What food did peasants in the middle Ages eat for dinner?

Answer 1

Peasants were lower class, mostly uneducated landowners or laborers that tilled the land. These people lived off what they raised or captured. They would eat well during harvest time, and more wheat and grain products through to rest of the year. A typical meal would be some type of soup or stew with pieces of bread. The reason for making stew was mainly to use the food more efficiently. When meat started to go bad you can boil it to make it still edible. So with out refrigeration many peasant's would have to salt, smoke, dry, or brine their meat and fish. To stretch it further they would boil it when they cooked it to eat. This made it safer to eat.

Answer 2

The diet staple of the peasants in the middle ages were grains, sometimes made into bread, sometimes cooked as gruel, legumes such as beans and peas, and garden vegetables such a onions, garlic, leeks, cabbage, turnips, carrots, and various lettuces and greens. Potatoes and tomatoes are both new world foods and were not known in Europe until later. Cheese, butter, and eggs would be available from one's animals, and a small amount of meat would be in the diet, although meat was certainly not a daily food.

The peasant's house did not have an oven. They baked bread at a village oven they paid to have access to, and cooking at home would have been done in a pot or on a spit over a fire. Soups and stews were thus the common meal, rounded out by bread and sometimes cheese. Pork, poultry, and occasionally fish would find their way into the stew pot, but the a peasant would very rarely eat a large serving of meat at one time. Mutton was eaten as well, but this was typically from an older animal, as sheep were kept primarily for wool production, so it tended to be tough and gamy, and was not highly desired.