Adamson - Food in Medieval Times

FOOD IN MEDIEVAL TIMES
made from the grape juice of the first pressing. For the third pressing
water was added to the crushed grapes, which made the resulting wine
less strong, and also less expensive. Unlike the Romans, who stored
their wine in jars, medieval Europeans generally used wooden barrels.
Since wine did not age well, it was usually drunk young, white wine in
particular. Red wine containing not just the juice but also the skin of
the grapes aged better and was higher priced. With glass being a lux-
ury material in the Middle Ages, and the technique of corking still un-
known, wine bottles did not yet exist then. Wine was drawn from
barrels as needed. Much is written in medieval cookbooks and house-
hold manuals about salvaging wine that has turned to vinegar or oth-
erwise gone bad, which suggests that the storage of wine was far from
ideal. Regions where wine was the common drink for both the elite
and the masses (albeit of a lower quality) were the Iberian Peninsula,
France, and Italy. Despite the fact that in England ale played such a
dominant role, vast quantities of wine were also imported, mostly
from Gascony, in southwestern France; some wine was produced lo-
cally as well. Among the towns that rose to prominence in the me-
dieval wine trade were La Rochelle on the French Atlantic coast,
Bruges and Antwerp in the Low Countries, and Malvasia on the
Mediterranean island of Crete, after which the famous wine malmsey
was named. Especially sought after by discerning European consumers
were French wines from Beaune, near Dijon, and the Bordeaux re-
gion, German wines from the Rhine and Moselle, and from Alsace,
Italian wines from Rivoglio and Sicily, and a variety of sweet Spanish
and Greek wines.
In the Middle Ages wine was drunk either pure or mixed with water,
the latter form being recommended by physicians. Spiced or mulled
wines were also consumed at luxurious meals, but usually in small
quantities and for medicinal purposes, namely at the beginning to
“open” the stomach, or at the end as an aid to digestion. There were
wines infused with sage, roses, or cloves, but the most famous, hip-
pocras and claret, contained complex blends of powdered spices that
merchants even sold ready-made. Selections of the spices ginger, cin-
namon, grains of paradise, pepper, galingale, nutmeg, cloves, mace,
spikenard, and sugar all figure in the different medieval recipes for hip-
pocras. The claret of the Middle Ages, unlike its modern namesake,
which is simply a type of red wine, was a heavily spiced red or white
wine whose characteristic flavor was achieved by pouring the wine
over a bag containing powdered spices, some of which were identical
with the hippocras spices. Others added just to claret were fennel,
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