Vegan Potage Stew (British Medieval Inspired Recipe) - Traditional Plant-Based Cooking (2024)

FAQs

What was medieval pottage made of? ›

Pottage is a type of vegetable stew or porridge made up of ingredients on hand. The main components were vegetables like carrots, cabbage, turnips and rutabagas, and a variety of grains in a milk or broth “stew”. Meat, bacon jelly or eggs could be added. Herbs were used to give flavor.

Pottage consistently remained a staple of poor people's diet throughout most of 9th to 17th-century Europe. When wealthier people ate pottage, they would add more expensive ingredients such as meats. The pottage that these people ate was much like modern-day soups.

This Medieval Pottage Stew is simply another name for a thick, rich, soup often made by Peasants during the Middle Ages. Since peasants were poor, and couldn't afford meat, they used whatever vegetables and grains they could grow to make this soup, often served with a dark, crusty loaf of bread.

Sweat the veggies using about ¼ cup of low sodium veggie broth. After 10-15 minutes, add 1 cup diced leeks, 1 cup sliced mushrooms, 1 cup fresh green beans (or use a 15oz can, rinsed and drained), and 1-2 cups of chopped cabbage. Let that simmer for a few minutes and then add 2 quarts of low sodium veggie broth.

In French, a Potage is a thick soup cooked in a pot that is usually blended. The origin of the word is from Medieval France where many homes had a "Potager" or Potage Garden that was used to grow vegetables to cook in the pot. Soup, in English, covers all types of broths, chunky soups and blended soups.

A potage is a category of thick soups, stews, or porridges, in some of which meat and vegetables are boiled together with water until they form into a thick mush.

Food & Drink in the Medieval Village

Everyday food for the poor in the Middle Ages consisted of cabbage, beans, eggs, oats and brown bread. Sometimes, as a specialty, they would have cheese, bacon or poultry. All classes commonly drank ale or beer.

They used rough linen cloths to clean their teeth, often accompanied with a variety of pastes and powders used to whiten teeth and preserve fresh breath. The ingredients in these were far from the fluoride we know today. Herbs such as sage, rosemary, pepper and cinnamon were commonplace, as well as mint and salt.

Cereals remained the most important staple during the Early Middle Ages as rice was introduced to Europe late, with the potato first used in the 16th century, and much later for the wider population. Barley, oats, and rye were eaten by the poor while wheat was generally more expensive.

In Japan, the restaurant Otaf*cku in the Asakusa district of Tokyo serves a stew called oden, which has been replenished constantly since 1945.

What is a stew that never ends? ›

Perpetual stew is essentially a stew that transcends time. Essentially, people turn on their crockpots to make a stew that keeps cooking, eating some of it, replenishing the leftovers with additional ingredients, and, well, you get the idea. A kind of bottomless, never-ending-stew.

A perpetual stew, also known as forever soup, hunter's pot, or hunter's stew, is a pot into which foodstuffs are placed and cooked, continuously.

Food for a King

Dishes included game, roasted or served in pies, lamb, venison and swan. For banquets, more unusual items, such as conger eel and porpoise could be on the menu. Sweet dishes were often served along with savoury. Only the King was given a fork, with which he ate sweet preserves.

The poor ate a dark bread of rye, barley, or maslin (sometimes with pea or bean flour mixed in), and herb-flavoured soup called pottage. This was made of peas, milk, egg yolks, breadcrumbs and parsley and flavoured with saffron and ginger. Cheese and a bowl of curds were also typical meals.

Alison Sim adds that those who ate breakfast in Tudor times 'generally enjoyed a light meal of bread and sometimes cold meat'21. There is no doubt that the staple foods were bread and cheese. The surviving accounts of great houses suggest that people consumed between two and five pounds of bread daily.

Frumenty and morrews were types of thick pottage eaten mainly by wealthy people. Peasants, by contrast, generally ate thin pottage which was runny, less filling and less nutritious. Recipes for frumenty and morrews commonly called for sugar, saffron, almonds, currants and eggs.

Barley, oats, and rye were eaten by the poor while wheat was generally more expensive. These were consumed as bread, porridge, gruel, and pasta by people of all classes.

Potage is a stew of ingredients usually meat & vegetables, porridge is a thick mixture of oats boiled in water or milk often eaten for breakfast, whilst gruel is a thinner poorer version of porridge.

Some pottages, or meat stews, were made with pre-roasted or pre-boiled meat, before sprinkling in herbs and spices. Others used raw ingredients. Unlike much of today's cooking, a mix of meats may have been cooked in the same pot. Poultry and meat were sometimes cooked together in a pottage.