by Jackie Money

Created on: September 11, 2008

I think most of us have watched the old movies where lords and gallant knights, seated on long benches around trestle tables, feasted on huge amounts of fish, fowl and meat washed down with a goodly amount of wine from golden goblets. They were waited on hand and foot by poor, downtrodden peasants, with the party usually ending in a bout of drunken debauchery. To a certain extent, these movies gave a reasonable, if somewhat over-dramatised, insight but the 'food chain' of the Mediaeval period was a little more intricate.

Many of the foods which we eat today, particularly the fruit and vegetables, weren't readily available, certainly in Mediaeval Europe.

The nobleman's diet would have been very different from the peasant's diet. His normal everyday fare would be a mixture of meat and river fish, as well as fruit and vegetables. Cooked dishes were normally flavoured with exotic ingredients such caraway, nutmeg, cardamon, cinnamon, cloves, saffron, garlic, turmeric, mace, anise, mustard, ginger, pepper, almonds, dried dates, dried figs and raisins. The nobleman took great delight in using these exotic additions as, the more exotic they were, the more affluent he appeared to banqueting guests, besides which they masked the flavour and smell of meat and fish that were a little past their sell by dates!

Much of the meat and fish at his table would have been supplied from his estate stock and would consist of deer, boar, hares, rabbits and even squirrel and hedgehog. Beef, pork, mutton, goat, chicken, goose and duck were much enjoyed along with the river fish of salmon, eel, trout and pike or, if one was close to the coast, herring, whiting, plaice or cod. Shellfish also featured in the nobleman's diet and included crab, oysters, mussels and cockles. Even in these dim and distant days, various pies and sausages were enjoyed, much as they are today and pottage, a thick soup of mainly vegetables with some meat, was also a regular dish at the dinner table.

For banquets, the nobleman pulled out all the stops and provided more elaborate meats and game such as pea-fowl (peacocks and peahens), swan, larks and blackbirds, as well as artistically presented 'sweet meats', many of which were coloured with natural food dyes.
Vegetables were served at the nobleman's table but they tended to turn up their noses at root veg which were considered more fitting to the lower classes. In Mediaeval England we didn't have the wide variety we have these days, but among those vegetables which

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