What medieval JUNK FOOD was like

Imagine you've been travelling for a few days, you're low on supplies, you get to the outskirts of a big medieval town or city. You are ravenous. Where do you go and get food cheaply and quickly? Outside of towns and cities, most people in the medieval period prepared their own food. If you were relatively modest a peasant, for example, which most of us were, you'd have your own hearth and you'd make food in a skillet or a ceramic or iron pot. There were things like frying pans and the equivalent around, especially later on in the medieval period. Basically, you made the food yourself. If you were rich, you had ovens and you had a kitchen and you had staff and they would prepare the food for you. But in towns and cities, things started to change. It was about the middle of the medieval period when cookshops started to appear. These were medieval fast food. What I mean by fast food is food that is ready and waiting for you. It's been cooked not to order, but it's been cooked to be consumed, but nobody quite knows who's going to buy it yet. You could just go up to the cookshop and buy a pie and consume it there and then. Around the middle of the medieval period, towns and cities were starting to expand quite dramatically. There were a lot more travellers. There was a lot more commerce. There's a lot more going to and from places. So the demand for cookshops started to expand and where there's a demand, it will be delivered. And those cookshops sprang up in all sorts of places, usually in places that were very busy. So next to a market square or next to a busy gate into a main city and they would serve the passing clientele. In real towns like Norwich and Bristol, there were actual streets called Cook Street or Cook's Lane. And those were the places where the cookshops mostly were. In the medieval period, types of trade tended to group together. You wanted to go and eat something or you go to the Cook Street and grab your food. And in Bristol, there was even a guild hall for the cooks. So they had their own organisation like a lot of specialist trades did. I like to think, though, if you were in a fantasy city, the cookshops might be set up to feed adventurers who are coming back from their travels. Right next to the gates or in the market square or near adventurers' guilds, perhaps, there would be a set of cookshops delivering food for those specific types of people. I think it's a lovely idea to think that where there's a demand, the supply will be met in a particular stylish way. Most medieval towns were surprisingly crowded, actually, and road frontage was at a premium, especially on things like market squares and important streets, which is where the passing traffic is going to be. In a lot of cases, I think it's likely that the size of a house kind of reflects a certain amount the size of a market stall back in the very early days of that settlement. People kind of ended up with semi-permanent market stalls and they then went backwards. So a lot of houses were very narrow frontage, but they'd have the main house at the front, they'd have a small, narrow courtyard, and then often they'd have their real kitchens at the back in ordinary houses. But in specific cookshops, often when they were built as cookshops, the ovens and the cooking facilities were at the front because that's where the action was going to take place. And in a lot of places, you don't have glass in the windows, you effectively have a shutter or board that goes up over the gap in the front of the stall. That is lowered during the day and acts as a table for your wares to be set out. It's literally a display place and you could prepare food on it, but you could also show what you were selling. And that's really interesting because at the end of the day, that would be shut up and bolted because there was no glass in windows. Glass was available in the medieval period, but it was really reserved for churches and rich people. And it's not very secure. You need to be fairly certain of your security if you're going to have a glass window, certainly in the early medieval period and the middle medieval period. One of the other reasons, I think, for medieval houses to be quite narrow, apart from the premium, is they often pay taxes based on road frontage. So the wider your house was, that's sort of the broader it fronted onto the main thoroughfare, probably the more tax you had to pay. And also the more road you had to look after because everybody had an obligation to look after the road directly in front of their building. Didn't always do it, but there was a legal obligation to look after the road in front of you. So what kind of food was actually available in these cookshops? Well, we have a record, chap called Fitz Stephen in the Norman period, so from Norman, London, describes what you could get in the cookshops. And he talks about fried, roast and boiled meat of all sorts. He talks about great and small fishes. And he talks about a coarser kind of meat for the poor. We don't actually know what that coarser meat was, of course. I'll leave it to your imagination. Maybe you can put it in the comments. But he literally talks about a coarser kind of meat for the poor. May just have been worse cut perhaps, or it may have been a particular type of cheap meat. We just don't know. If you wanted bread, you had to get that from the baker. So you could get specific types of food from the cookshop, but if you wanted bread, you had to go to the baker. You couldn't buy bread from the cookshops. You went to the baker. If you wanted ale, you'd go to an ale house. So I imagine scenes where you wanted to have a bit of a meal, you wanted drink, you wanted bread, you wanted a pie. Well, you go to three different places and sort of take your snacks with you. I have this vision of a medieval streets filled with people at certain times of the day, choosing what they want to get from which cookshop and deciding, there'll be a nice ale that'll go with this, or I fancy a glass of mead. I better go into this tavern. And so people were carrying food around from one establishment to the other and eating a lot of it on the streets. There weren't such things yet as pavement cafes, as far as I can tell. In the later medieval period, the records talk about all sorts of pies with meat or fish, not sure about vegetarian pies, but presumably there was some vegetable component in them as well. Vegetarianism wasn't really a thing back in those days. There were people that didn't eat meat. Lots of the clergy, for example, but broadly speaking, that was not something that people particularly familiar with. In London, in the middle of the medieval period, you could get all sorts of things. You get lots of different types of pies with different fillings. You could get what are called hotcakes. You could get wafers. You could get pasties. You could get cheese flans. They're kind of a quiche, I suppose. You could get all sorts of breads and wafers. And it really sounds quite varied. There was an awful lot of stuff that you could actually get hold of from specific pie shops and specific pasty shops and specific cheesecake shops. So it's really interesting. If you wanted a type of food, you went to a shop, a cook shop that supplied that kind of food. Other things that are mentioned are roast beef ribs. That sounds pretty good. Peas cods. Now peas cod is interesting because it's whole pea pods complete with the peas inside them. Braised or, I guess, kind of fried in butter with salt. Now I think that sounds really quite nice. Quite a good comfort food. And that sounds great. This one though doesn't sound quite so appetizing for me anyway. Hot sheep's feet. That was definitely on the menu as well. Never seen those in my modern life and it's not really something I would particularly think I would want to eat. Some cook shops would actually offer a service. They would cook your food for you so you could bring the ingredients to them and ask them to put those ingredients into a pie which would then be cooked in their oven and you would presumably either wait on the premises hanging around for 20 minutes, half an hour while it was cooked or you go to the local ale house, have a couple of pots of ale, come back again and get your pie or pasty from the cook shop. I have no idea how they maintained whose pie or pasty was belonging to which customer. Maybe it wasn't that busy or maybe they just recognized who it was. And I do wonder whether the odd slightly dodgy cook shop owner might swap out particular ingredients for cheaper ingredients while the client wasn't looking. Unlikely but not impossible. I have this vision of adventurers going in with certain amounts of food and wanting it to be prepared for them and so they just offer this food up and go to the pub, literally go to the pub, the ale house or the tavern and then come back again later and get their pasties and then wander off to do more adventuring while eating pasties. Cookshops were so important in the period that there were quite strict rules about what they could and couldn't do. For example, we know they've written down rules that you're not allowed to throw your dirty water into the middle of the street. I presume you had to put it actually into a cesspit behind your shop or put it in a barrel and have it taken away later. You were not allowed to reheat meat as well. There are very specific hygiene rules in some places. You're allowed to reheat meat or you'd be fined if you were discovered doing it. I'm sure a few people did though. Some people talk about spices being used to cover up the taste of rotten meat. Well, I want to tell you that that's completely untrue. If you had enough money for posh spices, you certainly had enough money for fresh meat. So the idea that you'd use cinnamon or nutmeg to disguise the taste of rotting meat is absurd if you think about it in detail. Those were very expensive spices. So you had cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger for wealthy people or people with enough money or wanting an expensive pie. But for more ordinary folk, you also had flavorings. You had flavorings like onion and mustard. Those were considered to be lower expense. Those were locally available and could be eaten in quantity by poor people. Whilst there were hygiene rules, it appears that cookshops for poorer people, for clientele that were destitute or very poor, were also notorious for bad hygiene. In fact, we know quite a lot of this. The poor in towns and cities often lived in tenement buildings. They often didn't even have cooking or washing facilities. They were that poor. They couldn't even cook for themselves. So they had to frequent cookshops. But at the dodgier end, the cheaper end of the cookshop standards. So cookshops were essential for that category of human being. And those cookshops tended to be shunned by the middle class and the upper class completely. And they were much dodgier. And there are a lot of stories to tell about dodgy cookshops. In the medieval literature, cookshops that catered to the poor are described in quite lurid terms. Hodge of Ware in the Canterbury Tales is described as a sleazy purveyor of unpalatable food. He is quick to anger, hot-tempered and prone to drunkenness. His cookshop is described as fly-filled. His food is often reheated. And as a final insult to his cooking prowess, it describes a particularly foul parsley garnish that he uses. Doesn't sound that bad, but I guess parsley garnish was considered to be a bad thing. And from a personal perspective, which is pretty awful for a cook, is he's described as having an ulcerated and stinking leg wound. It's a fairly colourful description and probably doesn't represent the majority of cooks. Maybe it does. Maybe they were all awful. But I think it's likely there's a bit of personal vendetta going on here. I reckon this is somebody that Chaucer didn't like and he's describing them in personal terms, perhaps. And it's gone down in history. We'll never know the real person, but somebody got their revenge. Whilst Chaucer's cook may have been a literary invention, we do know through the court records that some of them were dodgy. In 1380, for example, some pastellers were prosecuted for filling their pasties with stinking offal and food that was not fit for consumption, but also for faking the contents of their food. They were accused of putting beef in the pasties and selling it as venison. There's a bit of passing off there going on. So it doesn't say that the beef pasties were bad. It just says they were lying about the contents. I think that's kind of interesting because there's sort of baking fraud, contents fraud going on there. The fact that cookshops were so important to the poor meant there were actually, there was legislation, there were rules about what they could and couldn't serve. So for example, we know that was a rule that cookshops in a certain area had to serve pies with meat that were one penny, but that were as good as the tuppany pies. I don't really know what that means, but it's a specific rule that they had to follow. Possibly the amount of meat or the quality of meat could vary, but there's definitely, they had to sell penny pies as well as tuppany pies. And the fine for not doing so was six shillings and eight pence. There was a much smaller food vendor as well, one without premises. And these walked around with trays of food for reselling. These were called hucksters and they would often shout out their wares to all and sundry in the street as they wandered around, presumably vying for the best places, presumably trying to sell the food they've got in front of them as quickly as possible while it was still hot. These actually, for me, remind me very early on when I went to the cinema where people used to come down and serve ice creams and treats in the interval of the cinema. So they're a kind of huckster, if you like. We even have a record of the sort of thing that might've been shouted out across the streets to sell your food. Piers Ploughman has a wonderful poem. It's very dense. It's got a lot of data in it. It's really interesting. But there's a sequence in it where it's described as cooks and their knaves shouting out across the street and they shout out, hot pies, hot pies, geese and piglets, come dine, come dine, trying to get people into their cookshops to eat at certain times of the day. Imagine that. Imagine variations of that everywhere you went on the cooked row, people shouting out their wares. I think that gives quite a lot of colour and depth to the kind of sounds that the medieval street might have been. In the 1370s and 1380s, we have a record of a poet called Thomas Hockleave, who's reminiscing about his days working as a civil servant in Whitehall. And he talks about at lunchtime going to the taverns and eating and drinking. He drank sweet wine and ate pastries and wafers to the sound of pipe, harp and sortry. And they're all kinds of musical instrument. And I think that's lovely to think that he was dining at lunchtime and there was music going on as well, medieval music. Whether it was any good or not, I guess we'll never know, but he literally comments on that. So he's eating his wafers and drinking his sweet wine and listening to medieval music on the streets of London. We have another record of a traveller from Venice commenting on London and he comments about how meat seems to be available everywhere and there was geese and there was pork and there was beef. He also talks about swans and venison in great amounts. He said there was so much food everywhere to be found in London. He doesn't like the English ale though. He describes it as smelling like horse's piss with bits of husks on the top and it's cloudy. It seems that fast food in the medieval period was readily available, especially in the larger towns and cities. I think it's really interesting because it was a whole cultural thing. There were occasionally street cafes. There were also places you could go to get a particular type of pie and then some bread and another place for ale. So I imagine quite a lot of people would have been circulating at lunchtime or maybe in the evenings and I think that gives a different flavour and colour to some medieval cities. It strikes me they were actually much busier and more social places than I'd perhaps thought before.