What did people eat in the Middle Ages?
Medieval cuisine is as fascinating as it is bewildering. Between lavish, spice-filled banquets and frugal peasant meals, we often get lost in idealized images. However, thanks to culinary manuscripts, accounting archives, archaeological excavations, and period treatises, we can now reliably reconstruct the foods consumed in the Middle Ages, between the 13th and 15th centuries.
Here is a summary of medieval eating practices, focusing on France and neighboring regions.
A cuisine based on grain
As in Antiquity, the foundation of medieval alimentation remained bread and cereals. Wheat was reserved for the wealthy and cities, while the countryside primarily consumed rye, barley, oats, or buckwheat, depending on the region.
Cereals were consumed in the form of bread (brown bread, black bread, white bread, or mixed-grain bread), porridges, thick pancakes, flans, or flour used to thicken sauces. White bread remained a luxury reserved for nobles and clerics.
Legumes and garden vegetables
Peas, fava beans, lentils, chickpeas, and some types of beans (especially climbing beans, imported from Spain) were common. They were used in soups, purees, or stews.
Medieval kitchen gardens provided simple but nutritious vegetables year-round: cabbage, turnips, leeks, ancient carrots, parsnips, onions, garlic. Beet greens, watercress, nettles, and other leafy greens were also consumed.
Meat: abundant or rare depending on status
Nobles consumed a lot of meat, often in the context of banquets or codified meals: game (deer, wild boar, hare, rabbit), noble poultry (swan, peacock, heron), and farmed meats like beef, mutton, lamb, and especially pork.
The common people made do with pork, barnyard poultry, or offal. Meat was often salted, smoked, or stewed in a cauldron. Fasting days imposed by the Church prohibited meat several days a week: on these days, fish, eggs, or dairy products were consumed.
WILD BOAR STEW WITH LENTILS, RED WINE & DRIED BLUEBERRIES / Medieval cuisine
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Cured meats and preservation techniques
Cured meats were very present in peasant and urban cuisine. Smoked bacon, black pudding, sausages, andouilles, pâtés, and meats preserved in their own fat were common. Salting, drying, and smoking allowed meat to be preserved for several months. These products were also incorporated into soups and stews to enrich them.
Dairy products: widely available, but variable
Milk was rarely drunk as is, but transformed into curdled milk, fresh cheese, or aged cheeses. Butter was mainly consumed in northern regions, cream in some noble recipes, and whey was used in soups.
Dairy products played an important role in the lean diets prescribed by the Church.
Fruits and natural sweets
Apples, pears, plums, cherries, blackberries, walnuts, chestnuts, and hazelnuts were common. Fruits could be eaten raw, dried, or incorporated into savory-sweet dishes.
Cane sugar was a luxury imported product, reserved for the aristocracy. Honey was more common and used for sweetening, preserving, or flavoring. Jams were often medicinal in origin (electuaries), or prepared in thick syrups.
Spices: taste and prestige
Medieval noble cuisine was renowned for its generous use of spices: pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, grains of paradise, nutmeg… They were expensive and symbolized wealth and refinement.
These spices were used in sauces, cauldron-cooked stews, and even porridges. The desired taste was often sweet and sour, with the use of verjuice, vinegar, acidic fruit juices, or herbs like parsley, sage, marjoram, or hyssop.
Cauldron cooking: heart of the home
In all social strata, the cauldron was the central utensil. Suspended in the hearth, placed on a tripod, or directly on the embers, it allowed almost all daily dishes to be cooked.
It was used to prepare:
— thick soups, potages, porridges
— meat, vegetable, and legume stews
— thick sauces based on bread and spices
— dishes simmered for several hours
Cooking was done over a bed of embers, without direct flame, at around 95 °C. It was a cuisine of patience, slowness, but also great efficiency: few utensils, lots of flavor, and uniform cooking.
The cauldron is associated with warmth, survival, and sharing.
Bread and soup: pillars of the diet
Some peasant recipes allowed bread to be baked over embers, directly in the cauldron, by placing the dough on a bed of straw or leaves. The omnipresent bread was often dipped in soups or stews. For the most modest, a meal sometimes consisted only of a slice of black bread dipped in a pottage.
Soup, a generic term, referred to any hot liquid containing bread, vegetables, grains, or leftovers. It was the most common dish, shared daily around the cauldron.
Drinks: wine, beer, cider, mead
Wine was widely consumed, even diluted with water or boiled. The common people primarily drank cervoise, beer (unhopped), cider, or mead. Herbal infusions were also found, and sometimes fermented broths.
Water was rarely drunk alone, often mixed with other ingredients to avoid contamination.
A codified, rustic, and sophisticated cuisine
Medieval cuisine was structured by the seasons, religious prohibitions, social statuses, but also by a great capacity for adaptation. Noble cooking manuscripts reveal an inventive, refined, and flavorful cuisine. But popular cuisine, more sober, showed great creativity in using leftovers.
Cauldron cooking was one of the cornerstones of this culinary culture: simple, but generous.
🔥 Want to rediscover authentic wood-fired cooking?
The cauldron has always been at the heart of convivial meals and shared festive moments.
Today, you can easily recreate this experience at home, whether in the wilderness or in your garden.
✔️ Ideal for stews
✔️ Perfect for wood fires
✔️ Robust and durable
To go further
→ Our guide to choosing your cast iron cauldron
→ How to manage fire for slow, controlled cooking
→ Complete guide to maintaining your cast iron cauldron
→Cauldron cooking: A practice that spans centuries
👉 Discover your cauldron now and switch to more authentic cooking.
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To learn more:
– Le Viandier de Taillevent (14th century), ed. T. Scully
– Le Ménagier de Paris (1393), ed. Brereton & Ferrier
– Odile Redon et al., La cuisine au Moyen Âge, ed. Stock
– Bruno Lemesle, « Le feu et la cuisine domestique au Moyen Âge », in Archéologie Médiévale, 2002
– Jacques Thirion, Le Chaudron et l’Alambic, CNRS