I always remind myself that way back then … if you happened to cut yourself badly, there was a high likelihood that you could lose a limb or die from infection. They had treatments for stuff and they could be careful but all you needed was a chance infection (that is easily protected against today) and you could end up severely affecting your life or dying.
Even just a prick from a thorn while outside could give you tetanus, which was a super shitty way to die. People’s muscles spasmed so hard they could literally break their own bones.
Be sure to get your booster shot every 10 years!
Hell, even half of their “treatments” ended up making the problem worse or killing you even quicker
One common treatment for chickenpox was to drill a hole in the skull. Shockingly this wasn’t very helpful
But drilling a hole in your head did solve some other problems like brain swelling, so without knowing better and having no alternatives, I could see why one would try
I spent the next three years in a POW camp, forced to subsist on a thin stew made of fish, vegetables, prawns, coconut milk, and four kinds of rice. I came close to madness trying to find it here in the States, but they just can’t get the spices right.
I mean they had a lot more than that if Tasting History has taught me anything.
Granted very little of it was anything like what we think of today in terms of your typical meal. Ketchup started as a fish sauce from SE Asia and the French some the fuck how figured out how to burn a mead so bad the whole thing is charred, and decided to label it high cuisine anyways.
I think a lot of foods were invented by accident. Bread and beer, for example, can be made if you leave a gruel uncovered for a while. (And then heat it, for bread.) If you crush grapes and leave them for a while you’ll get wine, in the right conditions.
Barbecue, I maintain, is a natural phenomenon. Animals overcome by fumes in their dens by forest fires and then cooked by the smoldering embers is probably the first time our species tasted that delicacy.
Was beer really an accident? We were getting fucked up on fermented fruit for a long long long time before beer was a thing so I guess I always assumed we made that on purpose. But thinking about it I guess it makes sense that it was discovered on accident much like the fermented fruit.
Unlike fermented fruit, beer requires some processing by boiling the mash. I figure if someone was making porridge and forgot about it they’d end up with something beer-adjacent.
When they say wine they don’t mean what you’re thinking. When they say bread they definitely don’t mean what you’re thinking and I’d hate to think what the cheese was like.
People really don’t have a grasp of how much effort goes into modern food production to make it the quality that it is.
It’s fairly obvious when you think about it, there’s a lot of documented evidence of people living on ships surviving almost entirely on beer. If that was modern beer they’d all be incapable of operating the ship after about 2 days, dead shortly after from alcohol poisoning, clearly that didn’t happen.
Ive known alcoholics that drank 12-24 packs daily and still were perfectly functional. This is 4-5% abv beer, and they did all of the normal activities you would expect. If you didnt know they had a disease/addiction, you likely would never have noticed how much they had to drink that day. They easily consumed 2-3000 calories/day just from beer.
Human tolerance for alcohol is way, more adaptable than youre implying.
You’re both right. The beer people drank back then was usually very low alcohol content. It was essentially fermented just enough so that it would stay safe to drink for a while. There was stronger stuff, yes, but especially the stuff they had on ships was very weak.
not saying anyone’s wrong in this thread, but i would love to read sources on this
I don’t know about the wine or cheese but I have to disagree with you on the bread thing.
There are people that make multigrain, wholegrain, sourdough, etc bread based on medieval recipes and while they’re not wonderbread they’re also not unrecognizable as bread to a modern person and they’re not terrible either. There are even people who buy the grains and stone grind it themselves to make it more authentic.
People tend to grossly overestimate the hardships of pre-industrial life. Not that things were easy because of course a lot of labor went into simple things but people have always been cooking, the biggest difference between now and then would have just been consistency since people were cooking smaller batches more frequently with less precise tools.
Bread was water and flour and dirt, wine was vinegar, and cheese was “milk”.
If your cheese is still milk then it’s milk.
In much the same way that cheese isn’t yogurt
