They didnt eat apples much, they were used for cider.
“They” would whom, exactly? Apple Cider is hardly a universal beverage even in western Europe, whereas apples are a commonly cultivated fruit across much of the temperate zones of the planet. Most European countries have some regional tradition of cider-making, but not every place did that.
I have trouble seeing a hungry peasant taking an apple, squeezing out the juice, and discarding all of the fiber, calories, and other nutrition you’d receive from eating the apple.
Though England seems to be more cider-crazy than the rest of the world so maybe English peasants were like that.
But apples all get ripe at the same time. There’s only so many apples you can eat in the 1 or 2 month span, max, in which they’re available and not rotten yet. Unless you make cider out of the remainder, then you’d be missing out on the non-caloric nutrients, but you’d be extending the shelf life of the remaining calories substantially.
Yes, juicing is an extremely wasteful way to consume fruit.
Well, people will make liquor out of literally anything you can possibly to make liquor out of. And Ludovic is right that if you can’t sell your apples while they’re still fresh, it’s better to store and save it even at the cost of losing some of the benefits.
Of course, in the context of Merrye Olde Englande, it might even have to do with hiding the goods away from taxation. I recall that, due to various taxes that stacked up over time, Englishmen in various places kept being forced off their favorite beverages onto other, cheaper brews. Local-made cider could probably dodge the taxman.
what makes you think a peasant back then had even the faintest notion of fiber, calories, or other nutrition?
I know you weren’t responding to me, but actually - yeah, they did. Not in so many words, but people managed to eat dinners for eons before nutritional science, and will go long afterwards even if it it ends up debunked. Our bodies are really, really good at pointing us towards good sources of energy, and given half the chance will urge us to find nutritionally-complete meals as well.*
There are entire cuisines dedicated to extracting maximum value of calories, sometimes in pretty strange ways, or trying things until they could make a weird or barely-edible energy source palatable. Peasants around the world had to work hard to get by, and they needed a lot of energy to keep going. For example, the Medieval French wine industry produced drinks that were absolutely packed with calories. They didn’t know what a calorie was, but they knew it was fuel for the body.
*Not that’s it’s always possible, and there are a few diets which are satisfying but missing some vital nutrients. Also, some places on earth are annoyingly lacking in some of the relatively rare micro-nutrients - and the exact cause of local problems wasn’t necessarily discovered until the 20th century.
Well, sure, if you classify pizza sauce as a vegetable…
Sure, but people buy and eat Delicious.
Sure,imagination…
Bullshit. They had different apple varietals for different purposes, just like we do. Those are just English varietals, France had more. Pliny reported 2 dozen kinds. But I’m sure none of those made it to the Middle Ages. in Italy…[:rolleyes:
Most people were peasants, they all “happened to live” near orchards or gardens.
Yes, it would doubtless be hard to find experienced pomiculturalists in areas where people had made their living as farmers for generations :rolleyes:
It’s quite popular in France, especially Normandy and Brittany.
Fruit can also be dried.
I suspect the average peasant would have fed pomace to his pig, to help fatten it for the pre-winter slaughter. Bacon is the best way to preserve calories 
Although you can also use it to make “ciderkin”, a weak cider made by adding water to the pomace and fermenting it. It was said to be good for kids.
Hard cider dude.* Hard* cider.
*But this contemporary notion is flawed, tainted by our modern perception of the apple as a sweet, edible fruit. The apples that Chapman brought to the frontier were completely distinct from the apples available at any modern grocery store or farmers’ market, and they weren’t primarily used for eating—they were used to make America’s beverage-of-choice at the time, hard apple cider.“Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider,” writes Michael Pollan in The Botany of Desire. “In rural areas cider took the place of not only wine and beer but of coffee and tea, juice, and even water.”
*
http://www.archiveofciderpomology.co.uk/origins_of_cider.htm
These references show cider was made and sold in England in the medieval period, and transported for unlike beer it could be kept… The price was between 2.5d – 4d a gallon, cheap in comparison to wages, which were about 1d to 4d a day at this time. There are many more references to beer than cider however (74 compared to only 2 for cider in TNA), partly because beer was regulated by the state and the manor, but this in itself shows how much more important it was than cider. Why was cider less important than beer? Was it a matter of taste, of economics, regulation or technology. Price (as today) may have had something to do with it, beer is cheaper to make and this was reflected in the medieval price, about 0.75d to 1.5d a gallon depending on quality and area, while cider was slightly more…
Here is an explanation from Jim Franklin, orcharder in the Teme Valley:
“Before 1900, cider was so important, so important through the Teme valley, in Devon, in Somerset, is was a complete way of life. It was paid as wages, it was drunk because the water was so foul and it was used for medicinal purposes. It was taken on ships to stop scurvy, I mean it was a complete product in its own right. Previously to, I suppose, to the 1200s there’s reasonable records that they called it wine, it wasn’t called cider and that’s probably where the origin came, cider went one way and wine went another way but I cannot see really what’s the difference, between an apple being made into wine or an apple being made into cider, it’s just that it picked up this name and I don’t know exactly what the origins of this name is but I think it’s supposed to mean “strong drink” but maybe it was because it was so plentiful that it was quite a dangerous product. And it was, unless it was used properly, a lot of people were drunk for most of their life, which is probably the best way to go through life anyway.”…“Very few of our cottagers, yea, very few of our wealthiest yeomen, drink anything else (but cider) in the family save on very special festivals”
http://drinkfocus.com/beer/history-of-apple-cider/
*When the Romans arrived in England in 55 BC, they were reported to have found the local Kentish villagers drinking a delicious cider-like beverage made from apples. According to ancient records, the Romans and their leader, Julius Caesar, embraced the pleasant pursuit with enthusiasm. How long the locals had been making this apple drink prior to the arrival of the Romans is anybody”s guess.
By the beginning of the ninth century, cider drinking was well established in Europe and a reference made by Charlemagne clearly confirms its popularity.
After the Norman Conquest of 1066, cider consumption became widespread in England and orchards were established specifically to produce cider apples. During medieval times, cider making was an important industry. Monasteries sold vast quantities of their strong, spiced cider to the public. Farm laborers received a cider allowance as part of their wages, and the quantity increased during haymaking. English cider making probably peaked around the mid seventeenth century, when almost every farm had its own cider orchard and press.*
Early apples were mostly bitter and almost inedible. A few trees were grafted to produce dessert apples, but most were made into cider.
Yep, Hard Cider, beer and wine is common after the agrarian age. And actually it is highly probable that beer is the reason we settled down anyway.
Think of even the US, Johnny Appleseed was planting trees for the land owners who would make cider, and he would return for a cut of the profits.
Even from an area like England where seeds and plants were introduced from other places. Even if there were no wild trees to induce genetic materials from the original trees only 1:5 planted seeds would be a good eating apple and only 1:20000 trees would be an extant eating apple.
If you consider most of the commercial apples today are Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Jonathan, McIntosh or Cox’s Orange Pippin, and that all of those varieties are grown on trees with grafts from the same parent it become clear that apples were primarily a cider stock.
In the US this changed with the temperance movement and there was a huge push by farmers to develop eating apples during that period but previous to that it was almost exclusively for brewing cider. If you got an exceptional tree that was a bonus but it was not the norm for un-grafted trees.
Later as beer brewing increased “small beers” or the beer that resulting from brewing from the later runs off of grains became common. They were low in proof but were safe to drink.
It was only after Pasteurization was understood that the temperance movement was even practical.
If you read earlier brewing books like “Every Man His Own Brewer” - 1768 or “Town and Country Brewerey Book” - 1830 which are not as early but accessible they cover these topics. As the “Dark Ages” are dark due to a lack of information I cannot find earlier data.
But in at least England it seems that skeleton were close to the same height as modern humans which indicates they were most likely getting adequate nutrition.
I would not go so far as to say it was healthier, but modern diets tend to have issues more around overconsumption compared to energy use rather than the items actually consumed.
Apples can be kept over the winter. But not everything was about maximizing the calorie intake, anyway. Otherwise, snails, locust or acorn bread would have been common dishes in medieval England. Liking cider is a perfectly good reason to produce cider, even if it means some waste.
And as for the apple remains after pressing them, I’d bet they would have been fed to the pigs. Even when I was a kid, which wasn’t during the middle ages, anything marginally edible was fed to pigs by by farmer relatives. So, your apples would probably end as cider and sausages, which very conveniently, go well together.
You’re confusing the fact they these existed with the idea that the average peasant would have had them. A peasant would have likely had access to exactly one kind of apple. A burgher with access to multiple agricultural zones would have been in a much better position regarding varieties, but even then most cities would not have had that kind of variety.
Uh-huh - tell me more about how the people *growing *the many different kinds of apples would have had *access *to just one kind…:dubious:
No they don’t, if you choose your mix right. One advantage of having multiple varieties is having them be ripe at different times. Many a modern person has gotten an allotment, planted multiple rows of a handful of things, and within a few months understood why those people with multi-generation vegetable gardens prefer to have fewer rows of more different things.
Most peasants did not have orchards, nor anything of the kind. All the land they could plow was dedicated to grain and some vegetables, to ward off starvation.
Even in the dry, non-irrigated areas it was common to have trees mixed in with the year’s grain or herbals. Granted, in a dry area they’d be more likely to produce some sort of nut than a fruit, but in those same areas there were fruits grown along riversides. Both that kind of technique and crop rotation have been used to “keep the land from burning up” for a very long time.
Some of the things that George Washington Carver advocated for were traditional in the Old World but had mainly been abandoned in the New. The sight of large fields growing the exact same crop year after year after year would have been very unusual in 1000-1300 Europe.