Did Medieval People Eat Breakfast?

One question I'm often asked is did people eat breakfast during the Middle Ages, and the answer is it depends, but when they did sometimes it was this dish that's essentially a medieval version of cinnamon toast crunch, a 15th century recipe for sopes doré or golden sops. So thank you to HelloFresh for sponsoring this video as we tuck in to a medieval breakfast, this time on Tasting History. So to answer the question did medieval people eat breakfast we're going to have to look at but the short answer is yes they did, sometimes on occasion. For most people this meant some bread, or cheese, or ale, maybe some cold porridge left over from the night before, but as you moved up the social ladder you might be finding something more complex on your breakfast table as we see in the 14th century story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight before the men go on a hunt. Full early, ere daylight, the folk rose up. The knights, all arrayed for riding, leapt up lightly, and took their bridles, and each rode his way as pleased him best. The lord of the land was not the last. Ready for the chase with many of his men, he ate a sop hastily when he had heard mass, and then with a blast of the bugle fared forth to the field. He and his nobles were to horse, ere daylight glimmered upon the earth. An early morning breakfast of sops. Unfortunately it doesn't tell us what kind of sops this lord was eating because they really ran the gamut. Sometimes it was just a piece of toasted bread that was dipped in some ale or wine to kind of soften it up, but there are also recipes that are much more complex with eggs added, and different spices added. There's even one with fried onions that's kind of like a precursor to French onion soup. In fact the word sop is where we get the word soup. Essentially as the toast started to go away and the liquid started to become more prominent sop turned into soup. Now the sop that I have decided to make does not have any onions in it but it is reminiscent of one of my favorite breakfast foods cinnamon toast crunch. Soppes dore. Take raw almonds and grind them in a mortar, and temper them with wine, and draw them through a strainer, and let them boil, and cast thereto saffron, sugar, and salt. And then take a panda man, and cut him, and toast him, and wet him in wine, and lay him in a dish, and cast the syrup thereon. Then make a dreg of powdered ginger, sugar, kennel, cloves, and maces, and cast thereon. And when it is addressed serve it forth for a good pottage. Now I left the old spelling in because I feel like you can kind of get the gist of what the modern English would be, but I did pronounce it in a modern way because it sounds very, very different if you don't. Anyway for this recipe what you'll need is a pinch of saffron, two tablespoons of sugar, a half teaspoon of salt, and several thick slices of white bread. This is what in the recipe they call panda man or panda man which was kind of the nicest white bread that you could get. Then a quarter cup or 60 milliliters of white wine, and then a mixture of spices, and the quantities that you use are really up to you. I'm using a tablespoon of sugar, a half teaspoon of ginger, a half teaspoon of cinnamon, an eighth teaspoon of cloves, and a quarter teaspoon of mace, and a mace in this case is neither the weapon nor the stuff that you spray in an attacker's face but rather the outside coating of a nutmeg, and it has a similar flavor to a nutmeg but it packs more of a punch. It's a little bit spicier. It's really good. Then you also need two cups or 475 milliliters of almond milk made with wine. People are often surprised when almond milk appears in a medieval recipe. I guess it just seems like a very modern ingredient but it was actually really common in medieval Europe, and it was made pretty much the same way that it is today. You can just buy some almond milk at the store, some plain almond milk but I prefer to make my own especially since this recipe calls for it to be made with wine which they will not have at the store, and it's actually really easy to make. Almost as easy as the recipes that you'll get from today's sponsor HelloFresh. HelloFresh is a great way to get yourself to make more meals at home, and since it arrives on your doorstep all the ingredients there in a box you never have to do any shopping. Also the ingredients are pre-portioned so you don't even have to do any prep work. You can get right to the cooking. The recipes are well written, they're easy to follow, and they deliver delicious meals like this sesame soy beef bowl. 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That's 10 free HelloFresh meals when you visit HelloFresh.com and use my code 10TASTINGHISTORY, and now let us make some medieval almond milk with wine for which you will need one cup or 150 grams of raw almonds, three cups or 710 milliliters of water, and one cup or 235 milliliters of white wine. So first soak the almonds in water overnight. They should become nice and plump and then drain them. Then you can grind these up by hand but if you have a blender now is definitely the time to use it. Just add in the almonds and then the water and the wine and blend for a minute until everything is smooth. Then pour the almond milk through a fine cloth or a nut milk bag squeezing out as much liquid as possible and that's your almond milk. So then take two cups of that and put it in a saucepan and heat it to a gentle simmer. Then add in the saffron threads and the sugar and salt and stir, and the saffron here is really just to add color. It will add flavor as well but the color is the most important thing. It is what is going to give the dish its name sopes dore or golden sops and it turns that almond milk a nice golden color. Let it keep simmering, stirring occasionally until it has started to thicken. It'll take about 10 minutes. As it thickens take your bread slices and set them on a tray and then put those in the oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit, 205 Celsius for 6 to 8 minutes or until they have started to turn a golden brown then take them out of the oven, flip them over and return to the oven for another 4 or 5 minutes until they are nicely toasted. Then while the bread is still hot set it in a dish and drizzle with white wine on the top. Just enough to make it wet but not to make it soggy, yet it will get soggy. By now the almond milk should have thickened up quite a bit almost like a custard and you can pour it around the toast and a little over the top. Then take a good large pinch of the spice mixture and sprinkle that over the top as well. Now this spice mixture actually has a name. It was powder deuce or sweet spices and it was very common in the kitchens of wealthy medieval people, and it always varied a little bit depending on who the chef was who was making it but they were always similar, had similar sweet spices and usually a sugar base, and I've used it a few times here on the channel including in the recipe for medieval lasagna which is also in the Tasting History Cookbook. So you can use that all to make mostly dinner dishes but for now we are going to focus on medieval breakfast. In the Middle Ages not everyone got breakfast. In fact some people even considered it a sinful indulgence. Based on the writings of several scholars including the Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas some members of the Church tied eating breakfast to the sin of gluttony. There was an aspect of this sin called prepropere which referred to eating either too quickly or too soon after a previous meal. So eating first thing in the morning was often considered indulgent but this doesn't apply to everyone nor at all times. In fact in the earlier Middle Ages especially in the British Isles we know that at least some people were eating breakfast because there are two old English words undermette and morgenmette which meant morning meat referring to eating food in the early morning. Now how common it was is up for debate but it was at least common enough that they required two words for the practice, and Latin also had a word for breakfast. It was jantakulum though for most of the Middle Ages jantakulum was not meant to be eaten by everyone. More often it seems that people stuck to a two meal day. There was the midday meal prandium which tended to be the largest meal of the day, and then the lighter evening meal called cena, and still today in Italian dinner is called cena. In Spanish I think it's cena, and that's where it comes from. But jantakulum or breakfast was the domain of the wealthy or to those people who society deemed it necessary to eat breakfast. For instance laborers. Now depending on the location and the time period peasants performing manual labor could be up to 80 percent of the population which in that case a lot of people were eating breakfast, and it was usually eaten a few hours after the person got up. In a log from northern France in 1474 it says that from the end of March through the end of September, basically the summer months, the masons working on a particular building were required to start work no later than 5 30 a.m and had to continue until 8 a.m when they would have an hour for breakfast. And this was usually bread and cheese that they might have brought from home or be given by the employer, and some beer or ale and that was very often supplied by the employer as part of your day's wages. When working in the fields too people often just sat down right where they were working to eat their morning breakfast. Though you want to make sure that you're in a safe place when you eat your morning breakfast because in August of 1346 a William Bishop of Oxfordshire was digging a pit when he decided to have breakfast and he sat down in the pit only to have the pit collapse on him and it killed him. Now as it was eaten for those doing manual labor many likely only indulged in breakfast during the summer months as that's when the long days of work necessitated it. In the winter most people just waited for their midday meal. Though if you were either young or sick you pretty much got breakfast all year round if you needed it. In 1397 at Winchester College any students under the age of 16 received breakfast every morning. Other members of the society are to have two meals only, prandium and cena. There's this wonderful school book from the 15th century where a student wrote down his experience having breakfast. My breakfast was brought to my bedside as oft as me list to call therefore, and so many times I was first fed or I were clad. Meaning he often ate breakfast before he even got dressed but that was a nostalgic remembrance of his younger days as a student for now he had grown into a young adult and now at five of the clock by the moonlight I must go to my book and let sleep and sloth alone. Breakfasts that were sometime brought at my bidding is driven out of country and never shall come again. It's exactly how I feel when I think back upon my youth eating bowls of cereal and watching Saturday morning cartoons. Given something so precious and then have it cruelly taken away from you. Such is life. It was a similar situation for those people who were ill and if you were a monk well having breakfast came with strings attached. In his monastic constitutions L'Enfranc the 11th century Archbishop of Canterbury wrote that after terse the children and the sickly who cannot fast shall receive the mixtum. Terse was the mid-morning prayer around 9am and a mixtum was simply any additional meal that was given to a monk and should you eat this extra meal especially if it had any meat in it you had to go through a long process of begging for forgiveness. First even as he is eating his mixtum the sick monk had to pull his hood over his head kind of I guess to hide his shame. Then he had to prostrate himself on the floor before all of the other monks to ask for forgiveness and then ask for absolution from the abbot saying my lord I have been long in the infirmary born down by sickness. I have offended in matters of food and drink and much else and I have acted against our established discipline and for this I beg of you absolution. Now as the centuries went on it does seem that they relaxed a little bit but even as late as the 15th century William Caxton wrote go take the sacrament it is good breakfast. Now some people opted for the sacrament and breakfast but breakfast always came after the sacrament or going to mass. Even in the passage from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight it says he ate a sop hastily when he had heard mass because even a lord would not eat breakfast before first doing his morning prayers and it was the same for children. King Edward IV wrote regarding one of his sons the infamous princes in the tower that item we will that our said son have his breakfast immediately after his mass and between that and his meat to be occupied in such virtuous learning as his age shall now suffice to receive. So first he went to mass and then he had breakfast and then he had his schooling and it probably wasn't just his son who was eating breakfast but the king himself because by the late medieval period most of the aristocracy deemed breakfast a most necessary indulgence. Even as far back as 1305 King Edward I the Longshanks employed a cook whose designated duty was to prepare breakfast for him at his court which was constantly moving about the country. He was recorded as roger ate bece, kokus de gentaculo, cook for breakfast. And what exactly was old King Edward eating? Well many times it would have just been a fancier version of what the peasants were eating. Bread, ale, cheese, that kind of stuff but sometimes they would have had something a little bit more complicated. In a 15th century document from the home of Cicely Neville the Duchess of York and mother of two future kings of England it lays out her and her husband's breakfasts at different times of the year. For most of the year there were breakfasts for my lord and my lady. First a loaf of bread in trenchers, two manchets, one quart of beer, and a quart of wine, half a shin of mutton or else a shin of beef boiled. Manchet like the pain de main in our recipe was simply a very nice form of white bread so it was essentially what the peasants were eating. You had the bread and the beer though you also had wine, and you had meat and that's really what makes it a very different meal than what the peasants were having. During Lent it was the same but instead of meat they had pieces of saltfish, six baconed herring, or a dish of sprats. Now since it was Lent bacon couldn't have referred to like pork bacon so I'm thinking that baconed herring referred to the method of like curing or smoking the herring but I'm not entirely sure. I searched and I wasn't quite, wasn't quite convinced but that's what I assume. What else is cool about these old documents though is not only does it say what they were getting, what the lord and lady were getting for breakfast but also it talks about who else was even being served breakfast. Around the year 1400 breakfasts be there none saving only the head officers when they be present to the ladies and gentlewomen, to the dean and to the chapel, to the almoner, to the gentleman ushers, to the cofferer, to the clerk of the kitchen, and to the marshal. These breakfasts of course were not as fancy as the ones that the lord and lady were getting. The cup bearers for instance had a loaf of bread, a bottle of beer, and a piece of saltfish, and for those working in the stables well they just got the beer and bread. Now as the late medieval period gave way to the early Tudor period breakfast started to become more common. You see it a lot more in the writings of the period but for the majority of people for the next few centuries they kind of stuck to that diet of beer, bread, sometimes wine, cheese. That was breakfast. Only the wealthy started to play and and make things a little more interesting. Like in 1501 Edward Stafford the third duke of Buckingham often enjoyed a full spread of fish for breakfast including pike, roach, and place along with a dish of butter and eggs. And perhaps in the future I'll do a video on the breakfasts of Tudor England but for now I am going to stick to my medieval breakfast of golden sops. And here we are sopes d'oree from 15th century England. So it really is soggy bread. I mean that's what it is, and it is bread that you sop up juice. That's where the name came from and as the bread went away and more liquid ended up coming around it just became soup but it smells wonderful. You really get the saffron, you really get the spices. Here we go. It's messy but it's really good. So I was worried that the wine was going to be the dominant flavor and kind of overpower everything else but it doesn't. It's there maybe but it's more of you just kind of get a little bit of the burn of the alcohol but the flavor is the spices and is the almond milk and saffron and there's a sweetness to it. It kind of reminds me of like a custard, that that sauce. It's thick and it's flavorful and it makes it so that when the bread does sop it up it doesn't become so soggy that it just falls apart. It is still, you know, it's holding on there. The spices that you add, I think I could probably even add more. It does have that kind of cinnamon toast crunch flavor to it but you add even more and you're definitely in cinnamon toast crunch land. It's really quite good. Definitely not something I would think of to have for breakfast today because it is kind of messy but the flavor is good and I guess maybe I should have it for breakfast. If it was good enough for a medieval lord then it's good enough for me. What I also love is that you get the color, that dore, the gold. It does have a bit of a gold hue to it so you do get that color so the name absolutely makes sense. So go treat yourself like a medieval lord or lady and make some sopes dore, and I will see you next time on Tasting History.