"Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are." – Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
Why Examine Medieval Culinary Botany?
What did it mean to eat in medieval Northern Europe? This is not a question about mere sustenance or rustic fare. It is a portal into a forgotten relationship between humans and the living world—a relationship written not just in recipes, but in hedgerows, kitchen gardens, and wild forests. The foods consumed and cultivated during this era reflect a worldview in which nature was not simply a backdrop but an active, sometimes unruly, participant in daily life. Modern palates may recoil at the thought of pottage thickened with ground acorns or bread laced with nettle, but these choices were neither accidental nor solely pragmatic. They reveal priorities, fears, and aspirations. To probe medieval culinary botany is to challenge our assumption that the past was tasteless or monotonous, and to question the orthodoxy that our current diets are necessarily superior.
What Plants Dominated the Medieval Northern European Table?
Bread, so often mythologized as the staff of life, was rarely made from pure wheat in the north. Barley, rye, oats, and even pulses—such as peas and beans—were ground into coarse flours. The historical record, including archaeological evidence of carbonized seeds and preserved pollen, shows that bread was frequently adulterated with wild plants. Goosefoot (Chenopodium album), sorrel (Rumex acetosa), and ground elder (Aegopodium podagraria) appear in both botanical remains and period herbals.
Why this botanical diversity? Some might imagine it was only desperation that led to such mixtures. Yet anecdotal accounts from monastic chronicles and household records hint at a different motivation: an ethos of thrift, yes, but also a culinary curiosity. The Benedictine Rule, for example, prescribed moderation in all things but encouraged the tending of herb gardens with both "useful and pleasing" plants. In practice, this meant that the medieval kitchen was as much a laboratory as a larder.
How Did Seasonality Shape Botanical Choices?
The northern climate imposed strict limits. Winter starved the land of green, while brief summers exploded with abundance. The medieval solution was ingenious. Cabbage and kale—robust, frost-hardy, and endlessly variable—were the backbone of kitchen gardens. Leeks and onions stored well, while root vegetables like parsnips and turnips were buried in sand or cellars.
But here is where the evidence becomes more textured. Archaeobotanical studies of cesspits and latrine soils in medieval cities have revealed a surprising frequency of wild greens and foraged berries—items rarely mentioned in written menus. This suggests that, far from being the preserve of the poor, wild foods persisted in the diets of all classes. One might speculate that this reliance on the uncultivated was not simply a matter of necessity, but of taste and tradition.
Were Spices and Exotics Truly Absent?
The modern mind conjures the Middle Ages as an age of blandness, but this is a half-truth. Imported spices—pepper, cinnamon, cloves—were rare and costly, yet not wholly absent from the tables of the well-to-do. However, the native botanical palette provided its own pungency. Horseradish, mustard seeds, juniper berries, and wild garlic were pressed into service for both preservation and flavor. Anecdotal descriptions in surviving recipe collections, such as the 14th-century "Forme of Cury," detail how cooks layered sharp herbs and roots to create complexity in dishes otherwise lacking in animal fats or sugars.
Researchers hypothesize that the interplay between native herbs and occasional exotics was more deliberate than we assume. Medieval cooks were neither unsophisticated nor unadventurous; rather, they worked within a framework of available resources and adapted with remarkable creativity.
What Role Did Gardens Play in Culinary Botany?
The medieval garden was not a tidy rectangle of monocultures. Instead, it was a riot of intermingled species—culinary, medicinal, and ornamental plants all jostling for space. The walled monastic garden is the best-documented example, but manor houses and peasant cottages alike cultivated patches of chives, parsley, fennel, and savory.
Consider the tale of Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century abbess and polymath, who wrote extensively about the spiritual and physical properties of plants. She advocated for the use of spelt, a hulled wheat, as the basis for bread, arguing from both health and theological standpoints. Her recommendations, while shaped by religious belief, were grounded in careful observation of what flourished in the Rhineland climate. This anecdotal evidence complicates the notion that medieval plant choices were dictated solely by ignorance or scarcity.
How Did Culinary Botany Reflect Broader Worldviews?
Every bite of medieval food was freighted with meaning. The choice to include wild herbs in a stew, or to sweeten a tart with honey and crabapples, was not just pragmatic. It reflected a worldview in which health, spirituality, and the rhythms of nature were inextricably linked. Humoral theory—the dominant medical paradigm—held that each plant had a "temperature" and could balance bodily fluids. Cooks, therefore, selected ingredients with an eye toward harmony, not just hunger.
This might suggest that modern dichotomies between food and medicine, cultivated and wild, are recent inventions. In the medieval mind, such distinctions were porous at best.
What Lingers from This Botanical Heritage?
To wander through a northern European hedgerow today is to walk among ghosts. Nettles, sorrel, elderflower—these plants once fed entire communities, and their traces linger in folk recipes and seasonal festivals. Yet the industrialization of agriculture and the global homogenization of diets have rendered much of this botanical knowledge obsolete, or at best, quaint.
The historical and anecdotal record insists on a final challenge: What wisdom have we lost by severing ourselves from the unruly, flavorful, and adaptive botanical world of our medieval ancestors?