By Lady Eulalia de Ravenfeld
I was thinking the other day about approaching food and eating from a more authentic perspective, and that led me to thinking about eating specifically in persona. I came up with some questions that you could ask yourself to get you started. These are deliberately broad, somewhat vague, and definitely open-ended. Some require a fairly advanced level of knowledge, others do not; all require a good sense of your persona. If you don't have a very specific persona, thinking about these from a wide view is still quite informative -- even if all you do is compare medieval Europe with modern America (or Canada, or Australia, or anywhere), you'll still see how much we've changed.
When your persona goes through a day, when and what do you eat? Do you have breakfast? When? What is it? How many meals do you eat in a day?
What are the foods that your persona ate every day? Never ate?
What kinds of drinks would you have had? Did you drink ale at every meal? Abstain from alcohol?
What determines what you eat now? What factors might have historically? (Ethics/religion, availability, personal preference.)
When you go to the grocery store now, what do you buy even if you don't have a plan for it? What has to be in the cupboard or in the refrigerator? What are some medieval equivalents, especially onces that today we don't use as much? (Some examples include almonds/almond milk, verjuice, and wheat starch.)
Our tastes vs period tastes: how should food taste to a historical person?
Available cooking technology: think about the limitations posed by hearth-cooking, as well as the opportunities.
How is eating different when you can't have grapes or March or strawberries in October? (Having been eating locally/seasonally for a few years now, I can tell you: you miss them. Also food tastes better when you've been waiting for it for a year.)
Consider your place and time. Much of our talk about cooking medievally focuses on time (for obvious reasons), and place in the broadest sense (New World vs Old World). But what would have been the reality for your persona? Cucumbers may be period, but would you have ever seen one if you lived in 9th century Wales?
Are there surviving recipes from your time period and culture? How about archeological evidence? Even if you haven't tried to recreate any recipes, do you at least have a sense of what they are like?
How has the way we eat, not just what we eat, changed? (This covers several of the other questions, too.)
What were the important attributes of a particular food for your persona? For example, think about the importance of color in a lot of the surviving recipe collections of the High Middle Ages -- imagine what eating is like if you add food coloring to nearly everything.
What foods do you buy and what foods do you make? Do you buy ale and bread?
What kinds of spices would you eat? Did you have sugar? Was it expensive?
What kinds of game and fish were eaten regularly that we eat either rarely or never now? Have you (a modern person) ever tried venison, or boar? Do you want to?
© Laurel Black