The Truth About The Dangers Of Medieval Fast Food

May 2024 · 2 minute read

What kinds of fast food did medieval diners enjoy? According to the Penn State University Center for Medieval Studies, meat pies and pasties — a folded-over, filled crust, like a small calzone — were popular; they were portable and easy to eat on the go, like a Big Mac. Bread was the mainstay of medieval diets, as it was inexpensive, kept for a while, and was made from readily available flour. Fast food consisted of lots of bread products, including hot cakes, pancakes, and wafers in addition to pies and pasties. Furthermore, historians have found evidence of regulations forbidding bakers to charge more than a penny to put a customer's meat into a pastry and bake it, making it even more of a bargain for people with little cash.

Another similarity between medieval fast food and modern fast food is the bad reputation with which these eateries were saddled. In medieval times, the cooks themselves who prepared and sold these foods were often seen as dirty and dishonest. Sources indicate that some cooks made food from spoiled sausage pork, rabbit, geese, and offal, reheated and sold days-old pasties on the verge of spoiling, and sold beef pasties as venison. Per Martha Carlin in her article "'What say you to a piece of beef and mustard?': The Evolution of Public Dining in Medieval and Tudor London," available via JSTOR, in William Langland's Middle English poem "Piers Plowman," cooks are listed as a group regularly punished by authorities because "they poison the people privily and oft."

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qL7Up56eZpOkunCCj25samhfqbWmedOrrK2gXZavsMHTZquhnV2Zrq%2BzxKuqZqeWYrqmsMierZqkXZuutMCMn6aonF8%3D