Are there any good resources for pure European recipes that only include indigenous fruits/vegetables/meat that are...

saute onion + garlic
add cabbage
add salt + pepper + cayenne
let it cook
voilá

it's basic but it's good

obviously you can kick it up a notch by adding in some bacon or peppers or pepper flakes
it's very versatile

thanks youre bringing the sexy back to cabbage, will try it

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Cabbage was extremely nutritious and was valued as a winter food in the form of sauerkraut. It is fairly rich in vitamin c and kept scurvy at bay during long winters and also long sea voyages if it was carried aboard ship.

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OP, keep in mind that the food they ate a thousand years ago was extremely plain. In part because they were heavily limited by the available ingredients, and in part because they just didn't understand good cooking back then. You can actually experience the level of cuisine they had back then by going to a third world country these days where everything is made using only local ingredients. Just bear in mind that a typical dish for them is to boil a few vegetables (e.g. tomatoes, potatoes, onions, peppers) together with meat and then serve it over rice or with bread. Try doing the same thing but with only native European ingredients and you'll have a good idea of what they ate.

>OP, keep in mind that the food they ate a thousand years ago was extremely plain
Fucking proof.
Any society develops a food culture

I'm surprised it's not common knowledge already. Feel free to research it yourself.

they ate literal slop with hardly any spices in it, and they loved it because they didn't know any spicier better tasting foods

Oats.

Europeans were the first to domesticate and cultivate them. Rest of the world had zero knowledge of them for centuries.

Youre assuming that lack of spice implies plain, which is absurd. There are other ways to create interesting flavors

>that image
The absolute STATE of black twitter

I think you underestimate how much gruel Europeans have eaten down the centuries. I don't doubt they spiced things up when they could but a LOT of what they ate way back when really was extremely plain. If you're proper hungry that will still feel like a great meal.

>have vinegar, fish sauce, wines, cheeses and picklings, jams and herbs, preserved fish, meats, and aromatics that were probably more flavorful than they are today.
>can't have an interesting food culture cause muh chili and fivespice

they boiled cabbage, twigs, leaves and meat chunks and probably used urine as a spice

You're just straifht up wrong. Books like the abicius prove a non-plain, interesting food culture in early europe. Yes, peasants ate boring porridge, but then, working class have never been representative of food culture

I think we might just not be thinking of the same period in time actually. You seem to be talking about much more recent times than me and that other guy.

Im talking about 2500-600 years back. When european countries like denmark were cabbage nations

Well, I'm no expert but I'd think we did eat a lot of boring slop 2500 years ago compared to 600 years ago. I guess most of my impressions about food from that time are from fiction, though. Johannes V. Jensen's "Norne-Gæst", Bergmann's "The Virgin Spring" etc.
2500-600 is quite a span. I'm sure things weren't the same throughout.

Dumb Ass. Yes, you are the current village idiot.

There were flyovers then too.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumin#History

I'm specifically drawing on my knowledge of food in the roman republic, which was very exotic. And they used things that people had access to all over europe one way or another

they ate stuff like a triangle of cheese and a flagon of wine, meat was rare as it went to the upper classes most of the time.

recipes would be stuff like nettle soup, sourdough bread, and if they had meat it was heavily salted and preserved so think re-hydrated jerky in a soup or stew.

stews were a major thing, super interesting, so what you would do is start a stew and the pot would never stop boiling for months if not years, they just keep throwing stuff into the pot as it got lower so a whole mishmash of local stuffs.

>meat was rare as it went to the upper classes most of the time.
Only if you were lower class, dum dum

>the eternal stew

Stews that keep going were a thing everywhere, some chinks still do it

I see you have mastered linear logic user

Why did you automatically assume to be speaking to serfs? I'm offended

>start a stew and the pot would never stop boiling for months if not years
this sounds good

where do you think we are?

nowadays it's called a hunters stew

You know that the Ancient Romans already used herbs and spices like rosemary, thyme, black pepper, cumin, caraway, coriander, and wine to cook hundreds of years ago, don't you? They already fried meat and sautéed vegetables the same way modern-day Italians do, and they made salads using lettuce, cucumbers, olive oil, oregano, and other kinds of raw vegetables.
A reconstruction of what pre-Columbian pizza looked like would probably have dough, cheese, herbs (like oregano or basil), cured meats, and some vegetables (like artichokes and olives).
European cuisine wasn't really that different, in terms of ingredients, from the way it is right now, except for certain ingredients, like bell/chili peppers, tomatoes, squash, and potatoes, which can easily be ignored or substituted for something else. Northern European peasants used to eat a lot more leeks, kale, and turnips before the Age of Discovery. They didn't really use any spices, and they still don't use them that much.

Apicius' De re coquinaria was written back in the 4th century AD. That's approximately 1700 years ago, back in the late Antiquity. There was a
already a lot of contact with the Near East and even certain places in Sub-Saharan Africa, India, and even, to a very limited extent, with China and the Spice Islands by then, but it was still long before Columbus sailed to the Americas, or that Vasco da Gama sailed to India.

>meat was rare as it went to the upper classes most of the time.
meat was raised by the family and would be slaughtered for the family. the idea that meat was an upper class thing is a shitty meme. it comes from the 18th century when the city folk made wages and couldn't afford it whilst the nobility ate enough to be nutrient deficient in some cases.
>start a stew and the pot would never stop boiling for months if not years
the most they would do is a few days or weeks and even then it's not a very common method. stews aren't hard to make fresh since they can start in the morning and stew over the day.

Contains rice and came from Turkey. Disqualified

In the middle ages there was somethibg called flour soup. Flour browned in butter as the base and whatever veggies and meats were available.

>euro food 1000 years ago was plain because no spice
Not true. The ancient Greeks and Romans used nigella, anise, coriander, cumin, fennel, hyssop seed, mahleb, sumac, saffron, lovage seed, juniper, celery seed, caraway, rue and many, many others, not to mention the plethora of herbs used, as well. Literally all of these are still used in central, western, southern and southeastern Europe today, the areas roughly analogous with the Roman empire. Keep in mind that 'Rome' spanned from Britain all the way eastward to the Persian gulf. There are fucking Roman ruins and inscriptions in Azerbaijan, for fuck's sake.
I find it hard to believe that use of these spices completely disappeared after the fall of Rome then reappeared later. If you're saying Northern European food was plain back then, sure and absolutely. It still is. But the rest of the continent have used and still continue to use many of the herbs and spices used by the ancients.

borscht

So stew?
Sounds good

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fårikål

Which country do you hail from?

There must have been hundreds of dishes though. I bet theres a manuscript out there written by a german monk with a ton of info

roasted boar and asparagus with rye bread

Europeans literally colonized the world in the search for spices to make their shit food bearable

But the chief colonizers were the Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English, and 3 out of those 4 nations have awesome food.

Germans and Scandinavianns never did much colonizing at all, even though they are the ones whose food is most lacking in spice. I think your premise is flawed.

One thing people didn't mention - sweet buns. Sweet buns were made by basically baking saltless with fruits in it as well. Most berries fit for this, and the same goes for apples. Keep in mind winter made it so you needed to store them for long, so they'd probably be preserved in something of a compot.

England is the only one with decent food, thise other countries are so bad that the local McDonald's was the best option

i might not be euro, but i have also searched for natural foods myself that can grow in the zone i'm in.

by all means keep researching that. props if you actually can support yourself after years of farming to keep eating.

>German monk
Danish, actually, IIRC. Pretty sure the oldest complete book/manuscript on cookery originating in Europe dates to 1299 and hailed from Danmark. Not sure if it was written in Latin or Danish, as I've never seen it myself. Can go either way. The literate population of the time typically wrote in Latin but things meant for the generally public to understand, like laws, were written also in Middle Danish (despite low literacy rates in Mediaeval Europe rendering the effort moot).
There are some older fragments of writing, but IINM, the Danish book I'm thinking is the oldest one that's remained intact.

Not exactly. Italy and Portugal had strangle holds on the eastern trade, which included spice.
Competition occured between Portugal and Italy (especially Venice) for control of routes through the Eastern Mediterranean. Venice, Genoa and Sicily, busy trying to protect their trade routes, lost their seat at the table when the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453, leaving the rest of Europe scrambling to find new trade routes with the east. Portugal diverted to go around Africa and newcomer Spain followed suit but also tried to find new routes. Italy just kind of gave up on the whole thing. This left a trade vacuum for northern powers due to Portugal's monopoly on extraEuropean trade (and, therefore, ability to make up whatever price they wanted for items) because the Papacy had made direct trade with the Ottomans, who controlled the eastern Med, verboten until 1494 (when the Papal States asked for help from Sultan Bayezid II for assistance in fighting Charles VIII during the First Italian War).
Due to this control and artifical scarcity, Portugal (and subsequently Spain, especially after discovery of the New World) grew quite powerful. Northern powers, particularly Britain under Henry VII grew concerned/jealous of Iberia's newfound wealth and began its exploration and colonisation not just for spices, but also for other goods as well.

It is
But it also ferments well, so it was basically mandatory winter diet in all fermented forms.
Sure, its not a potato, because Potato is the Grand Emperor of vegetables, but its still one of the better ones.
It also helps things like iron absorb, which women wants, for a lot of reasons, alongside eating more liver and making stuff out of slaughter blood.

Only "Plain" food in history is very sparse.
There is long term fermented food, that can't be added with more spices, herbs or roots. Even if fermentation tends to make things have extreme amounts of taste, even extremely pain ferments, like salty pickles or surströming.

And there is early modern food, because import of roots/spices/herbs wasn't a thing.
And early modern meant people forgot to scavenge the countryside for mandatory forms of spice.
Personal favorites include dried bark, lemongrass, any non toxic herb, any non toxic root, any leaf of berry plants, etc.
Nevermind that all alcohol ferments can be used as spice, which include mead, beer, vine, vinegar, and anything really.

I eat using 98% European/Fertile Crescent ingredients, it's pretty easy. I miss potato and corn and bananas but I'm a lot healthier and it's forced me to be pretty creative with my cooking. I did it simply because I'm a classical antiquity autist.

>the most they would do is a few days or weeks and even then it's not a very common method. stews aren't hard to make fresh since they can start in the morning and stew over the day.
They aren't, but to make a stew, you need to boil bones, fat and flavor filled vegetables/herbs/roots, to make the base. And after a day of cooking, you can really make the actual pot by adding the filler.
But if you empty it, you need more stock. Which might not be a thing you can make, for logistical reasons.

Also this post is a meme.
When you slaughter lifestock, blood can only be consumer fresh.
So butcher gets the blood, and makes whatever out of it. Including any assistants the butcher needs, which is going to be underage farmhands and the like, sent to help, for the payment of blood.
Then you have all the Offal/Pluck/Giblets, which doesn't have a good word in English. So basically: All everything inside a animal that can be eaten, but isn't preservable like curing of meat can be.
So blood and offal is eaten right away, within the week. Everything else is preserved in some manner, to eat later. Even if the cured mutton might only be used for special occasions, while all the bone is used to create stew stock.

For a medieval society: Everyone will eat meat, but rarely. Animals that get slaughtered for old age, will get slaughtered so it can be used alongside some holiday or special event.
The same with hunted animals.
Livestock/work animals is basically too valuable, so eating them is sparse.

How can I eat like an ancient Scotsman? Lots of oats?

Pottage. Oat-based products, particularly bread. Lots of cheese and eggs. Fish, particularly smoked. Haggis, without tatties - though make use of neeps. Flatbread with cinnamon and berries. Smoked and salted meats, lamb in particular. Make heavy use of stock.

Lots of herring, mutton, butter and oats. Look up the recipe for Scotch Broth.

Yup, Scottish diet pre-Raleigh basically boils down to herring or haddock, maybe salmon (unlikely), lamb or mutton, loads of dairy, and oats until you cannot eat anymore. As for spices, hyssop, parsley, mint, sage, thyme, onion and garlic show up often. Carrots were everpresent, too.

Sounds delicious really.

Is there a translation? The danish is borderline incomprehensible, and I don't know latin

European food generally is incredibly tasty even the simple dishes, don't let the memers here stooge you I've been all around.

everyone forgets dandelions were used as an herb

It's very simple stuff that maximizes the flavors of what you're cooking. Coq au vin is probably one of the greatest examples of that - extremely well renowned dish, but it doesn't use super complex ingredients - chicken, red wine, lardons (you can use bacon too if you feel like it), mushrooms, a boquet garni (which is just bay leaf, thyme, parsley and whatever other spices you wanna throw in), onion, garlic, salt and pepper. Even if you go through the most basic things, it has a complex mix of flavors (chicken, pork, onion, garlic, thyme, parsley, bay leaf, salt, pepper, wine) without either of them overwhelming one another, and without excessively mixing spices to get a particular flavor out of it.
Completely forgot about those, I was going through memory. Oddly enough I remembered hyssop. Also, savory was used as a spice.

Did you intend to reply to rather than ? is the only post in this thread mentioning anything Danish.

Salt is native to Europe and was quite widespread even before medieval times

protip: look up the etymology of the word "salary"

Oats, or grains? Grains were from the fertile crescent and Egypt

Oats are a grain.

Yes

there’s a book called something like european peasantry cooking that is strictly that type of food. the book is at my weekday home, but you should find it with that title

tl;dr (kindly provided before the long bit): the title is Latin, Libellus de arte coquinaria, and can be purchased through ASU's medieval (sic) and renaissance studies department.

Long version: I couldn't find a translation online, no. I found the manuscript written in Middle Danish and with my background with mediaeval Saxon, I think I can get the gist of it, but not with certainty. Oddly, the recipe titles are in Latin or mixed Latin/Middle Danish but the recipes themselves are excluseivly Middle Danish.

However! Ari-fucking-zona State University of all places has translated the original Danish and Latin manuscripts (turns out, a purely Latin version was first written in the mid 13th century with the Middle Danish version coming at the tail-end of the 1200s or early 1300s) as well as two other versions of the same manuscript translated from Middle Icelandic (which has remained relatively unchanged even from Old Icelandic and is still comprehensible to speakers of Modern Icelandic; mid 1300s) and Middle Low German (IE Saxon; tad later than the Icelandic version). I can't find online copies of the Latin, Middle Icelandic or Middle Low German online, which is a pity as I'd be able to read two of those three.
Anyway, isn't ASU meant to be a party school? What are they doing translating things from the 13th century?

I can read Danish so I know, it's just painfully oddly written, like they hadn't decided how you write danish yet

pinnekjott

yeah all that curry is breddy gud

fårikål

>a typical dish for them is to boil a few vegetables (e.g. tomatoes, potatoes, onions, peppers) together with meat and then serve it over rice or with bread
What the fuck is typical meal according to you, then?
Are you American?