#note to self - beef jerky takes longer to boil than rice

[homunculus-argument]

The more you look into it, the funnier the whole myth of The Grim And Depressing Dark Ages is, in the extent in which it covers everything. Like no matter what area of medieval life you look at, the common misconception of it is something bleak, drab, colourless, joyless and smelling like shit. Like at best, an average peasant's life was repetitive, boring, joyless and smells like shit, and at worst it was terrifying, hopeless chaos that smells like blood and rotting plague corpses. I mean okay it was like that sometimes, but not all the time. They had enjoyments in life. Like consider food.

Medieval peasants' food wasn't just grey wet gruel for every meal and hard bread if you were lucky. One major staple food that was commonly eaten by peasants across Europe was pottage. I think every time and culture has some variation of the "just throw whatever we've got at hand in there and boil/fry/cook that shit" sort of meal, and for medieval peasants, that was pottage. And as the name would imply, it's made by throwing the aforementioned whatever-you-have-at-hand ingredients into a pot and then boiling that shit. And that's what's for dinner every day unless it's a special occasion.

And yeah eating the same damn boiled mush every damn day probably doesn't sound much less depressing than just eating bland gruel, but that's the thing, the pottage wasn't the same thing all the time, every time. The ingredients varied by whatever was available at any given time, by harvests, by what herbs are in season and what produce happens to be in the most ample supply. Different ratios and combinations of the same ingredients, fresh or dried or otherwise preserved, changing from season to season.

Freaking imagine being a medieval peasant whose favourite food in the entire world is spring pottage with meadowsweet mead, best thing you can think of. You've heard talk of finer meals, roast boar with wine sauce that they cook for kings, but you're pretty damn sure that it can't better than the pottage you get on the first weeks of May. The one meal that you'd have every day year round if you could, but you can't, so it's the highlight of your year. The thing you look forward to for months at a time. You're sure that is what is served every day in Heaven, and not only are you 100% down to physically fight somebody about it, you absolutely have. You broke your nose, it never quite healed right, and you regret nothing.

And then spring finally comes, and you've been eagerly keeping an eye on how all the right ingredients start to reach their right time, and not only have you been looking forward to May ever since the snows started melting because that specific Best Goddamn Pottage is the only thing you can seem to think about, everyone in your household has been looking forward to it as well - because it's the only thing you seem to talk about, too, and they're sick of hearing about it.

And this year it tastes like shit.