I always remind myself that way back then … if you happened to cut yourself badly, there was a high likelihood that you could lose a limb or die from infection. They had treatments for stuff and they could be careful but all you needed was a chance infection (that is easily protected against today) and you could end up severely affecting your life or dying.
Even just a prick from a thorn while outside could give you tetanus, which was a super shitty way to die. People’s muscles spasmed so hard they could literally break their own bones.
Be sure to get your booster shot every 10 years!
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RIP adhd people
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I spent the next three years in a POW camp, forced to subsist on a thin stew made of fish, vegetables, prawns, coconut milk, and four kinds of rice. I came close to madness trying to find it here in the States, but they just can’t get the spices right.
Once during prohibition I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.
– W. C. Fields
I mean they had a lot more than that if Tasting History has taught me anything.
Granted very little of it was anything like what we think of today in terms of your typical meal. Ketchup started as a fish sauce from SE Asia and the French some the fuck how figured out how to burn a mead so bad the whole thing is charred, and decided to label it high cuisine anyways.
I think a lot of foods were invented by accident. Bread and beer, for example, can be made if you leave a gruel uncovered for a while. (And then heat it, for bread.) If you crush grapes and leave them for a while you’ll get wine, in the right conditions.
Barbecue, I maintain, is a natural phenomenon. Animals overcome by fumes in their dens by forest fires and then cooked by the smoldering embers is probably the first time our species tasted that delicacy.
Was beer really an accident? We were getting fucked up on fermented fruit for a long long long time before beer was a thing so I guess I always assumed we made that on purpose. But thinking about it I guess it makes sense that it was discovered on accident much like the fermented fruit.
Unlike fermented fruit, beer requires some processing by boiling the mash. I figure if someone was making porridge and forgot about it they’d end up with something beer-adjacent.
Did beer start with women chewing grains and spitting into baskets? No boiling.
I was thinking someone dropped a piece of meat into the fire by accident.
What do you get when you burn mead?
Bochet. Basically caramelized honey mead.
Huh. That sounds good!
And it is if aged well. Fresh it is disgusting for some reason.
Bread was water and flour and dirt, wine was vinegar, and cheese was “milk”.
Cheese is still “milk”!
Replace dirt with salt and that’s modern artisanal sourdough.
I expect medieval bread that goes to peasants to be hard enough to work as hammers. The wine would probably be half water. The cheese, funnily enough, would probably be the best tasting thing in the home. We’re talking about cheese that is supposed to last months on end without refrigeration. A wandering cockroach that gets to the cheese might be some extra seasoning for the peasant, too.
Wine would definitely not be water because clean drinking water was more valuable than wine for sure.
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That only works with spirits or very strong wine though.
Probably meaning taste/consistency wise if we compare them to wine we can buy
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Wine that has less than 60% water is just brandy.
If peasants were given brandy, sign me up. I’ll have it with cake, thanks.
You know they meant watering down wine.
the cheese wasn’t even individually wrapped
And there was a chance your bread was moldy. But, hey, get the right kind of mold, and you get to start accusing people of witchcraft.
And the wine would be safe, but possibly heavily watered down to keep a barrel for longer.
It’s highly unlikely the witchcraft accusations were caused by ergotism.
It’s kinda crazy how easily the ergot theory took over. For 200 years, it was widely accepted that it was a case of mass hysteria, moral panic, and religious extremism. Then someone hypothesized it could be ergotism because the reported symptoms are similar.
And people immediately took it as a fact, because a clear, single cause is much easier to explain.
Y’know, like how they blamed the “witches” for anything bad?
Why didn’t anyone else develop ergotism? If their source of rye was contaminated, more people would have fallen ill.
Why did it only affect a handful of adolescent girls, who happened to be friends?
Why did another town 20 miles away have more accusations of witchcraft around the same time?
Why didn’t they recognize the symptoms at the time? St Anthony’s Fire was well-documented and treatable since the Middle Ages.
The wine may have been spiced with mercury to make it healthier
The bread was full of sand and grit and it would wear down your teeth to nubs by 25 tho…
To be fair, that sounds like fast food.
Add a piece of fish and it’s perfect.
Fish cooked with sorrel and salt. But not as much salt as modern cooks use.
And then some fruits, berries, or veggies if they were in season.
Yum. But I say…
Fish with whatever herbs you have and all the salt you want!
(I coincidentally enough have not one but two separate medical conditions which require increased sodium intake, and I am all about that salt. It is delicious.)
Fish with sorrel is specifically listed as a peasant meal in a few different medieval manuscripts.
Is people having the phone in their social media profile pic a deliberately-shit thing like when Youtubers are holding their tiny clip-on mic?
Old school selfie style, from before screen facing cameras.
Yeah, it was the lack of air conditioning and indoor plumbing that was the real problem. Oh into the disease. So much goddamn disease.
@nifty A post appeared on Mastodon via federation from Lemmy where it originally is a screenshot from Twitter so basically a stolen joke. Great.
But that’s the nature of memes, isn’t it? I also try to attribute as best as possible
