MEDIEVAL IRISHMEN DRANK 14 PINTS OF BEER A DAY

And other wild news from the front line of food history, in an exclusive interview with Dr Eleanor Barnett

One of the first lessons I learned making history TV shows is that one of the two things* that excite viewers the most is learning what people ate in the past. The urge to fill our bellies is a great historical constant; what we eat, how we prepare it and how we serve it provides a reliably fascinating point of comparison between our own age and those gone by.

For that reason I am delighted to bring you today an interview with Dr Eleanor Barnett, one of the UK’s leading food historians, as well as one of the most accomplished communicators of academic research to a wide popular audience.

For several years Eleanor has been running an Instagram account called @historyeats, which is a glorious trove of food history facts, curated with wit, wisdom and style. Now she has written her first book, Leftovers: A History of Food Waste and Preservation, which explores ‘the many ingenious ways in which our ancestors sought to extend the life of food through preservation, the culinary reuse of leftovers and the recycling of food scraps.’

The book is out this week and I highly recommend it. To give you a taste (yes, that’s a pun), here’s a conversation I had with Eleanor this week.

I learned a lot. I hope you will, too.

Dan

*The second reliably fascinating subject for TV history is toilets of yore. What goes in must come out.

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DJ: When people think about eating in the Middle Ages, the classic image is a greasy-bearded king like John or Henry VIII gnawing on a chicken drumstick at a feast then hurling the bone over his shoulder. Does this feel in any way characteristic of the way people approached food waste in pre-modern times?

EB: Oh yes! Henry VIII’s feasts were absolutely bonkers, with a huge array of meat dishes, elaborate pies decorated with the gilded carcasses and feathers of birds to advertise their contents, and expensive sweet-treats. For one of these banquets, Henry’s leading statesman Thomas Wolsey commissioned an entire sugar chessboard complete with moving pieces.

But a religious mindset kept this wastefulness in check - to a certain extent. Preachers told their parishioners of the parable of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, in which, after Jesus had miraculously fed the vast crowd with just five loaves and two fish, he instructed his disciples to ‘gather the pieces that are left over’ so ‘nothing be wasted’.

DJ: The menus of medieval and Tudor coronation banquets - or Christmas feasts - seem impossible for even a vast gathering of people to have eaten. Was there a social cachet to being able to afford more food than your guests could throw down their gullets? Would leftovers have been scraps for the servants and dogs? Do we even know?

EB: Certainly the rich were showing off with these elaborate feasts. Food was as much a part of the entertainment as the dancers and musicians, and what you ate was indicative of your social status (white meats, especially capon, for the wealthiest - preserved salted fish for the poor).

But large estates had ways of making sure food didn’t go to waste. In King Henry VIII’s household, officers of the almonry were employed ‘upon pain of imprisonment’ to collect leftovers and to distribute them to the poor, with punishments for those at court who didn’t comply too.

Workers in the various food industries in wealthy households would also have received scraps as part of their wages, like the leftover meat juices… yum! And dogs and cats would have helped to clean anything else up.

DJ: Do you think it’s possible for us, living in an age where food preservation, processing and farming methods mean we’re basically divorced from seasonal eating - or even the notion of lean periods of the year - to ever get our minds inside what it must have been like for people living before, like… the mid-twentieth century?

EB: We all live such busy lives too. I spend most of my time thinking about food, and even I fail to pause to reflect when I order a takeaway at the end of a long day that the tomatoes are native to the Americas and were likely imported from the Netherlands, the lamb came all the way from New Zealand, and the green beans were grown in Kenya….

Our food is now often produced far from home and flown in to avoid the natural seasonal bouts of scarcity. But I hope that in reflecting on the past, Leftovers inspires people to think more about where their food comes from and the huge amounts of energy that goes into bringing it from farm to fork – perhaps then we will all waste a little less of it.

DJ: Historical meme-busting/confirming time: do the English drink vast quantities of beer because it was a way of purifying water, or is that just a myth? 

EB: A recent study in Ireland concluded that medieval workers drank up to 14 pints of beer a day. And that beer wasn’t even particularly weak, at around 5%. This is certainly on the higher side – other research suggests English labourers consumed between 2 and 8 pints each day.