What would a medieval adventurer EAT?

SHAD! Thanks for the shoutout! Been a fan for years!

Shad, don't forget pastries. Medieval people loved their baked pastries, sweet honey cakes, various fried dough's, and of course the infamous pies. These were not modern pies, but more like self canned meals. You would bake a fancy, thick, deep crust bowl with lid. Then make a filling (usually meat and veggies), then bake that in your already baked crust. You would then open the lid and eat what you wanted, then close the lid and keep it for the next day, and the next, and the next. If you ran out of filling, use the crust to bake more! Then when the crust was finally worn, you could eat it as it was still technically food, or feed it to the animals, or throw it in a stew as thickener/crunch. Apparently popular out in the rural communities.

i had a dnd game where the wizard constantly prepared the sleep spell not for use in combat but to put a large game animal to sleep so they could kill it without risk. it was a lovely little rp action that they took in order to provide some reality to the game. any time he had to use it in combat he would say something along of the lines of "god damn it i was going to use this for dinner!" which got a good chuckkle.

Lembas bread, how could you miss the historical best ration that is definitely based in reality. One cake will feed a full grown man for a day, and a Pippin for an hour.

I can't believe you haven't mentioned mushrooms! Mushrooms are delicious, abundant in forests pretty much throughout the year (except when it is freezing cold), easy to prepare in many ways. You only have to know to identify and avoid the dangerous ones, something an average medieval traveller certainly did know.

Just a note on the Hawthorn berries, they are one of the easily foraged foods that you would easily turn into a long life ration by turning it into a fruit leather. Simply: -pulp the berries -boil -pour on a surface -let it dry (usually by the fire) (All can very easily be done in the evening at a campsite) And now you have a tasty fruit leather that will keep from weeks to months...

FYI, as far as "drinking vinegar" goes, our modern vinegars are far more acidic than homemade vinegars tend to get (especially ultra-processed types like distilled white vinegar). I've made fruit-based vinegars of the sort that could be easily be made in any Medieval kitchen and they can actually be quite pleasant and refreshing to sip even straight from the bottle, and are downright delicious when watered down a bit to make a tangy "soft drink." The thing about homemade vinegars is that you can customize the types and amount of fruit or wine you use for flavor and complexity, and stop them at any level of fermentation and sourness that you want. And considering the average Medieval homemaker would be more likely to be using honey than sugar as a fermentation nutrient (if they used one at all), it would basically an acidic type of fruited mead. I once made a pineapple vinegar that was so delicate and complex it was basically like sipping a tangy yet still slightly sweet picnic-type sparkling wine (it still had a bit of fizz in it when first sampled). 10/10 would recommend making your own fruit vinegars at home. It's super simple and the results are so delicious (and infinitely interesting to tweak and play with).

One thing I find interesting that people did all the way up to the turn of the century, but almost no one does these days, is preserve meat in lard. Placing meat in jars (either earthenware or glass in more modern times) and pouring hot lard over the meat to seal it in. Protects the meat from bacteria and prevents it from spoiling for up to a month on a shelf. I would be surprised if they didn't make use of this method in the medieval period, considering how easy and cheap it was. Even considering the weight, carrying a small jar of lard-preserved meat would be a solid choice for an adventurer, especially if you had a cart or wagon, letting you carry a good stock of food at a time.

Here's a few related medieval traditions of Eastern Europe that you may not be aware of (some are still carried out today in rural areas): - Clean water wells were considered community assets and often dug outside or inline with the property fence (on the road side) to be easily accessible for everyone. Isolated communities also used to dig wells way out of the village near the main access roads as a way to support traveling to and from neighboring settlements. Also it was considered extremely rude (or even a sin) to refuse access to clean water to travelers. By the way, drinking wells were maintained both by cleaning debris and by dumping lime into the water once a year (it's a much more effective antiseptic than modern people think and not harmful in low dose water dilution). - People who had orchards planted at least one fruit tree outside the property perimeter (usually alongside the closest road or path) for travelers to pick fruits freely if they wanted. - Giving a free meal to a hungry traveler was quite common in Christian communities. This could vary from a small takeaway offering to actually inviting the man to sit at a table and sharing whatever you've got prepared for your family.

Many plants considered to be weeds these days would've been part of the staple diet,too. Not just fruit. Dandelions for example. Every part is edible. The roots can be roasted and ground into a coffee substitute (dandelion is in the same family as chicory), gors flowers steeped in water could make a wine or cordial, even the roots of bull rushes could add to a meal.

Also on the note of hard tac that's more of a ship-based food, not a traveler's food. Travelers typically used Manchet Bread made of flour, salt, yeast, water, eggs, and milk. Unlike modern fluffy loafs Manchet Bread is dense and has very little yeast used in its making; think of the density of a heavy cake but the flavor profile of bread.

Fun fact: to make salami you usually need black pepper, which was quite expensive at the time - because of this in the Tuscany region of Italy they made a type of salami with wild fennel instead (which was extremely common) in order to reduce costs. The cool thing is that fennel is rich in menthol, which is an anesthetic: that's when the winemakers figured out they could exploit that by serving this type of salami to their clients in order to mask the taste of wine and sell them lower quality wine at a higher price!

This actually gave me a great idea as a little quirk for my character. She should be planting these kinds of foods on the side of popular trails during short rests. If everyone brought a packet of seeds with them and planted say 3 a day on the side of the roads, everyone would benefit from it.

Some metal helms can double as pots. Characters can stir and eat with their daggers. Some WWII soldiers cook and ate out of their helmets and used knives.

I've brought myself a slow cooker as a makeshift cauldron for food. I've went mad with it that I started phrasing dune quotes about spice: "Thee who controls the spice, controls the universe"

A good alternative to garlic is Allium ursinum, wild garlic. It grows in many forests around all of Europe even today. Probably tasted much the same as today since it was never really cultivated properly. Basically a drop in replacement for garlic.

You have to realize there's a huge difference between eggs you buy at the supermarket and eggs from you backyard chickens. There's a protective layer on eggs that are often removed for supermarket eggs, and it ruins it when they're refrigerated. This is called the "cuticle". Fresh eggs from your backyard chickens dont need to be refrigerated. These eggs can last like two weeks, by the way. Not just two days. That would be very useful for a medieval adventurer!

Probably one of my favorite lines injecting realism into a book was in the first Wheel of Time book where the group is traveling and eating the same cold rations over and over again since they can't stop to make a proper camp. "I used to like cheese."

The ranger's apprentice series does many things really well, one of which is their travel/camp life shown in the books. Fantastic books.

Pemmican seems like a “later kind of thing” because it’s indigenous to North America—the name is literally a Cree word. Did medieval Europeans have something similar? I don’t know, but pemmican itself was entirely invented by Native American peoples, and later adopted by European fur traders and arctic explorers. There are a number of regional variations, but many include dried meat, tallow, and sometimes berries. Some versions contain no meat, but consist of corn, tallow, and fruit.