Last week I began a series discussing various aspects of life in Northern Europe during the Iron Age. We talked about farming technology, grains, and vegetables. Today, I’d like to continue our series by diving into a discussion of fruits, spices, and cooking. All of the fruits eaten during the Iron Age would have been only available seasonally. Fruit trees have been cultivated since prehistoric times in many parts of the world, with domestic species spreading quickly to regions that were capable of growing them. The apple, pear, cherry, plum, elderberry, medlar, rowan, and hawthorn have been present in Northern Europe since prehistorical times, and several of them are native to the region. The fruits of the elderberry, rowan, and hawthorn trees usually undergo some kind of processing prior to consumption, such as making them into jams. All the other tree fruits may be eaten raw. Additionally, the Ancient Greeks and Romans had access to the peach, apricot, fig, and almond, all of which may have found their way to Northern European rare instances. Other fruits that would have been gathered or grown include the cranberry, red currant, black currant, gooseberry, lingonberry, and bilberry. Central Europe is capable of producing grapes, which were introduced by the Romans. Although olives can’t grow in Northern Europe, preserved olives and olive oil would have been commercially available through trade with the Mediterranean.
Nuts and seeds were historically an important source of food to Europeans. The hazelnut, walnut, chestnut, beechnut, pine seed, and acorn were all eaten supplementally in the Iron Age, but may have been primary sources of nutrition in times of famine. Nuts can be ground into flour and baked, as with grain-based flours, possibly even predating grain flours in Europe. Mushrooms would have also been a commonly eaten forage, including the button, chanterelle, burgundy, chestnut, lion’s mane, penny bun, giant puffball, wood blewit, morel, and truffle, and many more varieties of mushrooms.
Though Northern Europeans enjoyed many types of fruits and nuts during the Iron Age, the flavor additives available to them were more limited. Some modern herbs are native to the Mediterranean and were quickly spread to farming populations in Northern Europe, while others were already endemic to the north. Herbs and spices available in Europe during the Iron Age include sage, mint, thyme, bay laurel, oregano, rosemary, savory, hyssop, parsley, fennel, dill, cumin, caraway, coriander, celery, horseradish, lemon balm, lavender, chervil, cicely, lovage, rue, tarragon, mustard, onions, garlic, chamomile, and meadowsweet. Notice that peppers, which feature so prominently in modern cuisine, are wholly absent from the list. Additionally, many of these herbs are closely related species (many are in the carrot family) and have similar flavors. Barberry and juniper berries would have also been used as flavor additives. Despite the possible availability of all of these herbs and spices in Northern Europe, the functional spice cabinet of the time would have been limited to a few garden plants and what could be found in the wild.
As mentioned in last week’s post, grains would have been the primary source of calories for ancient Europeans. Vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, and meat would have all been eaten supplementally. The three most common ways to eat grains in Northern Europe were as breads, in soups, or in alcohol. There are innumerable varieties of breads, but a few basic forms. A dough may be formed from flour, water, and salt. If that mixture is rolled and baked immediately, it produces a flatbread. Flatbreads would have been the first form of breads and remained a popular and quick food through the Iron Age. If that dough is left to sit rather than being immediately baked, yeast from the environment will colonize the dough and cause it to rise. Breads that contain wild yeast (obtained from the environment) form sourdoughs when baked. If domestic yeast is added to the dough, it produces what we think of as a traditional bread. Yeasts would have been domesticated over time by the keeping of wild yeast colonies for making bread (sourdough starter) or beer (barm). Breads often served an accompanying role in a meal, such as being used as a sop to absorb soup before eating.
Soups were an important part of Iron Age cuisine because they were easy to prepare, kept well, and could be created from a variety of ingredients, often whatever was on hand. One of earliest methods to prepare a soup was to heat stones in a fire, then drop them into a leather bag filled with water. The rocks would boil the water in the bag, and then ingredients could be added. This ancient method of cooking is probably the source for the “rock soup” folktale that is present in many cultures. The base of the soup was commonly a hulled grain that would be boiled until soft. Alone, a soup of boiled grain is called a porridge. The addition of vegetables and possibly meat makes it a type of soup known as a pottage. Both porridges and pottages were important staples through the centuries. As iron became more common, cauldrons were used more often as a cooking vessel.
Drinking alcohol is ethanol, a byproduct formed when yeast ferment sugars. Anything with carbohydrates or sugar may be fermented to produce alcohol. In Europe, the traditional types of alcohols were wine, cider, and beer. Fruit skins naturally contain wild yeast and since the fruit contains high amounts of sugar, fermentation is fairly straightforward. The fruit is smashed into a mash and the juice is drawn off. The juice is then allowed to ferment until alcohol is produced. This process is essentially the same for both wine and cider. In beer production, the grain must first be germinated to begin the breakdown of carbohydrates in the endosperm. Essentially, the seed is encouraged to start growing. Germination is halted by the malting process, when the grain is dried at high temperatures. The malt is then mixed with water to create a mash, in which the grain will continue to break down until a sugary liquid called “wort” is produced. The wort is boiled with flavor additives (such as hops or meadowsweet), then the sugary solution is allowed to ferment into beer. The ethanol content in ancient beverages were likely quite low compared to today. Freezing an alcoholic beverage and removing the ice was one ancient method of increasing the alcohol percentage in a beverage, but true distillation wasn’t widespread until long after the Iron Age.
It’s a common misconception that humans were immune to the dangers of contaminated water a few thousand years ago. Throughout recorded history, it has been generally understood that it is unsafe to drink water from a natural body of water. Ancient societies used springs, wells, and cisterns to gain access to clean drinking water, but the primary form of water sanitation was mixing with alcohol. The ethanol in alcoholic beverages kills any microorganisms in water that might otherwise harm humans. Mixed wine with water was a common beverage in ancient Mediterranean societies for this reason. Similarly, a beverage called “small beer” was popular for its low alcohol content and the grain that remained suspended in the solution. Small beer and diluted wine were given to children and consumed by all members of society at any time of the day.
Another staple meal worth mentioning are pies. Pies are basically any filled pastry and were an easy way to make meals portable. Pastry dough is made of flour, some kind of fat, and salt. The dough is then filled with vegetables, meats, fruit, nuts, cheese, or eggs and baked. The resulting creation is some kind of pie, a food form that has been enjoyed since the Neolithic. The earliest known pies were a kind of galette filled with honey, but it wasn’t long before people were filling pastry crust with anything and everything.
As a brief conclusion to this week’s post, I’d like to point out foods that would not have been available in Northern Europe in the Iron Age. Black and white pepper would have been available only to the extremely rich, and other peppers (chili, bell, cayenne, etc.) would have been wholly unavailable. Potatoes, tomatoes, squashes, and bananas were unknown before the colonization of the Americas. Blueberries, pecans, maize, rice, peanuts, vanilla, chocolate, maple syrup, tobacco, and coffee are all New World products as well. Basil is from Southeast Asia, and wouldn’t have been found in Europe. As to fiber crops, there’s a slim chance that cotton fabrics would have been available to the rich of Northern Europe. Cotton was grown in Persia in the greatest antiquity, but was later grown in Egypt as well. That being said, it isn’t really attested even as an imported product until the Middle Ages. Sugar would have been impossible to find in Europe until the 15th century. As the above list of products are so important and ubiquitous in our modern world, it can be easy to anachronistically plant them into a story of the past. Even the great J.R.R. Tolkien included potatoes in Middle Earth, which was supposedly a new mythology for Northern Europe. It’s an easy mistake to make, but half the fun of writing about the past is immersing the reader in a world that is similar and yet alien to our own.