my writing blog

Gold ring with pearls and a garnet, discovered near Bedfordshire, England, circa 1380

If your dialog feels flat, rewrite the scene pretending the characters cannot at any cost say exactly what they mean. No one says “I’m mad” but they can say it in 100 other ways.

Wrote a chapter but you dislike it? Rewrite it again from memory. That way you’re only remembering the main parts and can fill in extra details. My teacher who was a playwright literally writes every single script twice because of this.

Don’t overuse metaphors, or they lose their potency. Limit yourself.

Demonstrating the rope dart (繩標; sheng2biao1)

White Dragon

no, medieval people did not only eat grey porridge with no herbs or spices, they had a great variety of vegetables we dont even have anymore, grains and dairy products, not to mention fruits and meats, all seasonal and changing with the time of the year. no, medieval food was not just tasteless, maybe this will surprise some of you but you can make tasty food without excessive spice use, and can use a variety of good tasting herbs. if you'd ever tried to cook some medieval recipes you would know that. medieval people needed a lot of energy for their work, if they would only eat fucking porridge all of the time they would get scurvy and die before they could even built a civilisation. they had something called 'pottage' which was called that because it was cooked in one pot. you could leave the pot on the fire and go about your day, doing stuff and come back to a cooked meal. they put in what was available that time of the year, together with grains, peas, herbs, meat etc etc. again, if you would try to make it, like i have with my reenactment friends, it can actually be really good and diverse.

dont confuse medieval peasants with poor people in victorian england. dont think that TV shows what it was really like. dont think that dirty grey dressed people covered in filth were how the people looked like.

they made use of everything. too poor to buy proper meat? buy a sheeps head and cook it. they ate nettle and other plants we consider weeds now. they foraged and made use of what they found. hell, there are medieval cook books!

most rural people had animals, they had chickens (eggs), goats (milk and dairy), cows (milk and dairy), sheep (milk and dairy) and pigs (meat machine), and after butchering they used ALL THE PARTS of the animal. you know how much meat you can get out of a pig, even the smaller medieval breeds? the answer is a lot

if you had the space you always had a vegetable garden. there are ways to make sure you have something growing there every time of the year. as i said they had a variety of vegetables we dont have anymore due to how farming evolved. you smoked pork in the chimney, stored apples in the dry places in your house, had a grain chest. people could go to the market to buy fish and meat, both fresh and dried/smoked. they had ale, beer and wine, that was not a luxury that was a staple part of their diet.

Here is a great collection of information about medieval cook books from all over europe with links! Here is another simple summary and some cook book links from the british library!

Here two books that I have myself and found great, and am soon going to try to remake some dishes:

The Forme of Cury: oldest known english cook book, compiled around 1390 for the english king (aka they put saffron into everything)

Das Bůch von gůter spîse: a german cookbook from 1350, part of the Housebook of Michael de Leone, a prothonotary (so no king this time). Way more down to earth recipes, and sometimes simple but still very creative with different foods and some sounding very tasty (I only know the middle high german version of this, so sorry)

It is also important to note that of course the food was VERY dependent on where you were living! Like wine and grapes were super normal every day food and drink for people where i come from (Vienna) where most of the economy was built on wine and the city (that is in a basin surrounded by low hills) is surrounded by massive wineyards, even today, going back over 1000 years. Where I live now (Norway) life and diet was fundamentally different! The ground is frozen most of the year, it is always cold, but you have a lot of access to fish (no wonder they went raiding).

To the many people on the notes asking over and over again (even though I answered it already) about the vegetables we don't have anymore:

Every modern vegetable used to look quite different, and we used to have a lot more variety of all of it. E.g. carrots: you are probably most familiar with the orange one, but that is just one vaeiation. Even today we have yellow and purple carrots, and back in the medieval period they had even more variants. There are a lot of things, especially salads that have grown 'out of fashion' and thus are not cultivated anymore like they used to be. There are a lot of kinds of peas dying out that used to be an important crop before we had potatoes in europe. Grains used to look very different (think of grain fields as high as corn fields). A lot of foods that need to be foraged also are out of fashion, sadly.

Take a knife or two to complete any tasks you need to finish soon. Reblog to give your mutuals a knife for any group projects you may be working on