I always remind myself that way back then .... if you happened to cut yourself badly, there was a high likelihood that you could lose a limb or die from infection. They had treatments for stuff and they could be careful but all you needed was a chance infection (that is easily protected against today) and you could end up severely affecting your life or dying.
76Even just a prick from a thorn while outside could give you tetanus, which was a super shitty way to die. People’s muscles spasmed so hard they could literally break their own bones.
Be sure to get your booster shot every 10 years!
39That does sound rather unpleasant
4RIP adhd people
1
I spent the next three years in a POW camp, forced to subsist on a thin stew made of fish, vegetables, prawns, coconut milk, and four kinds of rice. I came close to madness trying to find it here in the States, but they just can't get the spices right.
60Once during prohibition I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.
-- W. C. Fields
53
I mean they had a lot more than that if Tasting History has taught me anything.
Granted very little of it was anything like what we think of today in terms of your typical meal. Ketchup started as a fish sauce from SE Asia and the French some the fuck how figured out how to burn a mead so bad the whole thing is charred, and decided to label it high cuisine anyways.
48I think a lot of foods were invented by accident. Bread and beer, for example, can be made if you leave a gruel uncovered for a while. (And then heat it, for bread.) If you crush grapes and leave them for a while you'll get wine, in the right conditions.
Barbecue, I maintain, is a natural phenomenon. Animals overcome by fumes in their dens by forest fires and then cooked by the smoldering embers is probably the first time our species tasted that delicacy.
17I was thinking someone dropped a piece of meat into the fire by accident.
4
When they say wine they don't mean what you're thinking. When they say bread they definitely don't mean what you're thinking and I'd hate to think what the cheese was like.
People really don't have a grasp of how much effort goes into modern food production to make it the quality that it is.
It's fairly obvious when you think about it, there's a lot of documented evidence of people living on ships surviving almost entirely on beer. If that was modern beer they'd all be incapable of operating the ship after about 2 days, dead shortly after from alcohol poisoning, clearly that didn't happen.
43Ive known alcoholics that drank 12-24 packs daily and still were perfectly functional. This is 4-5% abv beer, and they did all of the normal activities you would expect. If you didnt know they had a disease/addiction, you likely would never have noticed how much they had to drink that day. They easily consumed 2-3000 calories/day just from beer.
Human tolerance for alcohol is way, more adaptable than youre implying.
22I don't know about the wine or cheese but I have to disagree with you on the bread thing.
There are people that make multigrain, wholegrain, sourdough, etc bread based on medieval recipes and while they're not wonderbread they're also not unrecognizable as bread to a modern person and they're not terrible either. There are even people who buy the grains and stone grind it themselves to make it more authentic.
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I expect medieval bread that goes to peasants to be hard enough to work as hammers. The wine would probably be half water. The cheese, funnily enough, would probably be the best tasting thing in the home. We're talking about cheese that is supposed to last months on end without refrigeration. A wandering cockroach that gets to the cheese might be some extra seasoning for the peasant, too.
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7Wine that has less than 60% water is just brandy.
If peasants were given brandy, sign me up. I'll have it with cake, thanks.
-1You know they meant watering down wine.
2
the cheese wasn’t even individually wrapped
26And there was a chance your bread was moldy. But, hey, get the right kind of mold, and you get to start accusing people of witchcraft.
And the wine would be safe, but possibly heavily watered down to keep a barrel for longer.
20It's highly unlikely the witchcraft accusations were caused by ergotism.
It's kinda crazy how easily the ergot theory took over. For 200 years, it was widely accepted that it was a case of mass hysteria, moral panic, and religious extremism. Then someone hypothesized it could be ergotism because the reported symptoms are similar.
And people immediately took it as a fact, because a clear, single cause is much easier to explain.
Y'know, like how they blamed the "witches" for anything bad?
Why didn't anyone else develop ergotism? If their source of rye was contaminated, more people would have fallen ill.
Why did it only affect a handful of adolescent girls, who happened to be friends?
Why did another town 20 miles away have more accusations of witchcraft around the same time?
Why didn't they recognize the symptoms at the time? St Anthony's Fire was well-documented and treatable since the Middle Ages.
25The wine may have been spiced with mercury to make it healthier
7
The bread was full of sand and grit and it would wear down your teeth to nubs by 25 tho...
17To be fair, that sounds like fast food.
10
Add a piece of fish and it's perfect.
9Fish cooked with sorrel and salt. But not as much salt as modern cooks use.
And then some fruits, berries, or veggies if they were in season.
4
Is people having the phone in their social media profile pic a deliberately-shit thing like when Youtubers are holding their tiny clip-on mic?
5Old school selfie style, from before screen facing cameras.
6
That person should try to eat a medieval peasant bread sometime. It was made from a coarse meal, not refined flour. It wasn't leavened. And it had zero salt inside. It also had sand in it. The taste of that shit is god awful and it destroys your teeth.
4It wasn’t leavened.
What're you basing that off of? The only reason you'd make a flatbread is if you couldn't cobble together some sort of oven/stove communally. Otherwise sourdough is a no brainer even with sandy rye flour.
13They also had yeast that they could get from the local brewer.
And since bread was highly regulated, it was generally made by a trained baker, who used the highest quality flour they could get... which was still often very coarsely ground with the occasional bit of sand from the grindstones.
But it was leavened, and had salt, because everyone could get salt. The stuff was everywhere. And still is.
7
Yeah, it was the lack of air conditioning and indoor plumbing that was the real problem. Oh into the disease. So much goddamn disease.
4@nifty A post appeared on Mastodon via federation from Lemmy where it originally is a screenshot from Twitter so basically a stolen joke. Great.
-1But that’s the nature of memes, isn’t it? I also try to attribute as best as possible
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