The most common everyday sort of meal in wood-burning Britain was what we might call pottage or frumenty, a thick moist dish in which whole grains or pulses are brought to a boil and then simmered until as much liquid as possible has been absorbed. Think risotto but with less stirring. The simplest version was very simple indeed — wheat or barley or peas cooked in water with whatever fresh vegetables or herbs were available — but if you had the means you could add anything that was in season: meat, fish, butter or cheese, milk or cream, eggs, and even delicacies like sugar, almonds, or imported dried fruits.1 In fact most medieval dishes were thick and sticky, exactly the sort of thing I like to give my toddlers because it stays on even the most inexpertly wielded spoon, and they’re extremely well-adapted to cooking over wood. Just get your pot boiling over a big fire, then as the flames die down your dinner will simmer nicely. You’ll have to stir it, of course, to keep it from sticking to the pot, but you have to come back anyway to feed the fire. You can cook like this over coal, but it’s difficult: a coal fire stays hot much longer, so moderating the temperature of your frumenty requires constantly putting your pot on the grate and taking it off again. It’s far simpler to just add more liquid and let it all boil merrily away, with the added bonus that the wetter dish needs much less stirring to keep it from sticking. With the switch to coal, boiled dinners — soups, meats, puddings, and eventually potatoes — became the quintessentially English foods.2
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.
1. We’re used to thinking of plants as being seasonal, but until quite recently animal products were seasonal too: chickens won’t lay in the winter without artificial lighting, cows stop giving milk when their calves reach a certain age, and generally one would only slaughter an animal for its meat at the right time of year. Geese, for instance, were typically eaten either as a “green goose”, brought up on summer grasses and slaughtered as soon as it reached adult size around the middle of July, or a “stubble goose”, fattened again on what remained in the fields after harvest and eaten for Michaelmas (in late September). Feeding a goose all autumn and half the winter only to eat it for Christmas would have been silly.
2. It’s also typical of New England, which makes sense; the New Englanders by and large came from East Anglia, which is right on the Newcastle-London coal route and a region that adopted coal cookery relatively early.
