What Did the Medieval Upper Classes ACTUALLY Eat?
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- Опубликовано: 9 июл 2024
- We previously looked at the diet of a medieval peasant, so in todays episode we're going to explore the diet of the upper classes of the middle ages! What did the medieval upper classes actually eat?!
0:00 Introduction
2:17 Sugar & Spice
4:03 Banquets
7:36 The Royal Appetite
🎶🎶 Music by CO.AG: / @co.agmusic
Narrated & Edited by: James Wade
Thank you for watching.
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Copyright © 2021 Top5s All rights reserved. In this video, we've compiled information from a variety of sources, including documentaries, books, and websites, all with the aim of providing an engaging viewing experience. While we strive to ensure accuracy, we acknowledge that there may be variations in the authenticity of the content. We encourage viewers to delve deeper and conduct their own research to corroborate the information presented.
Me after eating an entire loaf of white bread for dinner: Maybe I am rich.
In carbs if nothing else!
😅😅💀
Was there peanutbutter and milk involved? 👀
Nothing better than toast with English salted butter. White bread is has to be for toast.
It's been a year since this comment. Have you pooped yet?
Can we start a petition to rename sugar “sweet salt”? Never heard that it was called that before!
I like that !!
I will type it up ,will distribute it ??
Salt has always been jealous of Sugar. That's why it tastes so bitter.
I'll allow it.
Who's "we"
Could you do a video about medieval hobbies and what they did for fun?
Great idea
Me and homies attending church then an execution
Stilts
I thought that this is that?
@@MrStonedgolem I said it before he did it 😁
Now we live in a time where a trip to the grocery store can surpass what the highest members of society had back then
Only in pricing. Nowhere can you easily gather all the foods in this video,..well except perhaps in England or France.
Really your grocery store has all of those animals,, I highly doubt it because I live in Vancouver and only one place in the last 20 years has made venison carpaccio.
Also everything you're getting from the grocery store is super processed whereas what they got was fresh and none of your vegetables compare to what they had back then, grow something in your garden and buy something from the store then eat it at the same time you will see the difference.
stop kidding yourself and thinking that you live like the opulent did historically even with running water and Wi-Fi their lifestyle is something you can't even conceive of,, but high five for your narcissism thinking that you live on par with royalty 700 years ago 😂😂👑
The video literally explained the complete opposite of what you stated.
@@xScooterAZx One must keep in mind the perspective of cost between today and back then.
If I said a gallon of ale cost a penny, I’d be surprised to find someone who actually knew that was a whole day’s (or most of it) wages for Thomas Middleclass. Think of buying a six pack and it cost a quarter of your take home pay for the day! You couldn’t touch a gill (four ounces) of wine for a penny!
Meat was expensive. Fish, depending on access to a river or the sea, slightly less so. Unless you were buying minnows (they were eaten, too.)
Bread, having 1:19th the gluten of today’s bread, was the staple in everyone’s diet. Unless one were like several notable , historical figures who drank wine and ate naught but meat. Ulcers, skin diseases, and more accompanied that diet. So did early death, even for those days.
Hope I clarified a bit on cost.
Cheers!
@@PSDuck216 Oh yes. I do understand the pricing then vs the pricing now.
I was speaking about the different foods mentioned in this video. They just arent available in the US. for the most part. I know some of the foods are available on England. I mean you cant just go into Fry's food store,or Safeway and buy a whole pheasant,or a half pig,or half a cow. You need to find specialty stores or a really good butcher who has exotic meats,etc.
And a partridge in a pear tree… literally said it as you did 🤣
Both in this video and the peasant one you have visuals of tomatoes. Tomatoes came from the New World and were unknown in medieval Europe. In this video you also say they ate squashes. That too would have been impossible as they came from the New World too, along with zucchini. The amount of new fruits, vegetables and domesticated animals that arrived in Europe during The Columbian Exchange is astonishing. And most Europeans are unaware of this now.
I was under the impression that sugar, too, was an import from the new world and unknown in medieval times. For sweetening, they used honey.
@@andreasboesch9922 Sugar was available in the old world but it was rare and expensive and not grown anywhere in Europe. Cane was grown for centuries in temperate places like the Canary Islands. But yes, the boom in sugar consumption was the direct result of colonization in the Caribbean and the Americas.
@@cerberus6654 Thank you.
Learn something every day.
There is something amusing that in past times in Europe and Asia white bread and white rice respectively were status symbols.. and both nutritionally worse than their unrefined versions.
Ah, but you are wrong on “white “ bread. It was sifted multiple times. When baked, it was actually tan. Not the white, bleached flour that we know today, with nothing but empty carbs. So, medieval “white” bread was still good for you.
BTW, that wheat bread back then was not the gluten-heavy junk on our shelves today. In the 1950s, iirc, wheat was genetically modified to contain 19 time more gluten than wheat from the 1940s and back...to the Neolithic age.
That’s right: nineteen times! And dieticians, doctors, et al wonder at the gluten intolerances and outright allergies that are prevalent today. Look no further than Big Ag(riculture). Could this be corrected? In a heartbeat. But $$$ gets in the way.
I hope I’ve shed some light on medieval white bread.
Cheers!
WRONG.
The purpose of milling grains was to remove the germ so they didn't spoil as fast
@@ApathyBM what did they do with all the germs they removed?
@@00023 Uh, no.
No wonder so many nobles had gout
Love the light heartless you insert in every video with a joke or two . As always great content and quality . Hope your subscribers keep climbing .
Such an interesting channel. I love learning about everything they post.
I dont think you're quite right about the salt thing. High quality salt was expensive, yes, but people of ALL classes thought of it as a necessity. Much like how even poor people will buy gas for their car, despite the cost, they do so because of how important driving around is. Peasants would've had salt of a lesser quality, less refined of impurities etc, but they definitely and absolutely had salt.
You're right on the salt, but I haven't driven a car since last year (2021) and I normally walk everywhere but then again I do live in the middle of an old European city.
That’s because humans, like nearly all warm blooded animals on this planet need salt to survive.
What one bought at market never had added salt, etc, unless it was stockfish. Stockfish were fish, sometimes gutted, and packed and rolled in salt to keep it preserved.
To get the salt out of the fish, which was also dried, (sort of like a mummy without wrapping), it had to be boiled 2 days or more. What was left was a kind of protein powder or sludge that could be put into broths for soup or stews. Basically, by the time the salt was boiled out, it was tasteless. But put it into soups along with other meatless products, and the soup might be bland, to our tastes, but it was good sustenance.
Non appetite!
Cheers!
@@bristoled93an actual good urban setting lmao. One of the things I enjoy doing most while visiting cities in Europe is immersing myself into the life and walking five minutes for food, clothes, merchandise, massage parlors, literally *everything* is walking distance. Meanwhile in D.C you can’t drive or walk anywhere cause the traffic is horrendous and everything is too far away
I lived just outside DC for 2 years, there was a 7/11 nearby but we could not walk anywhere as there is no sidewalks.@@StridersBored
after torturing their opponents or witnessing a public execution, they normally went to a party where they fill themselves with food
Very interesting. Would be even more so if you'd edited the images for authenticity. So many were just way off; mostly by several centuries and geography, but also by animal and plant species.
How did they keep the Mediterranean fruits fresh if they had to travel so far??
Citrus fruits can keep for a couple of weeks if packed in straw. Pomegranates have a hard rind. Mostly you're looking to stop the fruit losing water or becoming overripe, so picking them early, packing them unblemished, and sealing the container can give you the time it takes to get from Greece to the south of France, or Spain to England and the Netherlands by sea.
I’m eating grainy homemade whole wheat bread and wild blue berries. I guess I’m peasant.
Well done! I would have loved to hear your narration outtakes on this one.
I'll never understand why fish was not considered meat. What is a fish according to them? A vegetable?
It's based on a biblical concept where fish are not considered to have the breath of life, unlike the beasts of the fields and the fowls of the air. People sometimes do weird shit when they believe Iron Age mythology is real.
It's meat. The rule is just cheating allowed by the pope.
No, a fish is fish.
@@ankhpom9296 and fish is meat.
I woulda been SO HAPPY to become protestant
#WayToGo!!
Another great one!!
Glad I live in 21st century, if they could have our foods today they minds are blown
Synth food is tasty af but not good for u unfortunately. They're mind would be blown followed by a heart attack lol
@@cyberpunkedgerunner2644 Heart attacks, ulcers and food allergies to name a few.
Just because we are accustomed to the garbage we have to eat, doesn’t mean our bodies like it.
Cheers!
I hate the 21st century
I'll bet the peasants cheated on fast days whenever possible - just to keep from starving to death.
It’s other words medieval life is all about us vs them and who can out do who. Wow things haven’t changed much ever since.
In other words
Not trying to be a stickler or crazy grammar person but I realize you may be ESL and that's actually what you're trying to say not-> it's other words
Imagine if people 568 years in the future kept records of a dinner you had one time.
"salt was rare and expensive."
And now is 'abundant and health risk'
But, man, I do like those ship shaped salt containers.
As for the feast, if I were a noble of this era, I'm not sure if I would make a very good one, but would have instead spent that money on advancing the lands under my control. Start young, around the age of maybe 15, then eventually with improvements, improved life for the lower classes, then as I was older invited them to such feast as I was old, near death, and wouldn't really care what the others think.....also, because I would try to be generally loved, raising the ire of the other nobility as their lower classes would prefer me, over them, thus I probably would have been assassinated before the age of 28, which would be the reason why I wouldn't really care in the end, also, the end goal was to be so loved, have people flocking to me, would deplete the other Lords population, and that's how I would conquer the Medieval world, as the real way to conquer someone wasn't though military might, but to have another populace love your lands, more then their own, which is why I would probably be killed around the age of 28, if not sooner.
If you think about it, just about every person during this time was struggling with some form of alcoholism
Not really. Most of the beer drunk would have been what was called small beer, usually about 1% ABV (this is the same strength as the shandy I could buy from the corner shop when I was a kid). Making small beer was primarily a way of making water potable; drinking five or six pints a day wouldn't have been unusual, starting at breakfast. In England at least, it was only when tea became popular that this practice really stopped.
small beer or ale supplemented the medieval diet, if your expending hundreds of calories daily working outdoors in the fields 16 hours a day, you need to replace those calories somehow- and the medievals did, with small beer.
I love your videos man ….
Pope Gregory sounds like a fun guy.
Do you think that was his goal?
Can you do a vid about female knights or female warriors
9:35 I said that right before you did lol. That’s hilarious
Great upload and lots of fun facts! I wouldn't eat like that even if I could afford it =-) Though I love the architecture and design of that time. I was actually having some Mc'D's while watching this lol. A shame they didn't have the SuperSize Me guy back then.
McD and other fast foods are great contributors of the decline of the American diet.
Eating fish on Fridays was also a push on the economy, promoting fish mongers and their revenues on an expanding European market that relied on beef and pork.
About the limits on how many dishes one could have in a meal: How was this enforced? Did the Food Police go from house to house, checking on people's tables?
This
Humans self domesticate readily
NPCs will self police.. just look the the hoaxdemics convid1984.. they were snitching on each other left and right
Most of these sumptuary laws specifically targeted wealthy burghers in towns and cities. These settlements had officials for the enforcement of sumptuary laws. Nevertheless, they often went unenforced due to the difficulties involved in their implementation and, of course, good old fashioned bribery. Still, people were found guilty of sumptuary offenses and fined. Offenses related to clothing and jewelry were easily noticed, while something like eating meat on a fast day, or serving more courses than the law allowed, were often discovered by means still popular today- snitching.
Goodwives of burgher households, always in competition for status with one another while pushing the line of legality, were more than ready to accuse a neighbor of living beyond their station, and many would've thought little about reporting an extra goose at their neighbor's table to the authorities- disguised as harmless gossip, of course.
@@derekthacker6219 Sounds like what I dealt with in junior high. 😁
❤️ great content
You said squashes would be available but squashes were only available in Europe after the Colombian exchange which was after the period of time you're talking about.
but they had gourds
I loved that ❤
how about a video about castles, and you do have to wonder exactly how long certain foods have been part of our diet, let alone what foods possibly came later because of the new world or where ever.
@ 2:06 Phil Collins doppleganger. Awesome video on food in the medieval era by the way!!!. I wonder how much weight the average overweight adult male lost during lent?.
No wonder we ran out of gold. People weren’t just wearing and decorating with it, they were eating it, too. Maybe we will be mining medieval sewers for gold someday.
Brings a whole new meaning to gold digger 😂
Medieval rich person: What would you like to eat?
Guests: Yes
Rich person: Say no more
Why even try ?
11:24 Those people are practically in the fire place. Unless it was a really freezing room that does not seem pleasant.
Not much has changed. As a current day peasant, I’m disgusted by the opulence and waste the wealthy live in and generate while me and my community work the majority of our lives to simply afford a roof over our head. Also nobles form the past and the current mega wealthy both didn’t and don’t pay taxes. We are literally going backwards. There’s a reason there’s a revolution every millennia.
It's not just wealthy but even the lower class.
Nowadays you see lower class people get into debt buying a new car just so they can 'look' rich.
Some people only care about status
What country are you in?
In the USA, the top 10% earn 48% of the income and pay 71% of federal income taxes.
I’m guessing you’re in a European country?
@@gustaftheone9279 Only 71% of federal income taxes? That's a very narrow measure of general taxation, in any case. Try thinking about how much they avoid paying, not how much they do pay in just one category. Really, how can one category give you the full picture? Did you think everyone would be taken in by that convenient piece of misdirection, or is it you who has fallen for it?
@@RichWoods23 Oh, please stop. ALL you have to do is work. Go and work, earn money for yourself and family. Stop trying to leech off the harder-working ppl
@@gustaftheone9279 Interesting. Instead of addressing my argument you make assumptions about the entire course of my life, my personality and my motivations. I'll keep it simple: your assumptions are wrong.
In answering the way you have, you have added to the evidence that indicates you have a narrow and flawed concept of society and the way it works in practice. Perhaps you'd like to explain how you came to hold this viewpoint? Consider it your opportunity to present a reasoned thesis rather than a silly 'gotcha'.
"Thou art a carl of mean degree; the salt lies between thee and me."
He mentioned squash being on the menu in the middle ages. I was under the impression squash are native to the Americas so is he using squash as a generic term for a different vegetable?
The middle ages were before and at the beginning of the colonization of the Americas. So it is possible, but probably took some time for it to be common. Then came the Renaissance.
There could well be confusion over the nomenclature of several plants and their fruits, which changes over centuries and where a single word can sometimes describe a number of what we would think of as different species (even genera). Squash is a Native American word, so that's wrong for the Middle Ages, but Europeans were familiar with watermelons from Africa and cucumbers from India and China, so in some languages might have described these fruit with the same word because of the broad similarities (medium-hard rind, medium-soft pulp with seeds). Pumpkins and marrows (bred preferentially for courgettes/zucchini centuries later) only arrived after the Renaissance, which had marked the end of the Middle Ages.
@@craptastic4527 The colonisation of the Americas started in the 16th century, a century after the Renaissance began in Italy and even after it had spread across all but the northernmost parts of Christian Europe. The 15th century was the last century of the Middle Ages.
I am seriously hungry after watching this video!
The upper classes are a lot of meat and highly prepared dishes resulting in gout for many.
Gout, the disease of kings.
commence the gout!
now im hungry
Lol - they did eat the swans too. The 'center pieces' were just dressed, after cooking, back into their skin with feathers on them.
1:43 so basically he thought enjoying food was a sin
I also believe that wine balances the humours, aids digestion, and increases complexion
I do have a collection of midevil recipe books and they knew how to eat.
Banquet competition was all about who has the biggest sausage!
Ok, at 4:25 you mention that salt is rare enough to only be available for seasoning at the table of lords, but wasn't salting a common method of preservation even back then? The amount of salt needed to preserve a single slab of meat would be enough to supply seasoning at the table for a hundred people *at least* wouldn't it?
I think it depends on how well refined the salt was. Salt pans have been built in estuaries for millennia, and there are salt mines in Cheshire. It's one thing to produce salt of a quality suitable for preserving meat or for making into a cowlick, but much more time and effort to repeatedly dissolve, purify, boil and recrystallise it to get the quality we're used to in our table salt today. It's not just sand and grit to remove; there can be a lot of iodine in sea salt and phosphates in rock salt.
6:51 Dear Lord why am I thinking of the French Ortolan dish??
Watching this before, to see what I eat for dinner
When you mentioned that Philip IV banned certain foods and established rations, who enforced these laws/restrictions? Was there a police of sorts? Who prevented me from having/buying x amount of meat?
guards
I need me some medieval art. Please.
That actually did make me quite hungry.
Pope Gregory I sounds like he had no taste buds whatsoever.
lord farquaad 11:24
I like the dude passed out drunk in his own vomit on the far right of the picture at 4:24
I can't stand how people were back then. Hell.. Some people are still like this today. I'm so glad that modern humans have mostly managed to mature and actually show care for each other these days.
I fully support majority of the population to only get at least 2 meals a day and a side dish. Sometimes we cant let humans to hqve too much freedom of life. There always has to be control.
no they haven't
And of course antifun busybodies are a tale as old as time.
It is incredible how rare and expensive salt was. Now it's so cheap and plentiful we liberally throwing it all over our roads to melt the snow and ice. Medieval peoples would be aghast.
Beings as how I am full blood Irish, then I will go with a pan of fried potatoes and with bacon mixed in.
Oh yes lest I forget, fresh baked bread with homemade butter.
Doesn't get any better than this.
I’m starving now.
Look at all those chickens!
How did they have various squashes if they were not known until after Columbus? And you showed tomatoes, again they came from South America
1kg/ 2.2lbs is equal to 7000 calaries, that is in excess of what the body burned in the day i.e for normal bodily functions !!!
It depends on activity level.
Don't know if its from the middle ages, but I've heard that burping was a sign of satisfaction after a meal and if you didn't burp it would be frown upon and u had to eat until u burped. Idk if its a myth tho. But I know someone who died cuz of a ruptured bladder cuz they didn't want to go to the loo and interrupt the banquet lol don't remember who tho
Tycho Brahe (or so the story goes). If he hadn't died when he did, he might have fallen out with his newly-employed assistant Kepler, who wouldn't then have been able to demonstrate the accuracy of the Copernican model of the solar system, effectively inheriting 20 years of high-quality observations made by Brahe (who disagreed with Copernicus over heliocentricity). The science of astronomy could have been set back by decades if Brahe hadn't been so concerned about the banqueting etiquette in a foreign city to whom he was indebted for taking him in as a refugee.
@@RichWoods23 That is fascinating!! I love butterfly effect scenarios.
No wonder the Priest complained about gluttony...
I would have thought that fish would bring about more lustfull thought
Shit us Americans and the brits eat around 5000 calories a day now. Guess we're eating like kings
True, btw not stalking, just checked ur profile and we subscribe to the same exact things! lol
I eat 800 calories per day, I’m American.
Squashes? They weren't introduced to Europe until Columbus arrived in the Americas
When did tomatoes come into fashion?
In the 70s, around the same time as disco music.
People needed more calories then. Dvd. The rich. It was cold and riding took a lot of exercise. 4000-5000 calories wasn’t that excessive.
How to get rich quick
1. Buy lots of salt
2. Get a time machine
3. Travel to the middle ages
3. Sell the salt
4. You are now a millionaire
You buy salt. I'll buy several different types of sugar.
@@guymorris6596 why not both? Lol
These guys hate snacks, get em!
Catholic priest used to really hate anything that could bring feelings of happiness, didn't they?
What an awful existence having half the year as fast days
Bulking season
Herb who ?
It did start to make me feel hungry...😑
i m hungry now
I would turn down much of what was offered. Lol
Larks tongues in aspic.
A neighbor of mine who is basically a Best-Buy employed geek is all into this medieval stuff. He says he'd love to go bak to that time. SURE!!!!
Ok
I think it's the smallpox, plague and dysentery that would put me off the most.
@RichWoods23 well.....what's amusing when I decided to go to the rennaissance fair and realized that the king and his loyal subjects work at Best Buy
i.f. waaaaaaaaaayyy before it was cool
tomatoes? really?
Often the photos are a bit out of context. Most history buffs know tomatoes were at first thought of as ornamental and not trusted as food when first brought over to Europe. I think the most common vegetables were cabbage, leeks, onions, parsnips, and peas.
since farming began Humans have devolved according tobone specimens in China the human race is collapsing.....right now....ONELOVE
I just gained 300 lbs. watching this.
I'm totally not watching this while eating Taco Bell.
So glad I don't eat meat or fish.. the would have killed me.
Where do you get your facts from? Citations needed.
.
A fat nobleman is a great man.
Nobility was literally everything not only that you couldn't even use a fork it was scandalous come on man
Huh, GRRM was right.
It'd be a lot easier to follow this if you didn't speed up in the Royal Appetite section. I can't even register what you're saying you're talking so fast. If you're not going to give your audience the chance to take in what you're saying why not just leave it as 'They ate a lot of stuff." and be done with it?
What utter killjoys those medieval catholics were, as if God cares what we eat! Lenten fasting does make some sense, though, food stores were at their lowest at this time of year. Any uneaten frozen meat would be starting to thaw and field plowing was just starting, there were only a few fresh items that could be harvested. Milk and egg production tapered off during the long winters, and young animals, like lambs, were just being born. How anyone could actually eat an innocent baby animal like a lamb is beyond me, but they didn’t have the luxuries of abundance and choice that we have now (well, some of us). Hungry people with children to feed feel differently.
White bread today is widespread but most unhealthy.