Medieval Eating on Monday

At breakfast, we ate porridge (aka oatmeal).  We learned that porridge was made from any type of grain (wheat, rye, or oats) and poorer people added more water and this was called gruel.

Oh the faces you get on a Monday morning…I’m sure mine wasn’t much better!

Micah just used her hands to eat

and of course washed it down with her 2 fingers
 
Then when she ran out, she climbed onto the table to get some of Levi’s (who wasn’t awake yet).

Levi finally woke up to eat his, but Cameron didn’t get any of his because Micah ended up pulling his placemat off the table and spilling it. 

For lunch, we ate vegetable stew served in a trencher (aka bread bowl) and drank mead (made from water, honey, lemons, and nutmeg, but ours was not fermented obviously).  We also drank from goblets and learned that they were usually made out of wood or metal. 
  

For dinner, we baked some bread and shook up some butter.  Sometimes butter churners would chant “Come, butter, come!”

But I sang “Shake, Shake, Shake…Shake, Shake, Shake…Shake your butter!”  which looks more like what Cameron was doing…
I mean “shaking his bootie” at least!

Daddy & Micah even helped out.

Freshly shook butter to go with our warm bread.

Yum!

We learned that there was usually only one oven in a town and that women took their dough to be baked by the town baker.  FYI…did you know that “lord” comes from the Old English word hlaford, which meant “keeper of the bread” and lady comes from the Old English word hlaefdigge, which meant “kneader of the dough.”