What it was like to visit a Medieval Tavern

While a medieval tavern in a fantasy game  might be where you'd go to

receive a quest from a hooded stranger in the corner, in real life

it was where you went to gamble, drink, and eat perhaps something like this bowl of beef pottage known as bokenade.

So thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video is we visit a medieval tavern

this time on Tasting History.

So if you ever find yourself in the late medieval period and you are in need of food and drink

you better find yourself an inn, tavern or ale house.

Now all three of those are not exactly synonymous and we'll talk about how they're different a little bit later but  

in general you should be able to go to any of  them and get a drink and probably some food.  

Now depending on the quality of the establishment  you might just be getting some bread and cheese  

but if it's a reputable tavern you should be  able to get a bowl of pottage or stew. 

Now some of these places might have what today is called  a hunter's pot or perpetual stew going.

And this is the concept of always having a cauldron of  of stew or pottage going at all times basically  

you would take a bowl from it and then replace the ingredients that you just took out so it's always replenishing itself.

Even today there are places that still practice this.

There's a place in Japan who has been serving the same broth since 1945

and in Perpignan France they served the same stew from the 15th century all the way up until World War II

when they couldn't get the right ingredients.

And in the Middle Ages getting the right ingredients would also influence what your stew would be.

You might just get a vegetable pottage and some place it would just be beans and cabbages,

but some places it might be like a fish stew or something with really quality meat in it.  

One of the most common stews from this period  which I found recipes for in pretty much every  

cooking manuscript from England and France from  the Middle Ages is called banata or bukenade or boknade.

"Take veal, kid, or hen, and boil them in fair water, or else  in fresh broth,

and smite them in pieces, and pick them clean. And then draw the same broth through a strainer,

and cast there to parsley, sage, hyssop, mace, cloves

and let it boil till the flesh be enough.

Then set it from the fire, and thicken it up with raw yolks of egg,

and cast there to powdered ginger, verjuice, saffron and salt,

and then serve it forth for a good meat."

I just find it so interesting that while the spellings have obviously changed  

and they would have been pronounced quite differently  back in the day

the words themselves for the most part are the same words that we would use today.

Now there are words like smite which means to cut but we don't usually use it in in like recipes.

It's more of a Biblical cutting I guess, though maybe we should bring that back. In my next cookbook I'm going to

get rid of the word cut and use to smite.

Now there are a few words in the original that we don't use at all in English today like eyroun

which was a Middle English word for eggs,

though eggs was also a Middle English word for eggs and it is around the time of this recipe

that we see one get picked over the other.

In 1490 William Caxton translated Virgil's 'Eneydos' into English,

and he was frustrated with how the English language was changing at the time.

He tells a story of a mercer or cloth Merchant named Sheffield, and he was from the north of England and he finds himself in Kent in the south of England  

and he goes up to this woman and and asks her for  some eggs,

and she says I don't know what you're saying, I don't speak French.

Well neither did he because eggs is not a French word but

she didn't know the word eggs because she was from the south and she said eyroun.

Well someone nearby overheard the confusion and said ask for eyroun and he got his eggs.

But after telling this story Caxton admits that he's also confused,

and finds consternation in these two different words meaning the same thing.  

And he writes "Lo, what should a man in these days  now write: eggs or eyroun?

Certainly it is hard to please every man because of diversity and change of language."

But the thing is he picked one and he picked eggs and usually it wouldn't matter which one he picked in years before

because he would write it down and a few people would read it great,

but he was using a printing press so  

thousands and thousands of these were going out  and so eggs became the word to use.

And he did that with a lot of different words. He was the one that chose which version we use even to this day.  

Anyway I just thought that was interesting, onto  the recipe.

So for this bokenade what you'll need is: 3 to 4 pounds or about 1 and 1.5 kilograms of beef, goat or chicken with the bones

I'm using beef, originally it actually says veal but I'm just using beef for this.

Also kid in the recipe it says kid, that is goat. I'm always having people saying it's children!

No it's not, it's goats.

A small handful of parsley, a few leaves of sage, a few sprigs of fresh hyssop, 1/2 teaspoon of mace,

and 1/8 teaspoon of cloves, four egg yolks, a 1/2 teaspoon of ginger, 1/2 cup or 120 milliliters of verjuice.

So what exactly is verjuice or vertjus? It was a medieval way of making juice from unripened grapes,

and so it's not fermented or anything but it does have this like vinegary kind of acidness to it

but it's also sweet so if you don't have it maybe like half grape juice,

and half red wine vinegar might mimic the flavor.  

Then a pinch of saffron threads ground up, and a  teaspoon of salt.

So first put your meat into a large pot and cover it with water or broth or a combination of the two,

and then bring this to a boil and reduce to a simmer.

And make sure to skim off any scum or foam that forms on top.

Simmer this for about an hour or until the meat easily comes away from the bone.

And then take it off the heat, take the meat out and go ahead and smite your meat.

Also the knife that I'm using is this honkin knife,  

it's a knife which I'm now calling my my smiting knife. 

This was made for me, handmade, by one of my Patreon patrons and it mimics an older design from like the early Renaissance, I believe. 

I just think it's so cool, so I'll put a link to-

cus he makes like hand done knives. I'll put a link to his stuff. Anyway, this is now my smiting knife.

So once your meat is smitten or smited, you want to strain the broth as much as you can until it's nice and clean.

Then return the meat to the pot and add the broth back in.

Add in the parsley, sage and hyssop all chopped very fine as well as the mace and the cloves.

Then stir everything together and bring it to a simmer.

Then set the lid on the pot and let it simmer for an hour or an hour and a half or 2 hours,  

really until the meat is as tender as you want it to get. Also, keep an eye on it because you might need to add some water in case it all

steams away but that's why you want to leave the the  lid on as you do it.

Anyway while it cooks, I'm going to tell you a little bit about what else you might find in a medieval tavern.  

"Befell that in that season on a day, in Southwerk at the  Tabard as I lay

ready to wenden on my pilgrimage to Canterbury with full devout courage."

That was from the prologue of 'The Canterbury Tales' by Geoffrey Chaucer

and being written between 1387 and 1400 it contains one of the first references to a named inn,

an actual historic inn, it was called The Tabard and this is where in 'The Canterbury Tales'  

all of the characters gather just before heading  south to Canterbury on their pilgrimage

which is kind of the whole point of the work. Chaucer talks  about the owner of this inn and says

that he was a very good host "And to the supper he set us  straight away.

He served us with victuals of the best kind. Strong was the wine and well pleased we were to drink."

Now when I picture this in my mind's eye I'm definitely influenced by

things like Lord of the Rings, and Dungeons and Dragons and all of these kind of medieval fantasy worlds,

but they aren't exactly like that. First of all there are a lot fewer like orcs and elves,

but also the inns and taverns and alehouses of medieval England at least

were not all the same. They were quite different, at least at different parts in their history.

Now of course throughout time their definitions overlapped-

there was a lot of variety within  each classification but in general

you had the inns at the the top of the echelon, they tended to be the nicest.

And then there were the taverns and then the ale houses at the bottom.

The inns, how they started out at least, they were a place for people to stay the night,

usually they were kind of near the gate house of a city or a town or else  

in between cities or towns, like a day's walk away  maybe 20 miles away,

so it was a place that you could stop the night and stay. And just like a bed and breakfast they would often give you some food and drink,

but only just like a bed and breakfast to the people who were actually staying there,  

you couldn't roll up, you know. You weren't staying there, you roll up and you're like I want some grub, that isn't how it happened.

Though at times in history inns found themselves making good money from the food and drink and so

they kind of said all right maybe we will just serve to anyone who comes up

and so it was like having a restaurant in a hotel which is still a thing today.

A tavern on the other hand was kind of the opposite, it was  a place for people to come eat and drink, mainly drink,

but it was not typically a place to stay.

Originally taverns were places that served wine.  

They were run by vintner who made or imported wine  and remember this is a time when

wine was actually still being made in England, I think they do it again now,

but they had quite a bit of wine being made in England but it was mostly made by the church,

and they kept it all for themselves for I'm assuming communion.

So anyone else was having to get imported wine which was a lot more expensive.

The most common wine in England at the time was a red wine from Gascony that cost about 3 pennies a gallon,

twice as much as the very best ale.

Then there was Rhenish wine from the Rhine region which cost 6 to 8 pennies a gallon.

Now if you're paying this much for your wine you want to make sure that you're getting actually what you paid for

so if there's any question you can ask the tavener to let you down into the cellar

to see the actual barrel that your wine is coming from.  

If a tavener was found to be selling adulterated or  counterfeit wine

they would often be punished by being put in the pillary or the stocks and having that offending wine poured over their head,  

public humiliation.

But they would also usually get kicked out of the guild which basically meant that they lost their business.

There were actually people whose job it was to go around and inspect the wine

and it was more popular in France than in England but these people were usually the town crier,

and they would do this kind of as part of their job and be called the wine crier.

In the 11th century there was a French writer who said,

"Wine criers cry with open mouth the wine which is for sale in the taverns at four farthings."

Now some were selling the worst wine and everything  in between, there was a lot of variety.

In London alone in 1309 there were 354 different taverns  so lots of variety,

and with a population of only 880,000 people, that's like one tavern for every 225 people

so business was booming.

It's probably why they started eventually selling other drinks commonly like cider from apples and perry from pears

especially in the west country and then  mead which is made from honey.

Often that was more expensive and kind of kept for special occasions but I'm sure you could find different versions- 

different versions all over. Also, I found a mead that  I really like,

it's called Odin's Skull. It's not so sweet and kind of has a little spice to it.

I'll put a link in the description. It's really, really good if you like mead.

I should do another mead video 'cus I there are a lot of old mead recipes I need to cover.

More mead maybe coming up.

Anyway these taverns along with all these different drinks that they were now selling would often start to sell food,

and some would even have a room or two to let up like on the second or third floor of the building

so you can see that the lines between the definitions are already getting blurred.

Also these rooms, you didn't get like a room to yourself they usually would house like 10 or 12 different people who didn't know each other,

was like mash as many people into these rooms as possible.

If there was a bed, again lots of people sleeping in the same bed so it ain't the Holiday Inn.

Now the least extravagant of the three places to to get drinks and there were more places you could get drinks that, but that we're covering,  

were the ale houses and when they started out they were just that,

it was a private house where the wife in the house was selling ale

because she would make a big batch of ale, but ale back then especially before hops, would only last a day two maybe three,

and so anything that the family couldn't drink themselves she would sell to everyone else,

and so she would stick a stick or a broom outside of the door and that was the signal letting everyone know that there was ale for sale.  

Eventually these places too would serve some food  though typically it wasn't the highest quality or as varied a menu.

You'd probably get some bread  and cheese, maybe a meat pie, who knows.

Now just because these ale houses were less official than taverns and inns

that doesn't mean that it was just a free-for-all. They were still controlled they had to sell quality ale.

In fact in some ways it was even more controlled because ale was such a staple of the people people's diet,

it was a major form of calories for many people.

In 1266 the Assize of Bread and Ale went into effect,

and this tied the price of ale and of bread to the price of  wheat and just like there were the wine criers,  

there were ale conners who would go around to test  the ale and make sure everything was on the up and up.

They were sworn "to examine and assay the beer and ale, and take care that they were good and wholesome,

and sold at proper prices according to the assize; and also to present all defaults of brewers to the next court leet."

A maae baker or brewer who failed to adhere to these new laws  

"ought to undergo the judgment of the Pillory  without any redemption of money.

Likewise the woman brewer shall be punished by the Trumbell, trebuchet, or castigatory,

if she offends diverse times and will not amend."

That is to say if an ale wife flouts the law over and over and and doesn't change her ways

then she's going to be punished and the punishments are all forms of a public humiliation,

though I had to kind of look into  trebuchet because I think of a trebuchet and I'm like

were they flinging these poor women into like the walls of castles.

So it turns out there are smaller versions of trebuchet that were used just for dunking people into into the river,

and that's what it was. They weren't they weren't trebucheting women across the field.

Anyway if you are visiting an ale house, or a tavern, or an inn you'll want to take it easy.

Don't go overboard on either the food or the drink or else you might end up like poor Osbert of Elstow.

The Bedfordshire coroner's role of 1276 tells us what happened to poor osbert after he left a tavern.

"About midnight on 17th May Osbert le Wuayl son of William Crustemasse of Elstow, who was drunk and disgustingly overfed,

came from Bedford... towards his house... when he arrived at his house he had the falling sickness.

Fell upon a stone on the right side of his head breaking the whole of his head, and died by misadventure."

And while died by misadventure may sound cool I assure you it is not.

And it seems that leaving these taverns drunkenly was was an ongoing problem and often ended in your demise.

In another coroner's role from 1272 it says that Ralph son of Ralph left a tavern and was accosted by four men,

Robert Bernard of Wuten, Robert of Shefford, Richard Norman and Roger Brienne.

I love that every person in this story has a first name that starts with the letter R.

Even the tavern that Ralph was drinking at was owned by Robert Malon.

Anyway these four men Robert, Robert, Richard, and Roger ask Ralph if he is drunk and

he is and so he drunkenly says who are you?

And in response "because he was drunk, Robert sprang forward and struck Ralph across the crown of his head with a sparth axe...

so that blood and brains immediately flowed out, he immediately lost his speech and died thereof about midday on the morrow."

The thing is these ruffians who accosted Ralph are the exact type of people who would often be in the taverns themselves.

I mean there were those upscale establishments of course but  

most it seems, at least that got written about, were  dens of scum and villainy

that were filled with gambling, drinking and prostitution but even with such a terrible reputation

it seems that pretty much everybody found themselves in a tavern at at one point or another, even the clergy  

but that was quite frowned upon as can be seen in this  letter from around the year 1200.

"An archdeacon to a rural dean, greetings...

we have been given to understand that chaplains in your deanery live in less than upright fashion...

for they go to taverns as we have heard where they have inappropriate and illicit association with laypeople,

with the result that those who say priests are no different from laypeople are justified.

In order that in the future it cannot be said that, as a result of your laziness,

such chaplains have been found in your deanery, bestir yourself to correct these matters."  

Another letter I found shows that whether you're  a layperson or a clergyman

going and gambling at these taverns often led to ruin. In this letter

a man has lent the friend of a friend some money and now he is asking the friend to pay him that money back,

and the friend is like no.

"I do not wish to lend him anything of mine, for he is inveterate dice player and he loses everything that he gambles...  

those who were with him in the tavern when he lost X and his pledges- they gained everything, right down to his drawers.

So take care that you refrain from handing over any more of your own money-

which you borrowed from me- and so lose on him what you ought to repay me.

So should you find yourself in medieval England maybe stay away from any taverns or in that seem a little dodgy.  

I'm hoping that I have found an upstanding inn in The  Porch House, Stow on the World

which I just booked several nights at when I'm going to England in June very, very excited.

Now they actually claim to be the oldest inn in England dating from the year 947 though

there are numerous places that make very similar claims uh so so it's hard to tell

exactly what they mean. There's a wonderful video by one of my favorite creators J. Draper, I'll put her stuff in the description she's great.  

And she talks about how a lot of places are England's  "oldest pub" or England's "oldest inn" and it often has to do with

like there is one stone that was here in 1450 and the rest of the place is new,  

it's like you know the Pub of of Theseus but sometimes also

it's like yes in 900 there was definitely an inn here, and there's an inn here now,

but you know here it was like a dentist's office and here was a bank and you know.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. I'm still really, really excited to go.

And perhaps if I can, I can convince them to really lean into their medieval pedigree,  

and make some bokenade like the one that I'm about to eat.

So as soon as the meat is nice and tender take it off the heat and then it is time to add the egg yolks.

Now if you just add the egg yolks right now they're going to scramble and it's going to be unpleasant so

what you need to do is let the broth cool down just a little bit and then take a little of that broth,

and slowly add it into the egg yolks as you're whisking and  they will start to warm up.

Keep doing this until you've added about a 1/2 cup of the broth and then whisk in the ginger, and the saffron, and the salt,  

and then you can add that to the stew. 

Finally add in the verjuice and it is ready to go.

And here we are a bokenade fit for a medieval tavern.

So you want to add those egg yolks in like last thing before you serve it because if you ever have to reheat it  

they do tend to scramble a little bit so they go from thickening it to to scrambled.

The taste is going to be the same but the the look is a little a little different and I did just have to reheat mine unfortunately.

Doesn't matter, here we go. The thing is smells wonderful the saffron is what hits me.

I was worried it was going to be the clove 'cus that's what was hitting me at the beginning, but now it's the saffron. Here we go.

Hm!

That's really good. That is so interesting because

you get those medieval flavors that you would never find in a modern beef stew;

like the saffron, like the cloves, like the mace, like verjuice which adds this kind of

biting acidity without being super acidic because a lot of medieval dishes will actually just add vinegar,

and that is the flavor that you get.

This is different there's a more of a sweetness to it.

Really, really nice and the meat just falls apart. 

Anyway if you do want to make this or if I can get that in, in England to make it,

then I will point you toward the Tasting History website, tastinghistory.com

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and I will see you next time on Tasting History.