The Medieval Fast Food that time forgot

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i love the simplicity of this kind of videos. its literally one man, in period clothing, walking in the woods and talking about medieval life. its so endearing!

I love how this channel immerses you into the little things of medieval life!

This is what the History Channel should be like.

Watching this guy strolling through the woods and geeking out about medieval fast food is the biggest vibe

it's so nice to have just someone standing there and telling me about something, no 5 camera angles and peppy background music and stock footage <3 thank you MH

I am not a historian, but I am pretty sure decorations on pies started as a way for people to identify their dish. As in, “My pie is the one with the oak leaf.” To this day, I still know which one is Aunt Elizabeth’s.

My late husband would tell me that when he was a child in Hackney sharing a house with three related families the Sunday roast would be taken to the local cook shop where it would be cooked along with potatoes and rice in the same baking dish and then collected and brought back to the house so that everyone there could partake with the addition of vegetables that had been boiled on the range.

There’s an old nursery rhyme… “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man, bake me a cake as fast as you can. Prick it and pat it and mark it with ‘B’, and put it in the oven for baby and me.” Might be a clue as to who the pies were baked for 😊

As for how the cooks knew which pie belonged to which customer who had brought the ingredients: I'm German and both my grandparents from the east of Germany were born in the 19th century. Among what they left we found some little signs of porcelain with pointed ends with their family name engraved and we believe those were used to mark their ownership on breads or stollen (huge German Christmas cakes) they brought to ovens in a shop. Maybe the medieval English citizens had something similar though maybe with some other mark instead of a written name ( not every cook might have been able to read).

If I saw you walking around the woods I’d think you’re a wizard

It saddens me that medieval peoples would go their entire lives never experiencing the eXtreme nacho flavor of a single Dorito chip

"Baking fraud" is not a phrase I ever thought I would hear.

I believe that a lot of this is still culturally true around the world. Growing up, I'd spend the occasional summer at my grandparents' house in rural Guatemala, and you'd buy food and drink from vendors selling from carts or bags. Instead of going to a formal restaurant, you might go to a particular house that had converted its front room into an eating space for customers. Instead of going to a videogame arcade, a different house had set up a few gaming consoles in their garage, which had an entry fee just to watch others play, and then an additional fee to pay for a certain amount of time. I believe there were formal road names, but houses and areas were known by distinctive features. My grandparents' house, for example, was at the end of a T intersection and painted orange, so became a local reference point for directions. "Follow this road until you get to the orange house, then take a left, and we're having dinner at the 3rd house on the right" or something like that. It really highlights, maybe, how little day-to-day social interactions have changed beyond material wealth and technology. If you were to drop a medieval person into any major city today, they would probably take a lot of time adjusting. But if you dropped them into my grandparents' town, I think it would have taken very little time for them to adjust.

When I went to Cairo a few years ago, I visited a Baker who received all his neighbours loaves for baking each day and was paid a small amount for doing so. I believe each loaf had a small mark or was fashioned slightly differently indicating who it belonged to.

Gotta love the medieval Yelp review on the "dodgy cook shop."

I've bought food from someone like a food huckster in Istanbul. He had a grill on a little 4-wheeled cart, much like my grandmother used to port food at dinners. From this grill he made shish kebab, stuffing a bread like we are used to kebab in the west. It was actually very good, better than the hotel food. :o

It's interesting to see this and compare it with the "fast food" of Ancient Rome, particularly the similarities and differences. In Rome a lot of the fast food locations were built into the fronts of the apartments where people lived and tended to be big enough that people could come inside and buy, with counters that had heated pots built into them, almost like a modern deli.

I reckon people physically interacted a lot more back in the middle ages. If you have to walk to the cookshop, the baker and the alehouse to get a decent dinner then you are going to meet a lot more neighbours than ordering a meal online or going to a supermarket self-checkout.

i always feel so safe watching these videos, they’re like a break from normal life. It almost feels like i’m back in a simpler time