Eat like a medieval peasant

I’ve just finished reading, or rather, listening to the audiobooks of the Shardlake Series by CJ Samson. They’re set in Tudor England during the time of Henry VIII and follow a hunchback barrister called Matthew Shardlake who reluctantly gets tangled in murder mysteries he’s forced to solve under request from Thomas Cromwell and later by Catherine Parr and the Lady Elizabeth before she becomes queen.

The first six books roughly follow each of Henry’s wives with the seventh book set after Henry’s death during the Norfolk rebellions. While Matthew Shardlake and the crimes he solves are fiction the stories follow factual events such as Kett’s Rebellion, Catherine Parr’s Lamentation of a Sinner and the sinking of the Mary Rose, none of which I’d heard of before.

Christopher Samson has a PhD in history so he’s the perfect author to navigate the reader through these historical events while keeping them engaged with the suspense of a good old murder mystery. At the end of each book is an historical note which seemed to get longer and longer with each subsequent book. The final book has a couple of hours (I work in audiobook time rather than pages) of essay just about the Nofolk Rebellions. Unfortunately Samson died earlier this year so that’s the end of Shardlake and his companions Jack Barak and Nicholas Overton. I feel as though I’ve lost a friend.

Reading the books inspired me to make pottage which was a staple of poor people’s diets throughout Europe from the 9th to 17th centuries. It was frequently eaten by characters in the Shardlake series and while I’d heard of it before I’d never tried making it. It’s basically a stew of vegetables and grains. My version is not exactly the same as someone living in Tudor times, for instance I doubt they’d have included chilli flakes or nigella seeds, but like me unless they were rich they wouldn’t have had meat in it. It’s very healthy and cheap to make. Here’s what I put in mine:

1 onion
1/2 turnip
3 carrots
1 large beetroot
2 parsnips
1/3 cabbage
5 sprigs of spring onion
3 stalks of celery
1/2 cup pearl barley
1/2 cup red lentils
3 tbl spoons oatmeal
1 tsp thyme
1 tsp rosemary
1 tsp oregano
2 tbl spoons tomato puree
chilli flakes
nigella seeds
lots and lots of pepper
I also put a bit of apple syrup in.

Stew everything together with water for about 1.5 hours.

That’s 19 different species of plants right there on one plate.