Entire History of Europe | Food in Medieval Times: Cuisines by Region – Part 04

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The food of German-speaking Europe was quite different from that of the Mediterranean world in the Middle Ages. This was in part due to the fact that the climate was harsher, which made it impossible to cultivate olives, almonds, and citrus fruits, for instance. And with most of central Europe being far removed from any ocean, the main fish to be had were freshwater fish. Ocean fish, if available at all, were usually the lower-grade herring and cod that were salted or dried before being transported inland. Straddling the northeastern frontier of the Roman Empire, the Germanic tribes never really adopted Roman cuisine and gastronomy, and unlike Spain and Italy, which endured Arab occupation, Germany never came into direct contact with the sophisticated Arab civilization, either, except perhaps for the odd knight who went on a Crusade or on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, or the German physician who attended medical school in southern Europe.

The little written evidence we have concerning the food of the early Germanic tribes comes from the Romans, who tended to be quite biased against the “barbarians” to the north. According to Caesar and Tacitus, the Germanic diet consisted mainly of meat, dairy products, fish, eggs, bacon, lard, and beer, and was a far cry from the sophisticated cuisine of Rome. Another writer even claimed that the Teutonic tribes ate their meat fresh and raw, in essence putting them and their culinary habits on the level of wild animals. While the Germans were familiar with fire in Roman times and used it for cooking, archaeology has shown that the Germanic diet in fact was strongly meat-based. Not until the tenth and eleventh centuries did the shift to a grain-based diet occur, which was much later than in the Mediterranean. By the High Middle Ages, however, bread and gruel had become staples in Germany, especially for the poorer segments of the population. The meat that was eaten by that time was no longer the game meat of the early medieval period but the meat of domesticated animals, primarily pork and beef. Other meat sources were sheep and goats, rabbits, hares, ducks, geese, chickens, and the hunted animals. The latter, however, were only a small fraction of the overall meat consumption. The fish eaten in the northern German town of Lübeck included carp, bream, pike, sturgeon, cod, and plaice.
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