![]() For those who were not privileged, a potage of boiled wheat and eggs would often be filling but affordable to those on limited incomes. The diversity of ingredients used for a potage varied tremendously depending on availability of certain foods and what the family could afford. Generally only royalty or the very rich were able to afford the delicacy of beef as the main course of their meals. Of course, many times beef was not part of the meal at all as it was expensive to produce. Even then, there was an order that meats were consumed with lighter meats like poultry offered first to be followed by the heaviest of the dinner options which would be beef if it was available. Our modern stews or goulashes are descendents of the medieval recipes for potage offerings that were part of the progressive system of introducing heavier foods as lighter ones were put into the system to prepare the way.Īfter these preliminary dishes were offered, the heavier meats were put out for the family or guests to consume. A potage generally resembled a soup or stew like mixture of meat and vegetables. Following the fruit course, vegetable dishes were served which would often include lettuce, cabbage, herbs, carrots or other forms of soft fruit.Īnother popular dish that was offered at this phase of the meal was a “potage”. The actual beginning of a medieval meal would probably start with a fruit offering like pears or apples because that was considered to be the easiest foods for the stomach and bowels to take and that it would prepare the digestive system for further entries. Similarly, the custom in fine dining situations where the soup and salad is served before the main course is an evolution on the medieval approach to serving meals. If you every wondered where the custom of serving appetizers before the meal came from, it came from this medieval concept of laying down light foods before heavy ones during mealtime. So much thought was put into how to carefully “mix” the foods after they had been consumed so that digestion proceeded in a healthy fashion. The common medical belief of medieval thinkers was that this type of eating would cause that heavy food to create unhealthy gases and even spoil in the stomach which could result in serious illness or death. Medieval chefs believed strongly that is those who dined on their meals ate the heavy food too early in the process, that food would “sink” to the bottom of the eater’s stomach and then get covered up with the lighter foods. So there was a great deal of emphasis on starting any mealtime with very easy to digest foods to lay the groundwork for the more substantial main courses to come. The dining experience and what went on inside the diner’s digestion system was considered to be a continuation of the cooking process by medieval chefs. There was a thought out approach to diet during the medieval years that, while not as scientific as present day, this system still showed a concern for health in what people ate and, moreover, the order in which they ate it. ![]() The image of a slovenly king eating a turkey leg with his hands makes for fun at a medieval faire but that image is not a good representation of how food was prepared and what kinds of things the people of the middle ages age most often. Many of the philosophies of how meals are taken and the types of foods that are suitable for a family meal that we hold today have their origins in medieval times.
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