carry some stuff to flavor food and stuff with.
I know Garum (fish sauce) was a big one during Roman times. Still used today. In terms of confiments from what I have found there are usually various sauces to add to different meals and would be sometimes a good sauce to cover a specific meat dish or vegetable dish. They also had various spice mixtures at the ready like Powdered Deuce. Id recommend starting there and see where it takes you
Mustard is the other very common one going back to antiquity.
Depends what you consider condiments. Pepper or mustard was really expensive but thyme, rosemary, mint and many other herbs could be stored all the year round by just drying them in the sun. My parents still store dill, thyme or lovage which grows in our garden in this way.
Watched a show about the invention of catsup. Fish sauce was used to cover the taste of meat that was about to go bad but you still had to eat it anyways. A lot of people didn't like it so Hines worked on a new one. It took him 57 tries to get it right. That is why its called Hines 57.
I've read accounts of roman solders on the march being given olives and grains. The olives could be eaten on the road and the grain could be turned into gruel at the end of the day.
One thing I've always respected about Shad is how he promotes his peers like Tasting History with Max Miller, for one promoting his peers is a very good practice all around for the RUclips community, creates more dedicated viewers that generally has a positive effect on the platform in addition to acknowledging peers in fields of study promotes well rounded and diversity of information, I'm sure there are plenty of things Shad and I might disagree on in terms of taste in humor, spiritual beliefs or politics, but this is a genuinely admirable trait and here's hoping we see more of it in the community.
The name for pre-hardtrack travel bread is "journey cake" or "johny cake", or presumably many other names that have been lost the history
According to Wikipedia, the term "johnny cake" is from the relatively modern 18th century, and is generally a North American term. From what I can find, the medieval equivalent of hardtack was basically just called "biscuit" (or rather "biskit"; e.g. "biskit of muslin"). Meanwhile, the Romans had "buccellum".
@@evilwelshman Johnycake sounds a lot like "journeycake", it seemed like just a corruption of the word to me. But, names tend to change, especially before globalization and mass literacy. The basic recipe is more or less the same; water, unleavened grain (whatever you have) and salt, and cook it in a pan or cooking stone. Crude and reliable.
@@thomasbonatti9341 What you say makes a lot of sense. Especially when you factor that "cakes" were originally more or less the same as "bread" except they were specifically circular in shape and flipped when baked instead of being left upright throughout the baking process. From there, it would then be hardly rocket science for a cake that was specifically made for travel to then be called "journey cakes".
On the other hand, the Wikipedia article on "journey cakes" / "johnnycakes" indicate that the term "journey cakes" is first attested in 1775, indicate that there is a dispute in the name's etymology (specifically: that "journey cakes" could be derived from "johnnycakes" and not the other way around, that the name is instead derived from either "jannock" or "shawnee"), that the cake is made from corn, and that other locations where the term has popped are mainly in the Americas. All of which indicate that the term is derived from the New World rather than Europe.
Granted, it could just simply be a case of convergent evolution. However, the way the Wikipedia article is written (granted, it could be wrong), it makes it sound as though the term "journey cake" had not been in use prior to that particular food item.
Thank you so much Shad! I love your channels, look at you here and with the knight watch, and with Gary on Nerdtronic. A lot of your content is educational for writing and role play. Continue the wonderful work you do.
Exactly what I needed for my novel, thanks.
You forgot about soups. You can make soups from literally anything. Mushrooms, bones, fruits and berries, flowers and herbs. You can catch 2-3 fish roast them them it them then boil the bones and heads with some herbs and turnips and have an amazing soup. You can make soups from nettles and wild lettuce that are everywhere in Europe. Not only is filling and nutritious but you also boil the water so you have way fewer chances for the water to be alterated. A small 1 litre pot made out of ceramic would be enough for an adventurer and it would easily be stored on the horse.
I guess pocket soup is a thing that dates back hundreds of years: Essentially soup stock gelatin reduced and dried into sheets then smashed/cut into pocked sized bullion chunks.
@@littlekong7685 idk why but im just picturing someone emptying soup from their pockets.
@@CrowBag That seems a truly Goblin move. "I took dinner." "You took dinner? from where?" "From the castle." "But, they only had soup." Goblin pours soup from several pockets into cauldron, lint, buttons, and all. "Yup!"
That reminds me, pocket water filters would be a must-have item, for adventurers. fairly easy to make, too, so they would be widely available. Some charcoal, some textiles, some sand/silt, and a few bigger rocks. And you can also use a clean stream to clean it a bit by running water in reverse.
@@littlekong7685 Hey, man, whatever fills the stomach. It might need a bit more boiling, but it would keep you from starving.
Lots of great information in this video Shad really thinking about using some of it in my next D&D campaign thanks!
Your videos really helped me with my history project. Thanks, man!
I'd add pocket soup to your list. Basically broth rendered down to a gelatin that acts like a bullion cube.
I was about to ask if that existed, especially if you salt it pretty heavily I can imagine it lasting for a while
Townsend does a neat one of that.
Just don't store it with your pocket sand.
@PenitentDeadMan308 T It's just soup base. You add it to water, then add meat or fish, veggies, mushrooms, whatever you have.
@PenitentDeadMan308 T it's funny how we think of gelatin as only going with sweet fruit flavors, but.. it's literally the thing that comes out of tough meat and makes gravy rich and good.
There's a bit more to salting meat than just slapping some salt on a haunch.
Personally, I'd opt to make a smoking rig.
You create a tripod-like rig from greenwood with horizontal sections from which you hang very thinly sliced meat. The rig is placed over hot coals, and you use the animal's hide (fur side out), or a soaked wool blanket, to wrap around the rig, leaving a small chimney at the top, and a small opening at the bottom (like a teepee). The smoke from the coals will dry out the thin strips of meat, and kill quite a bit of bacteria, as well as deter bugs (a problem with sun-drying). The process will take several hours, so the coals need to be maintained. Once it's done, you have dry meat not unlike beef jerky, and it'll have a smokey flavor imparted. You can then treat the meat with peppercorns for additional flavor, but mainly the peppercorns will help ward off bugs. Store the dried meat in salt, and now it'll really last you a good while. The meat can be later re-hydrated by boiling/stewing in a pot.
DangerousBandit1: you smell that? no rush...we'll wait 3 hours and then go get that .
Smoked and salted meat also just tastes wonderful.
Great video. I got a character with the cook proficiency so you've given me a good number of ideas to incorporate in our game
Fun little fact about honey, it can in fact last for a VERY long time. In King Tut's tomb, among the wine, weapons, and other tings, jars of this stuff was found and still edible, even after 3,000 years!
In the Lord of the Rings Books the infamous tater scene is even a situation where Frodo and Sam gather a lot of greens to add to their food and try to hunt for rabbits. Sam complains that sadly they didn’t find any taters, referring to wild potatoes in this case
Tolkein's mistake is well known. Potatoes are from Peru/Bolivia, although by the time of Cortez they had spread through the Americas, and quickly spread to Europe because it could be grown anywhere.
If you have to give it a similar European plant, use turnips or Jerusalem artichokes, but there are no "wild" potatoes any more than there are wild chihuahuas (to pick a pre-Columbian American breed).
@@davidweihe6052 That's like saying Tolkien made a mistake because there wasn't Elves, dwarves and hobbits in medieval Europe. It's fantasy.
And ironically, wild potatoes are actually poisonous, so you probably wouldn't want to eat them if you did find them...
@@davidweihe6052 Tolkien also gave them tobacco, another New World plant. It's easy to blame the Numenoreans, and later extinction in 'Middle-earth'. Or to ignore the conceit of it being our past. He also had the world being flat, then turned into a sphere.
I thought Lord of the Rings took place on Middle Earth, not Late Medieval Europe.
Fish ... most medieval cities were along the coast, and smoked fish was a great initial travel food.
Also, Rye-bread is very dense, and with some butter, cheese and perhaps a small dollop of jam.
Carrots, Onions and Apples were also widely used, as they last a good while, and can be eaten raw.
>onions
>can be eaten raw
>Have eaten raw onion and like it, now I want to get a few chunks, the core is my favorite part.
>Good for the sinuses and can even cure or at least treat throat based illnesses when eaten raw, same with garlic.
>Is resistant to crop diseases, pests and the cold, making it a good investment back in that day.
>Doesn't even die when dug up, not only making it last a long time but you can peel all but the core off and replant it and it'll grow it all back in time and even if it does get old it usually just dries up and you can fix that with stewing.
@@Miguel-bs6kh
Yes, they can be eaten raw .. it's not necessarily a tasty meal, but it won't kill you. They are better cooked though, like in a a stew.
@@Miguel-bs6kh Raw onion on its own isn't that pleasant to eat, but you can mix it with other things. A slice of onion with some meat or cheese on a cracker, for example; or possibly with other vegetables as a sort of salad (maybe something similar to coleslaw with cabbage and carrot?).
Also dried mushrooms and nuts were pretty common.
One amazing thing is flat bread mixed with seeds. It is similar to knackebrod and the recipe is super easy. A cup of flour, cup of grinded seeds (flax, sesame, sunflower,...), cup of water and spoon of salt. You may add yeast and let it raise a bit first, but then I would advise to cut the salt in half and just before baking mix the salt with water and put it on the top. Bake until crispy.
It is damn salty, but if you can drink enough water, this will keep you alive and walking for long time. And it is not bad with vegetables, cheese, cottage cheese, boiled meat,...
Love your videos, Shad. Every time. So glad you have the ability to do these. I learn interesting things very often from you and your guys! Keep it up.
Pan forte, basically a more dense version of fruitcake, was sometimes carried by medieval knights as a travel food. Also, salted pork (what we call salt pork or streak of lean) was given to Roman soldiers as well as used by sailors on long journeys.
In my D&D campaign, the characters would actually travel with chickens, lambs, or goats. When it was time to eat, you'd just off one of them and cook it over a fire, either as a stew or spit roasted.
We did that too, and because we didn't have a rogue, we walked them into dungeons in front of us to spring traps. So useful all around. (messed up I know, but heck, it's a game where you kill people on fairly regular basis, so...)
wait wait wait, how in the nineteen flaming hells of tap-dancing China do you make fruitcake MORE dense without violating the laws of physics? Short of compressing the constituent atoms into a near-fusion state (which I think is pretty much where the fruitcakes I keep getting for Nolaig are at), I can't see how to do it without causing a dent in the time-space continuum that might tear the fabric of reality :-D
@@jakubguziur7522 I ran my party through a sewer once that had a slow-but-deadly undead in it, and the locals told them to buy a chicken first.
The chicken was to be thrown at the undead to distract it while they escaped. And the animal chosen was a chicken both because it was cheap, and because chickens were demonstrated to NOT be turned into lesser undead when drained.
My guy would have a herd of pigs but he also is willing to eat bandits
I can already imagine an adventurer traveling with a bunch of chicken tied up like we see prisoners depicted in fantasy. A line with many hoops, and each hoop having a living-chicken neck. That's because having each of them on their own separate line might be more difficult to deal with. Though you could have a main line split into multiple roughly-equal-length lines for the chicken, so you can have all of them some ways away from you. You might also have more people in your party than go fighting, so a few of them can sit behind to rest and recover while also taking care of the animals. Some parties would even have a character with no fighting power, but ideally high evasion or running speed or both, or with defensive items, which to be full-time focused on taking care of the animals and other chores. I mean, like a porter for a knight, who does the chores to gain knowledge and experience, but in the case of adventurers also to get money and training.
Potted meats, they showed how to preserve cooked meats by pouring clarified butter over it and sealing it into a jar, on the Townsend channel
I really enjoy your presentation style, and your research!
21:42 THAT'S what they are! Here I was waiting for a joke about chicken nuggets. 😂
Please say I'm not the only one that thought the dried plums was chicken nuggets for 90% of the video
Showed this to my D&D group, next session all the snacks are gonna be based of ideas from this video
I thought it was a joke. I certainly wouldn't turn down some nuggets if I was on an adventure.
Love this Shad! This is why we love your channel, this is such a commonly depicted setting in media, but we rarely get the historical context and actual information about what they ate back then. Thank you for the education as always.
My pleasure Phillip, thank you so much for your support and best of luck with your channel, content looks awesome!
@@shadiversity Yeah, I have seen some of his videos. Total beast. He trained with Shaolin monks.
Bland food in history is a favorite Hollywood narrative, right up there with everyone always being dirty except for the elites, according to Hollywood no one before 1900 ever washed their faces.
@@shadiversity thank you for the encouragement Shad, I really appreciate it, let’s both keep making the best content we can! Journey before Destination ⚔️🤺
@@deanfirnatine7814 They have to to keep up the narrative that we are the most advanced humanity has ever been because everyone else was a filthy primitive. They still see the world like that- the rich are advanced, and we peons should shut up and keep our filthy faces away from our masters.
I love how whenever they do a hello fresh segment they always seem to struggle eating it so hard . I’m sure it tastes great but it is very funny
This kind of stuff is so interesting. I'll have to pack some of these things the next time I go on a mountain adventure with my little brother.
I would question the idea of a traveller carrying salt for the purposes of curing the meat of any game they catch/hunt. If I'm not mistaken, it takes quite a lot of salt in order to cure meat - something like 3% of the weight of the meat, based on a cursory look online. After all, you're trying to remove as much water as possible and as we know, living things are made almost entirely of water. I suspect, they would instead smoke or simply overcook the meat to make it as dry as possible. It should then keep for a few days and can be added into a stew which would then moisten and soften the meat.
Smoking is definitely the way to go, having enough salt to bury any significant quantity of meat in it would be rather rare.
Not a whole haunch as Shad stated, but we often did that hunting in the back mountain valleys in Alaska. Too far out to quickly get the meat back, so we'd slice it thin, rub salt all over it, layer the slices between wax paper we brought with us, wrap it up, and stuff it in a waterproof side-sack to pack out. Doesn't take a lot of salt to do that, about one big can of Morton's carried by each of us
@@BreandanOCiarrai this is really interesting! I imagine the act of cutting the meat thinly is key here as more surface area of meat is covered by salt and also less moisture per each piece for the salt to draw out.
A correlary to this, most butter had a 3-10% salt ratio unless it was freshly made butter, thus rather than carrying salt, some people would carry this 10% salt butter, and use the butter as salt.
Did you know that huns and later the magyars carried powdered milk on campaigns? Also huns invented powder soup for same reason. It was common among horsmen to carry these on long travels because you only need water and fire to make soup easy
Townsend's has a couple episodes about making "pocket soup", a sort of gelatin/jerky like concoction that worked a bit like bouillon, in that boiling it until it dissolved was a quick way to make soup base while traveling, and in dire need, could be nibbled upon by itself for a bit of energy.
Very useful video for writing inspiration.
Absolutely love your content, I just signed up with Hello Fresh with your code so thank you for that, I can't wait to get my order, the food looks amazing. And I did not know bananas had that big of seeds back then.
Here’s some things adventures might eat, the monsters they slay. Kill a Manticore or a Griffian why waste the meat? I had a lizardman fighter who wrote a book on how to slay, cook and eat various monsters. Manticore Kabob, float roast(Beholder). How to turn a Chimiera in to a three course meal. They didn’t all have thematic names.
Many years ago I was playing in a D&D game where we ended up on an epic quest on a spelljammer traveling through multiple dimensions. We ended up with this ongoing joke about the party getting tired of eating seafood all the time. A huge amount of of things that we fought and could eat were seafood. Giant crawfish, krakens, and giant space squid were all on our menu. We ended up on a desert world while running low on food, and were promptly attacked by sand sharks. Hell, even our spelljammer itself was made out of the shells of giant lobsters that fed the party, and the fishing village the lobsters had been terrorizing. I think the funniest moment was fighting the giant crawfish and one of the magic users hitting them with a fireball, then one of the clerics promptly casting create food and water to make buckets of melted butter.
My goblin did that.
Giant centipede stew, zombie hand, a person's foot... Playing a monstrous race really helps you in your dietary options.
Course he also wore some former enemy's face as a mask for a while...
@@The_Friendly_Fire Love Goblins and Orcs for this, and in Pathfinder (1e) alternate trait Tieflings can eat rotten food, or even dirt =p
damn i bet manticore tail is really good.
Good idea, but I can't help but think some monsters would be poisonous, or indigestible. And it might depend on your own species as well. "Normal" monsters, like gryphons and minotaurs and even dragons would be good, but I don't know about those "aberration" monsters, like beholders and mind flayers. I seem to remember seeing references to historical fantasy literature, in which eating dragon flesh gives you strength and maybe other powers (at least temporarily).
Jack-in-the-Box used to have what they called "monster tacos", but they never specified what kind of monster it was. I assume minotaur, because it tasted pretty much like regular beef.
One thing to note: while beechnuts might look quite a lot like chestnuts in the picture, they don't really when you see them in person. Where chestnuts are quite big and somewhat round, beechnuts are really quite tiny and quite pointy as well. Beech trees are pretty common here in Western Europe, and they produce a lot of nuts. They are much better and safer to eat than acorns as well (oaks being another common tree).
I was always told to never try to eat acorns and horse chestnuts because they're poisonous, while beech and regular chestnuts were fine.
@@Lttlemoi yeah pretty much the same for me, although you can prepare acorns to be edible (I am not aware of that being possible with horse chestnuts). Sweet chestnuts are edible though.
@@gijsbrans2338 Horse chestnuts should not be eaten, they can't be detoxicated enough for consumption.
I love when I find out one of my favorite RUclipsrs watches my other favorite RUclipsrs! Been a long time Townsend's and Tasting History fan!
You, Max, and Townsends are three of my favorites
There's a few times in Goblin Slayer they talk about food and rations..Lizard Priest is obsessed with cheese though because his people, the Lizardmen, don't raise cattle and the like so until he joined up with Goblin Slayer's party he had never had it..and now he has a wheel whenever he can. In the 4th volume of the Light Novel and 1st volume of the spin off manga Brand New Day..which is 2 volumes long and converts the entirety of volume 4 into manga form, Padfoot Waitress takes an order for a group at the tavern in the guild hall and it's for "Ale, two Lemon Waters, and Fritellas for five" with the fritellas being described as fish and chicken fried in oil..so..a mix of chicken fritters and fish fritters. Lemonade is mentioned a few times as well. During their quest in the Water Town while resupplying after their first exploration of the under ground of the city Goblin Slayer and Priestess have "Iced Cream", it's mentioned that some scholar had figured out that "combining fire powder and water helps keep things cold" and the guy selling it thought "What about frozen milk" and came up with Ice Cream.
I thought the cheese thing was only in the abridged version , I never saw the real one
@@Spiceodog Nope..that's totally canon. He calls it "Nectar" because of how good it taste. It's why he's one of my favorite characters, just the crazy swing between scary looking Lizardman Priest who uses bones and fang as catalyst..to obsessed with cheese and will have it any chance he can.
Ice cream is actualy old similair foods like sorbets were eaten in 550 bc persia and were spread in asia eventurly rought to europe
The aincient greek mixed snow and their drinks to make a sort of of iced slushy drink hippocrates had written a criticism of it claiming it causes problems in the stomach , we know it was not sanitery now days tho as the snow was unclean
Japanese, chinese, greek ,roman and aincient egyptions all valued ice and snow in drinks and food
Their is hieroglyphs depicting a aincieng egitopn snakcthat was made of ice and druit juices
ice cream becamd possible with the endophermic effect which was in the 13th century by Ibn Abi Usaibia a arab physician who wrote how to freec medcine using this effect
This was used for food in 16 th century using salt to help freez cream
So they can do it just with salt no need for magic powder it doesnt need much modern tech
Historically, the "fire powder" was salpeter
That's a bit weird, a Lizard man should lactose intolerant and so unable to digest cheese.
Now that you've covered food, would love to see you cover bartering and misconceptions of it with it, it's pretty interesting subject given the medieval period economics
Hear hear.
I'm thinking of Henry and his barter mini game.
Thanks! Had to stop and grab my notebook, and scribble down some lecture notes))
Rewatching this video a year after watching it on release. My DM is leaning into a heavy survival type DnD game and mentioned he might be reintroducing old school ideas like different ration types (iron rations, fresh rations, etc) and exploration survival mechanics like hunting, foraging, trapping, and cooking / camp building. He's making a massive hex crawl type map with different rules for travel on roads, fields, forest, hills. I've watched this video a few times a week the past few weeks looking for more bits of inspiration!
- Me: "Hey that's true, what WOULD a medieval adventurer eat?" *click*
- RUclips algorithm: starts by showing me a "supreme bacon" hamburger advert
- Me: "Oh..."
Cuz every adventurer should eat bacon