Medieval food: How healthy was it?

Imagine in the distant future, a historian recreates McDonald’s burgers and fries with fascination.

You know someone's mad flexing when they show you their decked out spice box

fun fact about diabetes, in my dad's hometown in north africa they would have you pee outside and if ants came to your urine (because of the sugar) that would be a sign you had diabetes

Most people would take weapons and technology with them if they could go back in time with a time machine, instead you can just take your spice rack with you and become the most powerful person in medieval times.

When my Dad was a teenager in the 50s he worked in a butcher shop. He told me there was an old lady that would come in and get the oxtail. The butcher would give it to her because it was something he would usually throw away because nobody wanted it. Oxtail was regarded as poor people's food in that place and time. Now oxtail costs more than many cuts of beef. Funny how that works.

That lady is so pleasant. I could listen to her all day.

Their interaction is so lovely to watch. She seems shy but he is so excited about her knowledge and steps aside to let us see how awesome she is

Actually, the fact that higher class food increasingly tastes like Christmas makes a lot of sense. Christmas is one of, if not the, biggest feast of the year, so you would use the finest ingredients you could get. Honestly even today making a fruitcake, for example, is relatively expensive, with all the spices, nuts, dried and candied fruit, and alcohol.

When I was a kid we were so poor we raised most of what we ate. We had fruit trees and a big garden. We raised chickens for eggs and rabbits for meat. We canned and froze enough to get us through the winter. At 54 I am in a good place financially but I cant afford to eat like I did as a kid. Now it is called "local organic" produce and "organic free range" rabbit. Too rich for me as a grown man. Go figure. I still love me some beans and potatoes though!

This channel is such a hidden gem, thanks youtube!

I knew about tasting urine for diabetes. But here’s a new one, my youngest sister diagnosed her diabetes because she had been urinating frequently at night. She went wilderness camping and had to keep relieving herself at night on a bush to the edge of the campsite. She noticed the next day that honey bees were all over it! Other bushes of the same sort were bee free. As an experiment, she poured urine on another kind of bush, and within 10 minutes, the bees arrived. When she went to the doctor, he thought it was just hilarious, but he tested her and sure enough, she had diabetes!

Ooooh those good ol' days. They had Burger King and Burger Knight.

We have a saying in Germany that literally translates "To give away the spoon." It actually means to die. And it refers back to the custom of having your personal cutlery for a lifetime. Great channel and great series about medieval food!

Medieval celebrity chef to his kitchen-hands: "The dish thou hast prepared is indubitably under-cooked."

I think it's awesome to think that someone like me (a young lower middle class bloke) has a pantry, spice collection and book collection that would make any medieval king drop their jaw.

It kind of amuses me to think about how precious spices were back then. There's always the quote floating around about how you could blow someone's mind from the olden days by showing them a cellphone, or something like that. But I think what would stagger them even more would be to take them to any local supermarket and show them the spice aisle. You could buy literal pounds of spices for a pittance, and get them whenever you want, rather than having to fork over tons of gold and wait for them to be painstakingly caravnned in from distant lands.

The idea that there were medieval celebrity chefs is so wild to me but absolutely makes sense lol

I’m really impressed by the historian’s knowledge of Czech glass. I didn’t think it was that well known outside of our country.

What a beautiful irony that it was a point of pride for a knight or a small lord to have a spice chest in their kitchen full of expensive and exotic spices, all procured through special trade or crusade to elevate the flavors in your daily food to new heights... ... and in truth, the lower "peasant" class has figured out how to make a meal 3 times tastier than yours on cheap ingredients native to the region without having to take a single step away from their town or farm.

Lord Denetbor makes medieval cooking even more interesting!