I Tried a Medieval Peasant Diet for a Day - Here's what I Learned

Microplastics, pesticides, Red 40. You know who wasn't worried about these things? Medieval peasants. So today I'm challenging myself to eat only medieval peasant recipes for 24 hours to see if we should just lean into the medieval escapism that I'm seeing all over my feed and bring it back to the good old days. The medieval times or middle ages refer largely to the 5th to 15th century which is a very long period of time. There's a lot going on all over the world but for the purposes of this video we're looking largely at the later middle ages and specifically in Europe which is where a lot of the iconography that I think we normally think of with medieval times comes from. Shrek, Jousting, Lord of the Rings. You might think that you're a medieval peasant, you can wake up, have some breakfast. No, we're gonna make our bread from scratch. This was started last night. It is our yeast mixture. We fermented rye, spelt flour, and some beer. And because I had no refrigeration, I probably left it out. It gets a little sour, like a homemade sourdough. Because bread was so important in the middle ages there were actually a lot of documentation and regulation around how bread was made and consumed. So we actually found this recipe in a medieval law from Rostwo? Rostsov? It's spelt like Rokla but that's not how you pronounce it. It's a city in Poland and this is a recipe that the government mandated for how to make bread. I don't know about y'all but this is way more effort than I would ever put into my breakfast in this day and age. I'm just like, how are people eating for spending all this time making one meal? Especially since bread gets stale really fast. They didn't have preservatives like we do so they have to do this on a pretty regular basis. I feel like Nara Smith. I was wondering why she's so calm in all her videos because she can release all her aggression. Okay, so the reason that I'm hitting it so hard is we're trying to develop gluten. Obviously these days we would just use an electric mixer but back then, it's kind of fun though. We're gonna do this for 20 more minutes and we'll be right back. While our bread is rising, a lot of peasants would have a home garden. Maybe some livestock including cows which gives us fresh milk. This is pasteurized though theirs probably was not and we're gonna make some really simple fresh cheese. They call this green cheese and that is not really fermented. It's just like you make it, you can eat it the day of. We're gonna start by combining some milk and vinegar and boiling it and letting it curdle. We want to get to 195 degrees. I should also clarify peasant as we were using it in this video refers to generally like the lower class of people living off the land in a noble fife, fief, would we be calling it? They're not the nobility. They're paying taxes to whoever rules the area. A lot of them are probably farmers, trades people but it doesn't mean that they didn't necessarily have a home to live in or own livestock or anything like that. So we've reached 195. We're gonna turn the heat off and pour my vinegar in and it's gonna start to thicken and coagulate and turn to cheese. Our dough has risen. I thought I was done kneading this but no, we need to knead and beat this again. So just arm day y'all. Apparently also back in the day, they used to believe that white bread was the healthiest so it was cheaper to make like rice and like darker grain breads which is why peasants had it more often. What's funny is nowadays everyone's like multi-grain, multi-grain. I feel like no one in LA eats plain white bread anymore. It feels nice. I feel like it got a little softer and fluffier. Not as dense, a little easier to knead this time. Now that I'm done kneading this, I'm gonna shape it into two little loaves to let them rise before we bake. There was actually a law in 13th century England called the Assize of Bread that dictated that makers had to make loaves of bread that could be sold for one penny. So the size of the loaves would depend on the price of grain which is kind of interesting. It's like the medieval gold standard where you could tell what the inflation or the crop yield was like based off of how much bread you could get for one penny. Ta-da! Okay, let's go bake these. It smells a little sour. Our cheese is curdled so let's try cutting it up. Whoa. Oh gosh, this is honestly so weird looking. It almost looks like you put a piece of bread to soak in some bath water and it's starting to disintegrate. It is a really yummy visual. We're gonna need to strain this to get it to be just the cheese. What's left over? I believe this is whey. I kind of feel like people buy this and I try to pour this without dumping it all over the counter. Oh my gosh. The cheese farted. The cheese cut itself. Okay, we're gonna strain our cheese. I did not get some milk cacao for this video but I imagine this is as close to the sensation as I'm gonna get. This is mostly rung out. We're gonna let this dry a little bit while we work on the rest of breakfast. This is a very arduous breakfast and I didn't even get my coffee this morning because I don't think medieval peasants had coffee. Testing my patience. So we have our slightly more dried cheese now. It kind of bounces. That's crazy. We are gonna season this and our medieval recipe that we sourced says to add a little cream so I think this will help make the texture more spreadable and really yummy on my bread. Kind of look like a ball of burrata or something. To pay homage to my garlic girly origins at Tasty, we are gonna squeeze a lot of roasted garlic in here. I feel like cheese is not cheese without a little salt. So we're gonna mix this all together. This is apparently also the start of how they make cream cheese except for cream cheese would be blended. We basically made cream cheese at home. That means that peasants were eating cream cheese. Cool. This has literally taken hours but we're finally having our first meal of the day, breakfast. We baked our bread. This is a very flat loaf to kind of make a round plate, also known as a trencher. I think oftentimes they just use a really thick slice of bread or some stale bread to use as their plate. Oftentimes apparently nobility and higher classes wouldn't always eat their trencher and then the peasants could ask them for their trenchers which is kind of sad when you think about it. But today we're very excited to have our trencher. I'm gonna slather on some of our fresh green cheese. This is a lot of cheese and a lot of bread for one person, I realize. I don't think there's any way that I could finish this. Chickens were common on peasants' home farm so we got a nice fresh little egg. Honestly, with the prices of eggs these days, feeling very wealthy being able to have an egg for breakfast. I also read that in medieval times they didn't always use forks but spoons were pretty common cutlery to have. As of right now though, I'm just gonna eat this with my hands. Spectacular. Nice, fresh, beautifully sunny-side up egg. This fresh cheese is really interesting. It really is kind of like cream cheese. I will say this is a lot of bread but we're carpet-lifting for my long day in the fields. I'm feeling so immersed in the medieval times. Our team, didn't they do a great job with the set guys and the lighting? But I feel a little out of place. Like I feel like I should be doing better and not just wearing like Uniqlo parachute pants. So I'm gonna go to the closet. I'll be right back. Alrighty, isn't this so much better? This is my medieval tunic that my friend just happened to have on hand which saved me some wardrobe budget. Anyways, let's make some lunch. In medieval times, fish were apparently very common. Whether from rivers or oceans, it was an easy and accessible source of protein. I'm very fortunate in that those came pretty clean from our local H Mart but I realized that a lot of kids probably even learned how to fillet fish. This looks beautiful. At the time, spices were primarily for the wealthy. So we're just using salt, pepper, and a lot of herbs today because that would have been in my peasant garden. Fried fish was really common in the medieval times because it was in accordance with the humoral theory of mid-medieval medicine. This has no explanation on it. But humoral theory followed the belief that you needed to balance the four humors This was blood, collar or yellow bile, phlegm, which I have a lot of today, and melancholy, which is black bile. So those tied to the four elements of hot, dry, wet, and cold. So that theory was applied not just to medicine but also cooking where the recipes were meant to balance the humors. So things that were considered dry, such as beef, were boiled. Fish, which was considered cold and wet, was fried. Very similar theory was applied to the medicine at the time for curing the bubonic plague which was believed to be an imbalance of the humors. So there was a treatment at the time where it was believed that the best course of action for the bubonic plague was to relieve patients of their excess blood by draining them. And I think history can tell us all how that went. All righty, lunch is served y'all. I'm not gonna lie, I'm kind of cooked with this. This looks like something at a French restaurant. We got some peas from my peasant garden and we got herbs. We are full farm to table right now. Some fresh lemon. This looks really good. I'm pretty excited. My co-workers were like, we're all gonna smell like fish tomorrow and we might still all smell like fish tomorrow. Oh, honestly, my hands don't even smell like fish anymore. They smell like lemon, so that's great. Okay, let's try this then. Loki, I think I was scared that we were just seasoning with salt and pepper but I realize a lot of cultures still only season with salt and pepper. That's not even that crazy. Not mine though. So while I'm enjoying this medieval peasant meal, actually a lot more than I was expecting to, I did do some research beforehand learning what the royalty of medieval times were eating and that was through medieval times in Buena Park. They actually really heavily took into consideration a lot of research of the time. They've made it their mission to educate and entertain and feed people with things of the era. So they let me come, see a show, get a meal, and interview a king, queen, and knight. Primary sources of a real medieval royal court. We are currently in Spain at the Castle of the Alliance. It is the year 1093 in medieval Spain and we are here celebrating the tournament that will bring our alliance together. I am fighting in honor of the alliance between King Ramiro and Queen Luciana. Overall, medieval times was a blast. I got knighted as a protector of the realm and queen of the tournament turn up. I didn't realize it was a full-on show with a story though. King Ramiro and Queen Luciana command me to call you into the grounds arena for the feast. Are you ready to eat? There's dressage, games, jousting, even political unrest. I notice they serve the food on pewter, not stale trenchers. We started off with bread and tomato soup. Very garlicky and delicious. Also very filling since this would be one whole meal I feel like for some peasants. Compared to my peasant meals, they darn near gave us a whole roasted chicken that was actually very juicy and tender. They paired it with spiced and buttery corn on the cob and a super seasoned roasted potato. Definitely a feast much too expensive for a peasant like me with all those spices. They even had dessert. A chocolate eclair which felt very fancy for the times. I'm not sure was royalty really eating chocolate while peasants could barely afford spices and sugar. This was a nice step away from my humble peasant life, but now let's get back to cooking. We've had a long arduous day of tending to my non-gmo organic veggie garden. So we're gonna make some potage. I don't even- okay. Potage is probably the recipe that I see most on medieval TikTok. It is a stew that most families would have constantly going over the fireplace on the stove where they kind of just add whatever they want to it. They'll add things that are about to go bad. They will add veggies. They'll add meats. Truly whatever is on hand so there's always a hot meal accessible. Because of that, I think recipes a little fluid when it comes to potage, but we did find this one online that is primarily cabbage and leeks which were very very common veggies sources of fiber. It also makes you really gassy, so I'm so sorry for all my co-workers that are stuck here with me today. We are just gonna chop these all up, throw them in some chicken bone broth from my pet chicken. Because meat was more expensive, harder to come by, we wouldn't have that unless we like killed the family cow. So today it's gonna be a veggie-based meal and maybe we'll save Betsy for the holidays. Our research team found this recipe so we know it is approved and historically accurate. There was saffron included. Saffron these days is really expensive and we would associate that with a higher class meal, but allegedly the peasants had some saffron so we're adding it. I'm gonna season with some salt and we're just gonna let this simmer for a few minutes, a week, eat it in a month or two. The idea of having a soup that you continually add to and serve for a really long period of time might sound disgusting, but there are actually restaurants in the present day that do that where they still have the same base of a recipe but they continually add to it. Otofuku in Japan have apparently been serving the same pot of soup since 1945 and honestly it sounds delicious like I would go try that. While this is cooking I'm sure a lot of y'all are curious about hydration in the middle ages. I feel like it's pretty common knowledge that potable clean water was harder to come by, but it doesn't mean that people never drank water. I will say though it was a lot more common for them to have beer, ale, mead, anything fermented. Obviously for legal reasons I'm not gonna be drinking beer all day, I am on the clock, but cheers y'all. That smells really good. You can see the saffron in there giving it some color. Our cabbage is a little wilty. This is great. Okay I could use a little bit of salt. Flavor is delicious. I love cabbage and leeks. I feel like if you just threw like a little potato in here, maybe a little something else, but we were following a recipe so this is the medieval recipe we had. We have our bread. I feel like Jon Snow at the Night's Watch, this is fantastic. But I do wonder if there's a little sweet treat that I can have after my meal. Honey with a common sweetener. So just having honey on some of your bread seems like a great way to end the night, but not without a little butter. I'm taking some heavy cream. Apparently you can make butter sans equipment by just shaking it in a mason jar. No one mentioned online how long exactly this is supposed to take, but we're gonna try it for culinary research. This is our crumbly butter and we can start to mold it. That is all buttermilk falling off right now. We're gonna go rinse this in some ice water and come back for our dessert. Look at that. I could eat this whole thing with a spoon but I won't. This is our leftover bread from dinner. It's an interesting texture. It looks really good. That's really good butter. A little sweetness from the honey and you got a little salt in the butter. This is amazing. Guys, I don't know what to say. This day of eating like a peasant has been better than how I normally feed myself. So we've had a very long full day of cooking medieval meals. The whole team is tired. They've been sitting here watching me eat for so long. This was a lot easier than I thought it was gonna be. I honestly might start incorporating some of these medieval recipes into my everyday cooking. Maybe not the bread, but a little cabbage stew, a little fried fish. I could do that on a regular basis. Learned a lot today. So I hope you all enjoyed and learned a lot too. Please let me know who you would like me to eat like next for our challenge and I'll see you all very soon.