this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Yeah, it was the lack of air conditioning and indoor plumbing that was the real problem. Oh into the disease. So much goddamn disease.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

@nifty A post appeared on Mastodon via federation from Lemmy where it originally is a screenshot from Twitter so basically a stolen joke. Great.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

But that’s the nature of memes, isn’t it? I also try to attribute as best as possible

[–] [email protected] 30 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I expect medieval bread that goes to peasants to be hard enough to work as hammers. The wine would probably be half water. The cheese, funnily enough, would probably be the best tasting thing in the home. We're talking about cheese that is supposed to last months on end without refrigeration. A wandering cockroach that gets to the cheese might be some extra seasoning for the peasant, too.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Wine that has less than 60% water is just brandy.

If peasants were given brandy, sign me up. I'll have it with cake, thanks.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

You know they meant watering down wine.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Wine would definitely not be water because clean drinking water was more valuable than wine for sure.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Probably meaning taste/consistency wise if we compare them to wine we can buy

[–] [email protected] 43 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

When they say wine they don't mean what you're thinking. When they say bread they definitely don't mean what you're thinking and I'd hate to think what the cheese was like.

People really don't have a grasp of how much effort goes into modern food production to make it the quality that it is.

It's fairly obvious when you think about it, there's a lot of documented evidence of people living on ships surviving almost entirely on beer. If that was modern beer they'd all be incapable of operating the ship after about 2 days, dead shortly after from alcohol poisoning, clearly that didn't happen.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I don't know about the wine or cheese but I have to disagree with you on the bread thing.

There are people that make multigrain, wholegrain, sourdough, etc bread based on medieval recipes and while they're not wonderbread they're also not unrecognizable as bread to a modern person and they're not terrible either. There are even people who buy the grains and stone grind it themselves to make it more authentic.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Ive known alcoholics that drank 12-24 packs daily and still were perfectly functional. This is 4-5% abv beer, and they did all of the normal activities you would expect. If you didnt know they had a disease/addiction, you likely would never have noticed how much they had to drink that day. They easily consumed 2-3000 calories/day just from beer.

Human tolerance for alcohol is way, more adaptable than youre implying.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago (2 children)

You're both right. The beer people drank back then was usually very low alcohol content. It was essentially fermented just enough so that it would stay safe to drink for a while. There was stronger stuff, yes, but especially the stuff they had on ships was very weak.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Same with the famous pirate rum.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

not saying anyone's wrong in this thread, but i would love to read sources on this

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That person should try to eat a medieval peasant bread sometime. It was made from a coarse meal, not refined flour. It wasn't leavened. And it had zero salt inside. It also had sand in it. The taste of that shit is god awful and it destroys your teeth.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (2 children)

It wasn’t leavened.

What're you basing that off of? The only reason you'd make a flatbread is if you couldn't cobble together some sort of oven/stove communally. Otherwise sourdough is a no brainer even with sandy rye flour.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

They also had yeast that they could get from the local brewer.

And since bread was highly regulated, it was generally made by a trained baker, who used the highest quality flour they could get... which was still often very coarsely ground with the occasional bit of sand from the grindstones.

But it was leavened, and had salt, because everyone could get salt. The stuff was everywhere. And still is.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

They also had yeast that they could get from the local brewer.

Yeah even the iron age gauls did that.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I don't think you could stick it together though unless it was fine grain. Also they presumably wouldn't have had yeast so it would have been flatbread.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Leavened bread was a pre bronze age thing. The whole point behind passover unleavened bread is the refugees theoretically had no time to let dough proof (not that I think the Exodus actually happened). As long as you're dealing with something that has gluten, leavening it is trivial. Iron age armies would make rolls, proof them with sourdough starter, and cook them on skewers over an open fire while on the march. Coarse grain rye might take a day or more to proof with sourdough, but it'll be sweeter and easier to digest after.

When it comes to if you make flatbread or not, it's more a property of does the grain itself have enough gluten to even rise (which things like barley does not). Usually if it doesn't, you'd make a porridge with it, but keep in mind that even making a porridge takes hours to really break down the grain. Leavening is almost always available.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

If you just leave dough outside you'll have yeast. Yeast is already around you. How do you think best was discovered?

[–] [email protected] 60 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I spent the next three years in a POW camp, forced to subsist on a thin stew made of fish, vegetables, prawns, coconut milk, and four kinds of rice. I came close to madness trying to find it here in the States, but they just can't get the spices right.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 3 months ago

Once during prohibition I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.

-- W. C. Fields

[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Bread was water and flour and dirt, wine was vinegar, and cheese was "milk".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Replace dirt with salt and that's modern artisanal sourdough.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If your cheese is still milk then it's milk.

In much the same way that cheese isn't yogurt

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

Cheese is milk in the same way that beef is grass. It's all carbon chemistry in the end.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The bread was full of sand and grit and it would wear down your teeth to nubs by 25 tho...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

To be fair, that sounds like fast food.

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