That person should try to eat a medieval peasant bread sometime. It was made from a coarse meal, not refined flour. It wasn’t leavened. And it had zero salt inside. It also had sand in it. The taste of that shit is god awful and it destroys your teeth.
It wasn’t leavened.
What’re you basing that off of? The only reason you’d make a flatbread is if you couldn’t cobble together some sort of oven/stove communally. Otherwise sourdough is a no brainer even with sandy rye flour.
I don’t think you could stick it together though unless it was fine grain. Also they presumably wouldn’t have had yeast so it would have been flatbread.
Leavened bread was a pre bronze age thing. The whole point behind passover unleavened bread is the refugees theoretically had no time to let dough proof (not that I think the Exodus actually happened). As long as you’re dealing with something that has gluten, leavening it is trivial. Iron age armies would make rolls, proof them with sourdough starter, and cook them on skewers over an open fire while on the march. Coarse grain rye might take a day or more to proof with sourdough, but it’ll be sweeter and easier to digest after.
When it comes to if you make flatbread or not, it’s more a property of does the grain itself have enough gluten to even rise (which things like barley does not). Usually if it doesn’t, you’d make a porridge with it, but keep in mind that even making a porridge takes hours to really break down the grain. Leavening is almost always available.
They also had yeast that they could get from the local brewer.
And since bread was highly regulated, it was generally made by a trained baker, who used the highest quality flour they could get… which was still often very coarsely ground with the occasional bit of sand from the grindstones.
But it was leavened, and had salt, because everyone could get salt. The stuff was everywhere. And still is.
The bread was full of sand and grit and it would wear down your teeth to nubs by 25 tho…
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
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.
the cheese wasn’t even individually wrapped
And there was a chance your bread was moldy. But, hey, get the right kind of mold, and you get to start accusing people of witchcraft.
And the wine would be safe, but possibly heavily watered down to keep a barrel for longer.
It’s highly unlikely the witchcraft accusations were caused by ergotism.
It’s kinda crazy how easily the ergot theory took over. For 200 years, it was widely accepted that it was a case of mass hysteria, moral panic, and religious extremism. Then someone hypothesized it could be ergotism because the reported symptoms are similar.
And people immediately took it as a fact, because a clear, single cause is much easier to explain.
Y’know, like how they blamed the “witches” for anything bad?
Why didn’t anyone else develop ergotism? If their source of rye was contaminated, more people would have fallen ill.
Why did it only affect a handful of adolescent girls, who happened to be friends?
Why did another town 20 miles away have more accusations of witchcraft around the same time?
Why didn’t they recognize the symptoms at the time? St Anthony’s Fire was well-documented and treatable since the Middle Ages.
