Cider and pork is a heavenly combo.
Snails, locust are actually not often a good use of energy. Acorns require a lot of prep, but not if you feed them to pigs.
They definitely had something “of the kind” - kitchen gardens and fruit tree plantings . Or is your expertise in peasant gardening better than the people who actually research this kind of thing?
“The garden of the Arden peasant’s holding was an important, if poorly documented, resource. Apple, cherry, plum and pear trees seem to have been common on many holdings, as in 1463 at Erdington, where nearly all peasant holdings contained orchards. The range of crops cultivated on the peasant’s curtilage is poorly recorded, but the garden of Richard Sharpmore of Erdington was probably typical. In 1380 trespassing pigs ruined his vegetables, grass, beans and peas.”
– Andrew Watkins, “Peasants in Arden”, in Richard Britnell, ed. Daily Life in the Late Middle Ages, (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998), p 94.
And if you think all they grew was pure subsistence calories, you really are displaying ignorance of the Medieval attitude towards garden produce, which was often as much medicine as it was mere food. Never mind all the non-edible things they had to grow, like flax, osiers & withies, wood for fire and making things, dyestuffs…
I bet it didn’t all go to the pigs; boiling down the leftovers from cider making is how you get apple butter.
No, I’m well aware of all of that. What MrDibble is arguing for, and what I am arguing against, is the idea that peasants had a wide choice of apple varietals. They most definitely did not; a peasant diet was unfortunately pretty monotonous, not just in Europe, but in most of history for the world. They ate darn near anything edible, because they didn’t have the luxury. They most definitely did not get to casually pick from multiple varieties of a single fruit as pleased them. (I also do not agree with his strange idea that the modern “common man” is a culinary simpleton.)
Additionally, much of what you describe happened on the edges of whatever land they controlled, and gathering fuel was often something which had to be managed on the local lord’s land. It could not necessarily be done without permission,and peasants would commonly use dried inedible plants in lieu of actual firewood.
This, of course, is a picture that would be heavily modified depending on the time, place, and social class of the peasant involved. A Freeholder in the late Medeival period would have been in a far different position than a cottager three centuries earlier.
Well, on that we agree, since that’s a complete strawman version of what I’ve said.
Actually, a lot of that sort of thing happened on the commons, in hedgerows or the royal forest. But also in the kitchen garden. Like. I. Cited.
Cite? Since estovers was a fairly widely established right, I’d love a cite that it was “common” to not have actual firewood (or turf or peat, where turbary took precedence over estovers).
One radical treatment for type I diabetics was starvation therapy. They literally starved children, giving them very small amounts of food. It severely limited calories, but had the benefit of somewhat controlling glucose. But that was just starting right before they developed artificial insulin, which made it obsolete.
Moonshine is the product of distillation. Beer is not distilled. I don’t think there would be a danger of methanol.
Peas porridge hot
Peas porridge cold
Peas porridge in the pot,
Nine days old.
What a splendid diet.
Pease porridge. And that rhyme is hardly medieval.
Maybe in upper-middle-class regions, but allow me to provide a counter-example.
I recently lived in a poor town in New England. Residents without cars (and there were a lot of them) basically had two choices for supermarkets unless they wanted to spend all day switching buses.
There was the grocery store by the strip-mall. Its “produce” section was mostly lettuces, onions, and potatoes. There was also a table at the end that, when it had anything on it, had bunches of bananas and plastic containers of rather dubious tomatoes.
Then there was the grocery store downtown next to the police station. No produce section. None. There was a rack of bananas near checkout. That’s it. This is a full-sized supermarket I’m talking about.
(Both stores had canned and frozen vegetables available.)
There was also a tiny local grocery who seemed to specialize in Latin-American stuff. I don’t recall them having apples. I suppose they might have, but the only thing they had more than one variety of was cigarettes.
If those are the “typical Americans” you’re talking about, it doesn’t seem at all unlikely that a peasant with a few fruit trees in his garden might consume a greater variety of fresh fruits.