Posted in The Hedge of Thorns by John Hatchard

The Hedge of Thorns, which we are currently reading, was written in 1611. Amanda and I both love history, so we wanted to find some historical information on the year. I checked Wikipedia. Not much there. I checked for the entire century, and it was not really info, just dates. So, I thought maybe I would focus on the diet and farming during the time this wonderful little treasure was being written.

At Merrie Olde England I found this lovely menu fit for the King:
Thus read the menu for a Monday morning breakfast served in honor of King James I's visit to the northern English town of Preston in August of 1607. Dinner the previous evening featured thirty dishes for the first course and twenty-seven in the second.

However, your regular common farm-folk did not eat in this manner
Much of what the farm-folk and villagers drank and ate was produced on their own farms or bought or traded with a farm neighbor.  If you were a farm family or a villager, your life was dictated by the farm-work you did during the farming year.  Water was normally gotten from rivers, but many times they were too dirty to drink from.  They drank milk, buttermilk or whey. At that time, whey was recognized as a digestive aid and beneficial to the skin. I also found that it was served at the spas or baths—frequented by the well-to-do for "cures"—often mixed with herbs, fruit or wine. This was interesting, after watching Amazing Grace last night and seeing that they visited a type of cafe that served a pump-water elixir - good for the health.  Of course, another drink frequently made and consumed during the Medieval period was ale.

If you were to look in a cookbook for that period, you would find that vegetables were widely available. A wide variety of the onion family—onions, leeks and garlic—plus root vegetables, spinach, asparagus and artichokes were readily available. They used these in soups and stews, rather than serving them raw. Pottage was a regular dish. It is a kind of stew made from oats. Sometimes they would add legumes to the oats or vegetables such as turnips, parsnips and leeks. Making these dishes was not as we would do today. whereas we will just make a trip to the grocery, what was added to these dishes was dependent on the farmer's own crop.

Salads were made of lettuces and herbs. Our family has found that there is a great deal more variety of good lettuces than just the plain old head of iceberg too.  We buy a Baby Spring Leaf Mix, and it is not your average salad, but I imagine it is a close picture of what would have been eaten by farm families of this era.
I find it amazing but not surprising that the upper classes  would have looked upon vegetables as a lower class food, to be eaten by the farmers who grew them. Here they were, looking for all sorts of tonics to extend their lives, and the very God-given life-foods were eaten only by farmers and peasants.

Pigs were a mainstay for a peasant's regular supply of meat. Pigs could find their own food, because they will eat just about everything, and they could be slaughtered throughout the year. Since pigs ate acorns, which were free from the woods and forests, they were also cheap to keep.
Mutton, sheep and lambs, was also a favorite meat dish in this period. At this time, the blood of the slaughtered animal was also used to make a dish called black pudding, which consisted of blood, milk, animal fat, onions and oatmeal.

Olde Beliefs
The British also considered raw fruits to be "unwholesome." Fruits and vegetables! the mantra of health today... the very thingthey needed more of, and they cooked alll the vitamins out of them or disregarded them altogether! So much so that the medical books of that time warned that fresh fruits "filled the body with crude and waterish humours, that dispose the blood unto putrefaction."  Because of this, apples, pears, quinces and berries were stewed or made into tarts, pies and other "puddings."

Caring For Food
Preserving vegetables was a problem in that time, and most recipes books contained recipes for pickled vegetables to be prepared with a salt and vinegar brine, and protecting from the air with a weighted cover or a layer of butter or tallow.  
Several foods, including mushrooms, walnuts, cucumbers and oysters, were added to "catsup," which was originally a pickled fish sauce made from anchovies or other small fish, something like Worcestershire sauce. Of course, tomatoes as well as potatoes were not an acceptable food until later, but I don't think our tomato and sugar mixture of Ketchup today even compares!

The Brits' Love Affair With Sugar
After finding that the higher classes thought vegetables were for a lower class of peasants and not realizing their true value, I then read that they went overboard in their enjoyment of sugared dishes. This was especially interesting to me, as we just watched Amazing Grace last night, and a large part of the slave trade involved the refining of and transporting of sugar.

The English Housewife by Gervase Markham was a 1615 handbook of handy hints for housewives and gave advice on cooking, brewing beer, and caring for wines. It also provided health advice for the family. Of course, health back then was a bit different than we know it to be today, and it called for sugar in most dishes, from salads to omelets and pancakes, from the broth and boiled meat, stewed fish, roast meats, meat pies and of course, the dessert pies, tarts and puddings that the English are famous for.
As we know well of today, large quantities of sugar in the diet  cause tooth decay, as was the cause of the proverbial English bad teeth.  A visitor to England in 1598 said of Queen Elizabeth at age sixty-four that her "teeth [were] black, a defect the English seem subject to from their too great use of sugar."

Tomorrow we are going to post some discussion questions about chapters 1-3. They will not necessarily be used in our online discussion, but I made them up for my own use with my children, so feel free to print them off for use with your children.
Blessings,

Jacque

Seeking Rest in the Ancient Paths

and As Always,