Eat Like a Medieval Scottish Peasant: Un Menu du Jour

When folk like ourselves think back on Scotland’s sometimes squalid, often brutish medieval past, we don’t normally consider what people were eating at the time.

Back in the days of the 10th century, an errant leader would simply have been disemboweled with a rusty fork. Much has changed since then; our methods of resolving political disagreements one example. Our diet is another. When folk like ourselves think back on Scotland’s sometimes squalid, often brutish medieval past, we don’t normally consider what people were eating at the time.

A survey by deals website Groupon suggests that Scots’ favourite meal is an old-fashioned Sunday Roast. However, what we understand as a Roast was only possible from the end of the 16th-century onwards after potatoes arrived in Europe on Spanish ships sailing from newly-colonized South America.

This, along with the fact that consuming beef and lamb was prohibitively costly for those lacking royal lineage, meant that normal folk was not having roast dinners in Scotland until at least the late Renaissance. So, what did we eat? Below is a guide on how to create a truly classic medieval Scottish set menu for yourself and your family.

L’apéritif

In France it is traditional to take a drink — normally alcoholic — before a meal, to stimulate companionship and appetite. In Scotland, the obvious choice would be whisky. But we’re talking about the 10th century here, and whisky is another modern staple which was not available when the Scottish nation blossomed into life north of the River Forth as the 9th century Kingdom of Alba. The first written record of whisky (or uisge beatha in Gaelic, meaning ‘water of life’) in Scotland is from 1495, when King James IV ordered Friar John Cor to make 1,500 bottles of the stuff. How dining partners began meals back in the 10th-century one can only imagine.

Entreé

Pottage

Pottage is a simple soup or stew made from vegetables and occasionally meat scraps. It was popular in medieval times as it only used vegetables native to Scotland, which you could grow outside your house…