SC - flour, sugar and fat in the medieval diet?

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Jessica Tiffin wrote:
> 
> ------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
> I am a college physiology instructor and wonder if you would be so
> kind as to help me. I plan to discuss nutrition with my students-
> such as weight loss, the (crappy) american diet and sugars/junk food,
> etc. Can you tell me if medieval cooking/diets used white flour,
> white sugar, etc? I would assume the answer is no. Do you know if the
> "fried" foods to make e.g. fried chicken, etc., or was the food
> basically broiled or baked simple? Any thoughts as to what
> percentages their diet consisted of (%fat:%protein:%carbs)? Did they
> use whole grains or bleached flour, etc?

Rather than make assumptions about what will or will not be obvious,
let's give this a shot. 

Fat: overall, I would say that fat content of everybody's diet in
Medieval Europe was about as high as they could make it (within a range
defined, more or less, by status/income). Bear in mind that there was no
central heating, and it takes a warm-blooded animal considerably more
calories to simply stay warm in winter when you're either outdoors a lot
or have to rely on things like fireplaces and braziers. 

Add to that the [currently undocumented] "fact" that starving people
reportedly dream of fatty foods. Literally. I forget where I read this,
and will try to find more details, but apparently there are medieval
accounts of hungry people craving fat more than any other calorie source.

Recipe sources available to us suggest both a fairly high fat content in
everyday dining for the well-off owners of such cookery manuscripts (a
fair amount of fried foods, including fritters, pancakes, and
doughnut-type foods, not to mention fats used to enrich and condition
sauces), as well as a fairly high level of dairy food consumption at
certain times of the year, including milk, cream, butter, and cheeses of
various kinds.

White flour: it seems to be a rather recent development (say, in the
past 40 years or so) that whole-grain flours have reached their current
level of popularity, with notable exceptions like Drs. Graham and
Kellogg in the nineteenth century.  In general, the most common trend
throughout human history seems to be the feeling that the whiter the
flour or the bread, the better. So much so, in fact, that flour has been
known to have been adulterated at various times with things like ground chalk.

However, there's some reason to believe that white, as with a number of
other color references in medieval writings, is a relative term, and
that while "white" flour and "white" bread did exist in contrast to
brown bread, "white" bread was generally not what we would call white.
White flour would be obtained, for use by the medieval baker, by
searcing, sieving or bolting whole-grain flour through increasingly fine
grades of bolting cloth, which would produce several grades of flour
from the same original batch of meal. I don't think flour would have
been bleached in any way because our modern conditions of food surplus
and storage tended not to exist in medieval Europe. They did not have
sacks of ground flour sitting around in warehouses for months or years.
Among other considerations, it limits the usefulness of grain to grind
it too far in advance, unless you know how to glue the bits back
together. It also would have represented a loss of shelf-life for
medieval farmers and millers, I suspect.
In any case, there's evidence to suggest that while flour was sifted
into different grades, all of the resulting flour, be it white pandemayn
flour or brown cheat-bread or horsebread flour, was eaten. It's been
pointed out to me that the 14th century was in Europe, not only a period
of plague, but also one of comparative famine -- there appears to have
been one of those mini-Ice-Ages across much of Northern and Western
Europe at the time. I suspect that people, even the rich, were a bit
more frugal in some of their dining habits.

For what it's worth, though, bleached flour (at least, in my
understanding) has not had any chemical additives thrown in to bleach
it, but rather it's a simple oxidation process as ground flour is stored
in cloth sacks in warehouses. While that might be considered good news,
I assume there's some vitamin or other nutrient loss in the process.

White sugar: same thing. What they called white sugar may not have
actually been what we'd call white. We know sugar was available in
different grades (it was quite expensive, essentially sold almost like a
drug until the fifteenth or sixteenth century, until more sources for
sugar production, such as Cyprus and later, the Americas, became
available), but we also have quite a few recipes that speak of using one
grade of sugar over another for preference, and also some recipes that
include a specific refining process (usually something like the
egg-white clarification process used by some vintners and people who
make consomme out of stock in modern kitchens) that would suggest that,
again, for the most part, white augar was preferred over dark. However,
since sugar was still expensive, and even when it became relatively
cheap in the seventeenth century, I don't think anyone really used the
amounts per capita that we use today. If for no other reason, I suspect
that a medieval person would know if there was sugar in any food they
ate... it would be assumed to improve the food, and they would almost
definitely taste it, as with any other spice. By contrast, modern people
are often surprised at the number of pounds of sucrose they tuck away in
a year simply because they aren't aware of how much sugar, say, a can of
soda represents. We have lost our appreciation for sugar, but not, it
seems, our addiction as a culture.

Hoping this helps with perspectives...

Adamantius     
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com