Medieval Junk Food
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- čas přidán 9. 06. 2024
- Did they have fast food in medieval times? Jason Kingsley, the Modern Knight answers that question. You might be surprised! #historyfacts #history #medieval
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i love the simplicity of this kind of videos. its literally one man, in period clothing, walking in the woods and talking about medieval life. its so endearing!
Not always 😀Sometimes Jason gives us a really rich show with horses, armor, weapons and even parts of the castle
@minerwaweasley1008 yes, yes! I was just pointing out this specific simple videos! 😃🐎
@@andreluislimaa This one is really stand-up 😄
@@minerwaweasley1008 Castle? I don't recall ever seeing Jason at a castle, unless on older jousting pictures.
@@EmeraldVideosNL Look at the penultimate film, the one about taverns and inns. A castle wall was used as a background.
I love how this channel immerses you into the little things of medieval life!
exactly :)
Agree 100%
Could not agree more 💯
is his clothes historically accurate?
Totally agree
Watching this guy strolling through the woods and geeking out about medieval fast food is the biggest vibe
Honestly right 😂 he seems wonderful
My late husband would tell me that when he was a child in Hackney sharing a house with three related families the Sunday roast would be taken to the local cook shop where it would be cooked along with potatoes and rice in the same baking dish and then collected and brought back to the house so that everyone there could partake with the addition of vegetables that had been boiled on the range.
wonderful and very recent data thanks.
My father told me similar stories from the 1960s. He would often be given a tray full of food and told to go to the bakery so they could bake it.
It apparently was a relatively common thing, although I can't say how common house ovens were in 1960s Athens.
I live in Luxembourg on the Moselle river and in the 1940s and 1950s people would take a pot of food to the village baker. He would put it in his oven for a fee and the families would collect it , effectively slow cooked, at the end of the day.
Paying for it to be cooked was cheaper than paying for the fuel and watching the oven for hours in case there was a fire.
@@graemer3657 well even in Albania these days that is common,from meat to pies to Baklava.
Madam, around what decade did that happen?
it's so nice to have just someone standing there and telling me about something, no 5 camera angles and peppy background music and stock footage
Glad you enjoyed it!
Amen! Love it
Seriously!
Darn right
I agree! I like this format so much better than the cheesy music & stock footage
I am not a historian, but I am pretty sure decorations on pies started as a way for people to identify their dish. As in, “My pie is the one with the oak leaf.” To this day, I still know which one is Aunt Elizabeth’s.
Many places with communal ovens, even in the Pompeii ruins, have ways of marking whose bread is whose, …so a plausible theory.
Regarding the shop fronts, just 30 years ago I moved to King's Lynn and at the bottom (poorer) end of the old main road (Norfolk Street) quite a few shops had no closed frontage but were open to the street (boarded up when closed) and often sold only a single product I.e. there was the Egg man (just sold eggs), the spud shop (just sold potatoes), the cockle man (would sell locally caught shellfish) etc etc.
They've all closed since then and been updated over the last 30 years, all the shops now have the usual glass frontage and become "normal" shops.
Mindblowing to think practices normal to the medieval age were still quite normal just 20/30 years ago.
Very interesting about Taxes v.s. the size of the front of a building! The same was true in Kyoto for a very long time. I wonder what the logic is...
@@6400loser Simple. Busy road frontage means more customer eyeballs. More frontage is more eyeball space being taken up where potentially another shop could be. I wouldn't say the real estate structure in today's cities is really all that different. Prime real estate means prime prices and high taxes, it just might not necessarily rely on the width of frontage for the calculation... though it might. Square footage will be a significant factor in today's calculation.
@@YesYes-xb6he Well England is a mostly backward country, so not surprised.
There’s an old nursery rhyme… “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man, bake me a cake as fast as you can. Prick it and pat it and mark it with ‘B’, and put it in the oven for baby and me.”
Might be a clue as to who the pies were baked for 😊
It saddens me that medieval peoples would go their entire lives never experiencing the eXtreme nacho flavor of a single Dorito chip
Or a sip of Mtn Dew Baja Blast 😿
It would probably taste very weird to them. If you get off of junk food for a while, and you try it, it taste different. Like now, when I drink Coca-Cola, I taste dirt. Watch videos of people who try Mountain Dew for the first time. It’s a great example.
@@maryd1495 soda tastes like drinking syurp i hate it especially coca cola i never drank it as a kid and then as a teen it was awful funnily while pregnant it was a craving but now its gross again lol its not that we like it its our bodies love that sugar...its like a drug
That's true. I haven't drank any pop since I was 16 I am now 33 and for the first time yesterday I decided out of curiosity to sip a coke. Oh GOD it was disgusting! I was surprised. I wasn't even a big drinker of pop anyways before though. Yet it never tasted like that I could remember before. I didn't finish it no desire at all for it. It was nasty actually tasted flat even though it was just opened.
GROSS!!!!
As for how the cooks knew which pie belonged to which customer who had brought the ingredients: I'm German and both my grandparents from the east of Germany were born in the 19th century. Among what they left we found some little signs of porcelain with pointed ends with their family name engraved and we believe those were used to mark their ownership on breads or stollen (huge German Christmas cakes) they brought to ovens in a shop. Maybe the medieval English citizens had something similar though maybe with some other mark instead of a written name ( not every cook might have been able to read).
There's a nursery rhyme from England
Patty cake, patty cake, bakers man,
Bake me a cake, as fast as you can,
Pat it and prick it and mark it with B
And put it in the oven for baby and me.
This was how communal ovens worked. You brought your bread or pies to the oven and they were marked with a mark you provided, then given to you when baked in exchange for money.
I always thought prick and mark it with a B meant piercing the surface of the pastry so that the piercings make a B shape, not that they would be sticking some sort of skewer into the bread with a B engraved upon the skewer
Roll out some pastry and form it on the pie top into a unique mark.
Villages also had municipal ovens that could easily have used this sort of thing as markers.
Much as chocolatiers swirl different marks on filled chocolates to identify the filling.
When I went to Cairo a few years ago, I visited a Baker who received all his neighbours loaves for baking each day and was paid a small amount for doing so. I believe each loaf had a small mark or was fashioned slightly differently indicating who it belonged to.
Cool
This is probably how they did it everywhere. I know they did a similar thing in one of the stans (maybe Khazakhstan).
Communal ovens have been a thing wherever bread is baked since urbanization began. Ovens are large. Require significant amount of work to built. A _lot_ of fuel and are a serious fire hazard; the Great Fire of London is believed to have started in a bakery.
This is what the History Channel should be like.
ancient astronaut theorists say yes
Ice Road Hitlers of Ancient Space Egypt needs 57 consecutive hours of airtime
"Baking fraud" is not a phrase I ever thought I would hear.
That's why there's the baker's dozen
It’s when you tell everyone at the bake sale that everything is homemade, but you bought it from Costco.
hah! check out "bread" in russia during nazi invasion and the following decades up until 2001
I believe that a lot of this is still culturally true around the world. Growing up, I'd spend the occasional summer at my grandparents' house in rural Guatemala, and you'd buy food and drink from vendors selling from carts or bags. Instead of going to a formal restaurant, you might go to a particular house that had converted its front room into an eating space for customers. Instead of going to a videogame arcade, a different house had set up a few gaming consoles in their garage, which had an entry fee just to watch others play, and then an additional fee to pay for a certain amount of time.
I believe there were formal road names, but houses and areas were known by distinctive features. My grandparents' house, for example, was at the end of a T intersection and painted orange, so became a local reference point for directions. "Follow this road until you get to the orange house, then take a left, and we're having dinner at the 3rd house on the right" or something like that.
It really highlights, maybe, how little day-to-day social interactions have changed beyond material wealth and technology. If you were to drop a medieval person into any major city today, they would probably take a lot of time adjusting. But if you dropped them into my grandparents' town, I think it would have taken very little time for them to adjust.
That's a very interesting insight, thank you!
That sounds like my uncles neighborhood in Ohio before crack happened
Lets Plays before there were Lets Plays. Interesting!
That sounds more down-to-earth and community-minded than large corporate establishments (which focus on efficiency but at the expense of social quality)
To a degree exists in Southern Italy too. I met for example bakeries that have absolutely no sign on them - unless you look at the door, you won't guess it's not a normal house. But locals know those places and lots of buyers there all time. Same with some stores too.
If I saw you walking around the woods I’d think you’re a wizard
He would then explain to you what medieval people thought of wizards and magic then walk away...
@@breach258 History Wizard casts Knowledge Spell. It was super informative!
He is.
@@breach258 Definitely a wizard who mastered time travel then.
i would dig some "call of the wintermoon" vibes
i always feel so safe watching these videos, they’re like a break from normal life. It almost feels like i’m back in a simpler time
You are, we all are when we enjoy this content
Gotta love the medieval Yelp review on the "dodgy cook shop."
It's interesting to see this and compare it with the "fast food" of Ancient Rome, particularly the similarities and differences. In Rome a lot of the fast food locations were built into the fronts of the apartments where people lived and tended to be big enough that people could come inside and buy, with counters that had heated pots built into them, almost like a modern deli.
In Pompeii also
I’d love to have a time machine
Owning a kitchen was not guaranteed in industrialization Europe either. Not when room to simply sleep was short and fuel and time cost.
I reckon people physically interacted a lot more back in the middle ages. If you have to walk to the cookshop, the baker and the alehouse to get a decent dinner then you are going to meet a lot more neighbours than ordering a meal online or going to a supermarket self-checkout.
In many parts of the world, people still live like this. My husband walks to the bakery every day for our bread. He also frequents the fruit and vegetable stands. Our meats are delivered. We travel an hour down our mountain, once a month, for bulk goods.
Not only neighbours, you get to know all the staff. (Who may also be neighbours, sure.)
@@marionky Apparently a lot of places in Europe people still only use a fridge for storing holiday foods, day to day they probably don't have enough food to justify turning it on as they go to the shops every day. One friend lived in a house i Amsterdam for 6 months, he couldn't get a fridge if he wanted to, but he was also between a bakery and grocery and across from a restaurant.
Eh, it’s really only the last few decades where this kind of social interaction has been destroyed in the west, and it’s turning everyone into socially awkward weirdos.
@@littlekong7685 Im European (Norwegian) and not having a fridge sounds straight up absurd to me. But perhaps further south on the continent, in big cities, having an empty fridge is a realistic option? I dont know why anyone would want to do that though...
Your description of 'putting your lunch' together is what I've found here in Thailand. The night market, in like every town, is like that. Go here to get main food, there for a drink, there for bread or snacks, there for condiments and then find a place to sit and eat. I've been here ~6 months and learning to enjoy them if not too chaotic. It is very sociable. It is part of the culture here and if I spoke/read the language I'm sure it would be easier to navigate. Enjoy your vids. Thank you.
This channel has been great for getting a really good and accurate idea of medieval life, especially for fantasy writing 10/10 excellent work!
Glad you like them!
I cherish this channel so much. Nobody understands day-to-day medieval life better than Jason. Even after years of watching your channel you still manage to transport me back in time to a bustling, lively, energetic marketplace. Heartfelt thanks to you, sir
Other than onion and mustard, at the right time of year there would be Ramsons (wild garlic) and for a longer period of the year there would be Jack By The Hedge (wild garlic mustard).
Stinging nettles were probably used too as a vegetable (I've had stinging nettles in a stew and they taste very good). I'm sure there were all sorts of common edible plants used like Sorrel, dandelion and wild mint like horse mint etc
Nettle is also a popular freshness preserver. I remember the days when meat was transported wrapped in a thick layer of nettles to keep it from spoiling.
I would think horseradish, too?
@@minerwaweasley1008Why do the nettles have that effect?
@@peterknutsen3070 I don't know, why. Maybe it has to do with the bactericidal effect of nettle leaves - in any case, it has been used for centuries and it works.
@@mindstalk I was thinking of including horseradish but it seems that it probably came here in the later medieval period or at least that is what is thought. But who knows, it might have been here much earlier. I mean its possible that the Romans could have introduced it to Britain. Our earlier history is like a jigsaw puzzle with many pieces that are missing. Only so much written information has survived the journey of time.
Detailing the food and drink of a setting really makes a fictional world feel alive. Take your reader or players through a busy city market and you can have them introduced to a lot of your world in a quick and organic way.
Pat it and prick it and mark it with B.
The nursery rhyme says that you took your loaves and cakes to the baker where they did a final shaping, slashing the crust and putting an initial on it labeling it for the customer.
I could imagine someone with a few coins in their pocket sitting down in a tavern to get their cup of wine and sending runners ala medieval uber to go fetch bread and meat from nearby cookshops. I would also imagine places like taverns and alehouses which wanted people to linger, and drink more, quickly getting the idea to serve some food as well, as we can see in many different cultures, though tapas jumps to mind.
Probably plenty of kids around offering this kind of service, and I guess they would even haggle the price and pocket the difference.
@@NotAnAlchemist_Ed Zactly.
I can imagine sitting there with a stomach full of weak ale like “you’re telling me I have to go walk to get some food?” “Alright”
Sloshes away to pass out elsewhere
I guess the taverns have cross promotions with nearby cookshops and stuff. So you can order meat from Cookshop X and pies from Bakery Y and eat them while drinking in Tavern Z, and these places will send their own boys with the food.
Yes, every pub landlord in England knows to serve salty food to keep the punters thirsty! It seems likely that alehouses would have had deals with local cookshops to share customers and drive business to eachother's establishments. I do wonder what bar snacks were common back then though if you weren't hungry enough for a full pie...
I like that you have no qualms about interjecting comments about fantasy setting scenarios alongside the history facts. Makes the whole presentation less "stuffy" and overall pleasantly nerdy. 🙂
He knows his audience!
The first thing I thought of were the “pot shops” from A Song of Ice and Fire.
@@EggnogTheNogomg SAME!!! that's so funny, that's even why I clicked the video because yeah... Doesnt get much fast-foodier than that!
Quick, check. Cheap, check. Food sits out for extended periods, definitely check. Lol
"I'll have one without quite so much rat in it."
Monty Python
love how he looks like a wizard, i fell down a rabbit hole of watching D&D videos to this, very chill
Jason first I want to say I love these videos and I am always excited when they come out. You're also well known for your successful video game company and I would absolutely love to see you go into the medieval genre. Your interest and dedication to history would make it absolutely incredible in a video game
Holy shit I've been watching this guy for ages and had no idea he co-founded Rebellion, haha. Wild!
@@KingofCrusher same haha
I love to watch the stock introduction seeing pride of accomplishment when he chops that poor watermelon in two. 🍉🗡️🍉
the dude is a bit of a legend@@KingofCrusher
I can totally see Jason coming up with a Kingdom Come: Deliverance style game set in England. Maybe... the late Viking/ early Norman period. Aghh... a man can dream !😌
Fascinating stuff, I was born and raised in Windsor, and the main shopping street that leads up to the Castle gates is called Peascod Street and there are pea plants carved into the font in the Parish Church in Clewer Village.
Wow cool
Reminds me of eating at modern fairs. Hard to get your whole meal together & find somewhere to eat it in peace.
I love the addition of talking about fantasy adventurers knowing that a lot of fantasy aspirants would be coming to videos like this for research.
Watched this fast food video again. Only Jason, the Modern Knight, could make pie shops so interesting and real. Think I'll take my virtual pie from this video to the Ale house video for a virtual tipple to wash it down. 😊
Sir Jason
@@VintageExplorer666 He's definitely Sir Jason to us MHTV fans. But he has explained that although CBE is a level of Chivalry, he isn't actually a "Sir" at this level. One level more and he will be. Fingers crossed HM the King promotes him soon.
@LynneFarr thanks for clearing that up. I actually presumed he was Knighted, perhaps, for his work as an historian lol
@@VintageExplorer666 I think he deserves it as historian, presenter and CEO of a successful entertainment empire among other things. Hopefully he will get that next level of recognition. In the meantime, we can continue to enjoy MHTV. Good viewing to you.
Roman cities had many 'fast food' shops and today we eat from one end of a street market to the other. People are people no matter the era, and where there is a need, someone will start making and selling it.
Yeah capitalism!
C.M.O.T. Dibbler: "Sausage inna bun!"
Love this channel, always so interesting. Also, love the delivery. Nothing too flashy, lovely locations. I feel like im listening to a favorite teacher in high school. Keep up the great work sir!
I love this channel because it reminds me of watching shows like this on some early Saturday mornings with my dad on public access tv
Just started watching your channel a few days ago and have binged a ton of them! Stoked to see this new one up. Here is to many more, cheers!
Welcome aboard!
Thank you kindly. My 2 kids and I watch on the TV after dinner. We all learn something, are entertained, and are not rotting our brains, so thank you for your hard work!
Yeah, it's always a small thrill when Jason & crew release a video.
This is a great channel. Been watching for 5 years. It's kinda sad when he shows the medieval period ending with gunshots. No armor could stop a musket ball
I have been enjoying your "medieval food" ever since I first saw the "Medieval food: How healthy was it?" and it's related videos ;-)
They also bring back memories of reading David Eddings books where food pops up in several instances like finding an abandoned house with an intact kitchen, good times.
Regarding the narrow shop frontages the shop fronts of Cirencester old town are all in multiples of 22 feet (11ft, 22ft, 33ft and 44ft) as the Roman layout was with 22ft shop fronts. There was very little change in the property boundaries outside of these measurements for nearly 2,000 years, possibly why we see very narrow shop fronts in old market squares and such. So many layers of history.
That was so interesting! I don’t dabble much in medieval history, but when something pops up, it’s always fascinating to me that over centuries & millennia, human nature and creature comforts don’t change much! 😂. Thanks for the great video!
*The rest of the adventuring party:* "Ugh, a rotting animal carcass."
*The Orc and Gnoll in the party:* "Marinated snack!"
Jason, thank you. Whenever I'm curious about a specific historical way of life or event I look it up, but the answers I get are usually quite vague, and leave me wanting to know more of the details. You, bring history to me, and include the tiny details that I seek. Again, thank you.
EDIT TO ADD: Perhaps, if you have time, maybe do a video about all the strange little 'objects' people would build into in the walls/thresholds of their huts/homes to ward off evil spirits. Obviously, superstition was a huge part of daily life back then, so maybe you'll have the opportunity to produce a 'mini-series' regarding their superstitions?
Lmao i love those little _definitely not pagan, totally good christian_ wards. I saw a lot of them on thresholds in Bretagne.
Spices/Reheating/"passing off": The first is most certainly true "if you think about it" and you show that you know why. As someone with many years experience as a cook I can tell you that many people cant tell the difference between chicken and pork dishes once certain spices have been added and certain techniques have been used. For example, I know how to turn cheap pork into a texture and flavor that could be passed off as much more expensive mako.
If you search you will find stories of chefs in various places doing the same today. There is a story from a Chinese chef I read a few years back about a client that had contracted him to cook a protected "moon" turtle for a special event because eating one was supposed to extend life. The chef agreed and took the "magical moon" turtle which was worth a huge amount of money and then sold it and bought a common road killed turtle. Once the road killed common turtle was spiced up with enough sauce the client had no way of knowing that it wasnt the protected rare turtle and had no way of telling the difference between the one that supposedly conveyed life and the one killed by a Dongfeng once it landed on the plate.
Locally we have "family style dining" at some restaurants. This is where you get all your grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins and all go sit together at a restaurant for one particular menu option. For example, its common for Friday to be fish or Sunday to be fried chicken. Big platters of that meat are brought out and set on your table along with big serving bowls of mashed potatoes (fried chicken or roast pork) or fries (fish or shrimp), along with cole slaw, several bowls of vegetables, bread and butter, and platters of desserts. Its all you can eat but sometimes there is a couple pieces of chicken or desserts or something left over. Unscrupulous places may take table leftovers and try to serve them to the next person which might be you so you need to know what to watch out for to make youre dining safe. It is potentially possible that these items recycled to your table could get recycled again for example by recycling the already recycled fried chicken into chicken salad or chicken soup for later in the week. Each step tends to dry it out more and more spices are added and when it reaches the soup stage it can begin to taste sour from spoilage so baking soda is added to dampen it. The dried out plastic like chicken may wind up in pies or something similar to restore and remoisten it to an edible stage.
Which brings us to cuisines that are wildly over spiced like most of those from India over to the rest of SE Asia and including much of the Hispanic new world and bleeding into the US in the form of Tex-Mex. These people historically did not and often today still dont have proper refrigeration. Anything larger than a chicken regularly has leftovers that lay around in the heat and quickly spoil (open air markets?). Many of these people are extremely poor and the best proteins they can afford are often something like goat bung or grubs from rotting wood. As I kind of alluded to earlier, there is no excuse for American Tex-Mex and those people can be given anything as they have absolutely no idea what they are eating and they are proud to not know, the rest of the world is forced to eat that way out of desperation and is happy that their tongue does not know.
I love hearing the motorbike blazing past at 1:20 haha. My immersion!
Thanks to channels like this and Tasting History, my RPG city has things like a Butter Pie house (open 24 hrs) public houses, taverns and separate inns. The lower end inns serve gruel for breakfast and pottages for dinner and have communal sleeping quarters.
Thank you for all you do to add a bit of realism and character to my RPG world for me and my friends.
Grab your ketchup and crunch away my friends.
...for you are crunchy and go good with ketchup?
Medieval check. Food check. What more can one wish for?
I love all your medieval food episodes in particular.
This was so interesting! This channel continues to be one of my favorites on YT, you should be granted support from the state for doing a public service of excellent quality!
This channel needs a podcast, I'd be listening to it all day
I always love seeing an upload on this channel. I too like the idea of an adventurer coming into town and planning out the cook shop, bakery, and tavern they will visit for the meal. Also, the hucksters shouting out "hot pies! hot pies! Geese! Piglets! Come dine! Come dine!" with trays of prepped food.
On the subject of spices hiding rotten meat I have a personal anecdote (so grain of salt required) that makes me doubt it even beyond pure economics.
I once brought a packet of chicken tenderloins, put them in the fridge, and progressively cooked them up and ate them through the week. The packet I brought was larger than I usually buy so instead of finishing it on Wednesday it lasted until Friday.
Now I was a bit suspicious of the meat since I had left it so long but giving it a sniff test it didn't seem to smell off and I wasn't about to waste food if it was still good. So I went ahead and coated them in my usual extra hot spice mix and cooked it up. One bite told me I had chosen wrong, it was very clealy off and none of the spices were doing anything to hide that.
I am of course a sample size of one and chicken would not be the average medieval meat, but humans are very good at tasting rot and I was likely using what would be a considerable amount of spice to a medieval person.
Yeah, much like blood and damp soil, humans are incredibly sensitive to the taste of food that's past its best. The humans who weren't good at it usually died of food poisoning before they could pass on their genes!
As a single person, I have found that if I coook something, including meat, I have 3 days to eat it. So I will make something in the evening on Wed., eat Thursday, and then eat for dinner on Friday. After that - it's headed for the garbage. Never gotten sick.
Cook them all at once (poach, for instance). Cooked meat has more staying power than raw meat, which goes "off" rather quickly.
Peascod Street in Windsor, Berkshire, UK runs south west from the main gate of the [Norman] Castle. I always wondered what peascod was! I must try it sometime. Thanks for a great channel Jason.
Thanks for the info
This is brilliant. I can almost picture those times, the way you describe them.
How well-timed! I was musing on medieval street snacks for use in a fictional-fantasy setting, and settled on roasted chestnuts. I guessed mainly based on personal experience, but it made me really curious about it in general! Thanks for the "taste" of historical quick bites :D
I feel like a scotch egg is the perfect snack/meal for an adventureing party after a long day of killing goblins.
The museum of Aargau reconstructed a mobile oven from the 15th century.
A backing oven on wheels!
Cheap bread with salted butter or farmers cheese, local berries served in a broad leaf (fresh or dried/preserved), small roast fish from the nearest river (stuffed with herbs), crispy pork fat (cracklings. The leftovers from rendering lard), small cakes (think cookie size but soft and sugary bread), boiled salted potatoes (maybe cut in half with a hunk of bacon shoved in), roasted rabbit (two legs per order then any other meat sold on in a hollowed out bun/between two slices of bread soaked with drippings), roasted nuts still in their shells (great for keeping warm in winter), small pies, roast meat on sticks.
I feel like peas sold as a bunch of fresh pods would also be an option - easy to pop out snd snack on then dump the pod anywhere to compost.
A couple of thoughts come to mind... I imagine the difference between penny pies and tuppence pies was one of size but there would have been a temptation to put lower quality ingredients in a penny pie and the law said the filling had to be the same. On the other hand, given that they couldn't cut corners, pie makers might have felt the profit margin on penny pies was too small.
The other is that putting your kitchen in the front of the shop, while actually less sanitary, was good advertising. In a world with minimal health standards, it's not a bad thing to have full disclosure of what's going on in your kitchen.
You say minimal health standards, but I feel that is perpetuating the myth of an unclean medieval society, just a bit. Contrary to popular belief, people did bathe, did care about their hygiene and looks--and given there were laws to ensure the food was safe to eat (such as not reheating meat), I think it shows a better understanding of food spoilage and hygiene than we give the medieval folk credit for.
It's pretty neat to see that they cared so much to enact laws and fines like that.
@@shawnwolf5961 I have to agree there. I think the frontage was a better idea for the sake of honesty more than anything. You can see the amount of filling going in, you can see they are using piglets and not old mares, the vegetables look fresh and not wilted. Plus the smell of cooking food is not to be underestimated, a hungry patron walks by and smells your food from the kitchen might decide then and there to stop and eat. And then it becomes far less likely the local inspector might take an interest in you, unlike the folks making food in a back area and only bringing out sealed foods.
@@shawnwolf5961 I think it might be more a question of enforcement. From what I understand, Medieval governments had less of an administrative state and less law enforcement. Identified violations would likely be prosecuted, but there would be less proactive enforcement. In that situation, allowing the public to observe the kitchen is more valuable.
@@littlekong7685 In the '90s, I was a 'baker' at a cafe-bakery chain, where all the baking and prep was done front-and-centre behind the counter. Aside from near the cloud of cinnamon around the Doughnut King, the smell of our bread and pastries filled the Food Court. People used to wait for the latest batch of baguettes to come out of the oven so their salad roll could be hot and fresh (and wilted), rather than one of the cold baguettes that had been sitting there for 15 minutes.
Now that I've given Doughnut King more than three seconds thought, every doughnut shop ever does exactly the same thing.
I’ve been enjoying your videos for years. One of the best channels on CZcams. Thank you for making these and informing everyone in such an engaging, entertaining way.
The Wizard approches you slowly... "Imagine you've been traveling...".
I love this channel so much.
What a great video on so many levels! Brought back some memories. First trip to Ireland & the UK in 1983, Return of the Jedi had just been released. I'm a big fan & saw it at home and then in Dublin, Edinburgh & London. Was amazed at the ice cream vendors at intermission and the bars in the lobbies. We could buy popcorn & sodas in theaters the US then, but not ice cream & booze. 😊
There used to be a theater in the Chicago area where you could sit at a ta NJ le and actually served a meal during the movie.
@@mpetersen6we have all of that in the US now (sadly)
I think medieval towns or cities were extremely social and busy. You had to visit 10 different spots to get ingredients for dinner and walk quite a distance at times to go about your business. Even if it was a big market with all you needed you'd stop at every stand and discuss current local affairs and gossip. It was exactly what my gran used to do not more than 40 years ago so why would it be any different back then.
Another brilliant video. I love the insight to the normal everyday people of the medieval age. Fascinating to uncover what they were eating and where they were eating it. So love this channel, dip in once every couple of months and it never disappoints.
Food themed episodes are my favorites! Thank you, Jason! 🙏
Hot cross buns were a thing in the medieval period! The song sounds like someone hawking their wares.
There are lots of places with busy market streets that probably sound quite similar to the ones back then. In the end, one of the most effective ways to get people to check out your goods hasn't really changed. 😁
The Crowner John book series (set in ca 1290 Exeter) often has the main characters stopping at stalls to buy various “fast food”.
Getting someone else to bake your pies is also a good way to reduce the risk of burning your kitchen (or house) down.
Pie are one of things that you can cook once in bulk and keep for days.
The other day I was reading about the ancient Roman grain dole, wondering how that worked when tenement dwellers didn't have cooking facilities. Wiki said you would take your grain to a baker, for milling and baking.
@@mindstalk I think there was a parallel in medieval times where even if you grew the grain, you still had to have it milled by your lord, mostly so the lord could get income from you in the form of a part of the flour for their own use. And according to this video, if you didn’t have the facilities, a baker would have to bake the bread or whatever for you too. I wonder what the charge was for that service?
I used to have an older colleague in the 1970s whose father had been a baker in Sheffield, England. He told me that people would come with food to be cooked in his ovens, presumably after the bread had been baked, because few had their own oven.
I really love how you integrate educational history with how someone might use it in fantasy tabletop RPG settings.
This channel is as comfy feeling to watch after a long day as it is informative! Thank you for this content!
Always nice to see your videos drop.
Another great one for stories and rpg games.
You know, if your company Rebellion made a Medieval Fantasy RPG video game, I'd play it. Especially if you, sir, made a cameo in the game somewhere!
YES! Me, too!!
I'm in!
in!
Agreed.
Also in!
I can answer the question of how someone would know which pie was theirs at a bake shop. Apparently every family had a distinctive design that would be pricked into the top crust. I learned this from a friend who uses her family’s design on pies to this very day. It’s been handed down from mother/aunt to daughter since at least Victorian times.
If I ever win the powerball, I'm gifting the History Channel to this man.
Yesssss!!!! I’m so excited to see this in my feed! 😍😍😍
Me too!
Your channel is my favorite of all the ones I watch. Not a single video is boring or lackluster. Whether I'm in the mood for some fun history or just an escape your videos are awesome.
Most people on farms,were vegetarians for most of the year.
They didn’t kill their animals for meat,because they depended on them for everything else!
All of the things they gave to us everyday like,Eggs from your chickens,ducks and geese.
Milks from your cow,sheep and goats not only to drink,but also would be made into lovely cheeses.
Your cow or if you owned a horse, pulled the plow to plant crops.
The wool from your sheep is shorn,cleaned and spun into thread for knitting,spinning or weaving and made into clothing.
In Autumn,only the old animals who didn’t earn their keep any longer or weren’t going to make it over the winter,were killed for winter food ingredients. Meat was usually salted and or smoked to preserve it for the winter.
Greetings from Czech republic, Jason! Hope you and all animals are all right.
all good thanks. winter is finally here too.
Jason, just a thought but pigs trotters, which are the feet, have been popular right up until recent times. I know my parents used to eat them quite frequently in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Sheep trotters wouldnt be much different except maybe a little smaller. Also you could think of it like a lower shank, the lamb shank is now really common but i can remember it being thought of as poor peoples food in the late 70s early 80s
BTW you are one of my fav channels on CZcams, love the effort and research you put in and its always interesting topics 😄
I'm an immigrant to Extremedura, in Spain, and most of my neighbours still eat pig's trotters. They eat the ears and tail too - everything except the squeak, they say. We're very proud of our acorn fed pork here. (I was invited to eat tail - a special meal. It was very tasty, not as gelatinous with cartilage as oxtail.)
Chinese pig trotters are still a thing. Braised pig trotters and such.
Pig ears are a delight; chicken feet too
Hmm I suppose ear can be quite crispy?
Lamb shanks -used- to be cheap, until a few cooking shows told everyone they were fashionable. Now they are ridiculously expensive for the amount of meat you get vs the amount of bone since they are now sold by weight instead of by the piece. Something I came across a few months ago is 'pig wings', a US centric snack made from the smaller trotter of the pig well trimmed & eaten at 'Tailgate BBQ's' and the like. In Australia I see them in some supermarket butchers at 1/3 the price of any meat, even chicken drumsticks & wings (something else that has gotten ridiculously expensive once it was declared fashionable).
Alfred the Great famously didn't eat meat due to a stomach ailment, contemporary writers complained about the bland meals served at his court.
I was born and raised in Malawi and this all legitimately sounds like a regular bus stop or open market! From the cookshops with fried chicken and goat, tiny bottle stores and restaurants, to the vendors with trays of offcuts and pies, potato chips and boiled eggs with a tiny bag of salt to go, and packets of alcohol... and it's VERY busy, dusty, smokey but awesome to hang out in 😂 you should definitely head over there if you can!
Modern Malawi is equivalent to medieval England? Oh dear.
I've tried this with reenactors a few times, but the way you explain it makes it sound amazing Jason 🍻
Way better than what we have now
@@ConcedoNulli I tried it once and they asked if I wanted a job there.
I'm assuming they were being sarcastic as they told me to f off shortly after.
@@cyqryI've never been sure of 'what' they're feeding us at McDonalds 😄
@@valandil7454 Reconstituted god knows what with salt and other preservatives. It's almost an insult to food to call it food.
Thank you Jason for these videos. Your genuine passion and excitement is contagious and I find myself frequently smiling and laughing along with you whenever I watch them.
100%
My absolute favorite channel, so excited to see another episode!
Its amazing how similar medieval fast Food is to modern asian fast food shops where the stores are highly specialized in one or two different types of food and its delicious
I love this guy. He's like me when I'm telling my girlfriend everything I just learned about ancient Rome. So glad that he gets to share this with us, and that he gets to live a life where he can explore it.
I love the idea of adventurers bringing their own ingredients to a cookshop in an RPG. Sounds like a way to make monster hunting fun and delicious😋
I imagine that bringing your own ingredients for them to just cook it for you would be cheaper vs buy the whole pie from them.
that IS a thing in the monster hunter games 🤔
Mmmm goblin pie!
And lemon gelatinous cube for dessert!
I used to sell pies from a tray at the football. The universal call was "Hot Pi-EYES" with a rising note on the last syllable. The call not only cut through the background general roar of sound, everyone using the same call made it easier for the customers to pick out where the nearest pie was.
I absolutely love this guy's content. Super pleasant and well spoken
As always, top-notch information presented beautifully. I still say, these videos should be shown in schools... :)
Side note: So, 'fast food' was readily available, and of possibly questionable quality? 'And there is no new thing under the Sun'...
Love watching your videos. I have a theory on what "courser meat" could suggest. This is a stretch but I was just watching a video on the Townsends channel (which discusses colonial history) and they had a video about the rations a prisoner might receive. They reference a historical document (a ledger of rations) provided to a prison in I think it was Philadelphia. That document also makes reference to course meat. It references "Sunday - one pound of course meat made into a broth". I suspect between these are referring to roughly the same thing and that it may be a slang term for the poorer cuts of meat or even perhaps the umbrals (though that has a specific term) which they might have ground and stewed to make a rich broth which would be inexpensive and nourishing. I think the term "course" in this context refers to any meat that is unsuitable for whole cooking and serving and they would be making a broth out of it. The video also references a second document about how prisoners are often fed ox hearts and ox head so perhaps it is a reference to the same thing in this medieval context.
… perhaps the “umbrals” … even my spell check never heard that one. … 🔦... “Umbral is derived from the Latin umbra, meaning "shadow". It is also the Spanish and Portuguese word for "threshold", and sometimes used as a surname ....” Sweet word. Thanks.
That's another good channel.
@@robkunkel8833 I heard another video on modern history that referred to it as a word for the guts of an animal which I think would be ground up and made into a pie
Not a native English speaker here; I understood it as coarse, not "course", so I gathered it to be leftovers of this and that, a sort of stew of different undistinguished bits (hence coarse); or, alternatively, entrails.
@@purpurina5663you are correct, I think it was meant to mean coarse I just goofed with a typo.
What a fantastic channel.
Thank you so much for all your work to provide such informative and entertaining content.
Subbed!
There is a remnant of this style of life in France when you go and get your croissant in the bakery and are allowed to eat it in the cafe with your coffee.
I love your videos, but I think this is my favourite type. When you choose an everyday topic, and tell us about it. Like fast food or toothbrushes.
Great film! Very much interesting information, I suppose RPG players and larpers will be very grateful to you for it. The city is mostly a lot of people who need to be fed, and not everyone can afford to have their own kitchen. I lived for many years in Krakow, a city where there was a medieval university - the city and university chronicles speak of particularly many places where ready-made food was sold. There was also a system of feeding poor students linked to charity - every poor student had a pot and a spoon and at lunchtime they could come to a burgher's house and count on the cook to give them something. This was a very popular kind of charity, for which the Krakovian bourgeoisie was probably forgiven many sins 😃
So fast food restaurants or kiosks and soup kitchens for the homeless have been around since ancient times after all.
That's really cool! Do you happen to remember what the system was called?
@@glittertechnic I don't think it had a special name, but I could be wrong. Perhaps there is some "pascere pauperes alumni" preserved in the chronicles ("to feed poor students" in Latin) 😃, but I have not come across any particular name.
Jason! One of your best videos! So educational ! Wow, I would love to see something like this recreated in real time, like the renaissance festival that is conducted and recreation every year .
Have a great Thanksgiving! ❤❤❤❤
Glad you enjoyed it!
I love the presentation of this video, the whole thing captivated me from beginning to end. Thank you for educating us!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Hey man how ya doing? I been watching for about a year now and just wanted to say thank you for the hard work you put into these videos. I never fail to learn something as well as be entertained! You’ve sparked an interest which has evolved into a fascination into lives in the past. It’s funny because I find myself questioning how I can find a way to connect ourselves with the people of the past. As I’ve come to think, we are much more alike to those that came before us than we realize. All that has really changed is the “routes” we use to achieve the same feelings. I appreciate the videos and am always excited for a new one!
Such great content.
This is my third time watching this lovely exposition, I can’t wait to see it exceed 1m views soon. You earned it!
That “courser meat” was definitely the Hippogriffs that ate one too many horses
Excellent stuff Jason! Videos like this that offer "slice of life" topics are endlessly interesting. I wish you'd been around 40 years ago when my D&D group was in full swing, knowledge like this would have made our campaigns so much more realistic. I had an old herb book and drove the DM nuts with always asking about comfrey/woundwort and other healing herbs that my Ranger carried around with him. There have always been tales of shady cooks using dyes/plaster/sawdust and other nefarious means to "spruce up" their products and get higher prices for them.
"Cheap" seasonings are amazing, there is so much that can be done with just salt/pepper and a few herbs, some of the best meals I ever ate were made up from whatever we scrounged while deployed in the field in the Army. A snared rabbit, chives, wild garlic, dandelions and the salt/pepper packs from our MREs made an amazing Hasenpfeffer that I still remember fondly.
This was an absolutely fascinating little slice of history. I loved it.
"Streets were often named based on what function they served"
*remembers Shite Street from a previous episode*
08:10 sheeps feet soup is available in Turkey, it's called Kelle Paça and it is delicious. It also contains pieces of sheeps head
Like to think at some point Rebellion is going to make one hell of a medieval style game.