40 Foods Medieval Villagers Actually Ate Everyday

► Get our medieval cookbooks & guides here: http://medievalway.store/yt Why would a medieval bishop call a goose a fish? Because around eleven eighty-eight, in parts of Ireland, some of them did. Gerald of Wales reported bishops and monks eating barnacle geese on fast days with a clear conscience. The bird, they said, was never flesh. It grew on driftwood, like a barnacle. That is how badly people wanted a way out. Depending on the region and the century, meat was off the table for roughly a third of the year. Every Friday, all of Lent, often Advent, and the eve of the great feasts. In Lent the eggs, the butter and the milk usually went too. A bishop could argue about geese. A village family had no such argument, and the sea was days away. So what was actually in the pot? Today we go through forty foods that carried a village through the fast, from salt herring to pease pottage, the techniques that made them last, and the loopholes the village never got, including that goose.