Still found in very cold, deep lakes in the north of the Brittish Isles. That’s the landlocked strain. Anadromous Arctic char would have been found in a similar range as the salmon, as long as there were cold, clear rivers for them to spawn in.
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While char are salmonids, they aren’t salmon. Sorry to be pedantic, but there is only one species of true salmon native to Europe, Salmo salar. There are many subspecies and regional strains, though.
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A lot of that depends on diet. Crustaceans (I’ve read) make the meat more or less pink, so it depends on if its available. Farm raised stuff tends to be more pink, 'cuz they feed it dye to keep it pink (food pellets don’t have whatever is in crustaceans).
I have observed from the very few times I’ve had char (Lake Trout, Arctic Char, Brook Trout) that it’s a bit lighter in color, and more finely marbled. (dunno if that is the right term)
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Yeah, that’s what I wrote. Dang italics broke down on me. Salmonid. There we are.
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Ditto on sanitation. It gets supposedly smarter food processors even today. Think iceberg lettuce with e coli.
Obviously, salting/drying helped to preserve certain foods. And I’d imagine that if fresh (enough) food was available, other food would have been avoided. No reason to think that too-rotten-to-consume foods would have been any less disgusting to medieval people; no microscopes or scientific testing methods, but smell and appearance can say a lot.
Side note: I can’t recall the source, but I read a historical document way back when regarding a wealthy landowner who (in a complaining manner) described his tenants as [paraphrasing here] “those long-lived peasants”. The impression I got was that the landowner had access to rich food (not good for one’s health; short-lived complaining landlords), while the peasants had a simpler, healthier diet.
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Until notably recently I suspect that “…and parasite loads taketh away” probably answered that one a lot.
Supply instability probably didn’t help. Even if the good-to-best case is way less grim than commonly depicted; having your youthful growing years fall during a bad harvest can be something that will leave a mark.
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Yes. And not to mention ignorance re foods that provide best nutrition and health, e.g. vitamins.
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I’m not sure what they trout I’m familiar with ate. They generally didn’t go for my hand tied analogues 
There were lots of crayfish in the lakes where I grew up but don’t know if the trout got them. You would see lots of feeding on insects at the surface, though. Ya, the lake trout flesh I familiar with not very pink at all.
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Yeah, I mean. I don’t catch trout on crayfish lures. But I don’t catch much in the way of trout at all, because I’m less of a talented fisherman than I’d like to be.
(Also there’s not a lot of trout where I live…)
I’m told just about everything you can imagine loves a nice crayfish. Carp, Bass, Catfish, Drum, anything that can fit them in their mouth.
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Depending on the place/time and fashion, higher-ups in the Middle Ages ate a great deal of meat and not much else. Vegetables, growing in soil, were base and unrefined, so suitable for peasants and pigs but not people of good birth. Also, there were theories that they spread disease-possibly not unfounded depending on sanitation!
So your average peasant had a balanced diet, if the harvests came in all right, and the nobles had heart disease, gout, vitamin imbalances and constipation.
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There are other freshwater crustaceans. Scuds are common in lakes and rivers, and look like a sowbug or pillbug:
Mysis shrimp are often found in cold, deep lakes:
Both can lead to trout with very orange/red flesh if they are a significant part of the diet.
Oddly enough, there are Chinook salmon in the Pacific with white flesh. About 1 in 20 salmon can’t properly digest the compounds that lead to the typical “salmon” coloration.
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This is the kind of discourse that keeps me coming back to Boing Boing.
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Of course Medieval peasant covers a very broad swath of humanity. Everything from a 9th century serf in Saxony to a 15th century villein in Suffolk. While the film seems to be fairly specific as to period and location there is still a big difference between a food insecure day laborer and a prosperous cottager with his own farm
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Interesting, my grandmother was English and I swear she only knew of two seasonings, salt and pepper. She also had a weird habit of boiling damn near everything. As a child sitting at my grandmas table for a Sunday dinner with the whole family I remember eating a chicken that my grandmother had boiled and then sprinkled some pepper on when it was pulled out of the water. As I sat there eating some of the boiled, peppered chicken I was utterly confused how something that had been “cooked” in water could be so damned dry. To be fair though she did teach us how to cook polt (scandanvian potato dumplings with meat in them) and while they were also boiled they were amazingly delicious with a little ham and bacon in the center and cut into discs and fried up like hashbrowns the following morning there may be no better hangover food known to man. Dense, chewy, buttery, bacon, ham… so good. So I guess you get a pass on the boiled chicken and pepper grandma.
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That was the issue with the chicken–very little intramuscular fat. Unlike pork.
If they were as tall as us, they must have been in the habit of ducking a lot, because their doors weren’t very high.
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Seasonal eating is a lost art for modern Americans, but it’s possible to eat well year round even in cold Northern climates. (Though I have to say, it’s really easy to do as a Californian.) The irony of that picture is that apples actually keep really well (even if you don’t “preserve” them as cider). I stick my “keeper” apples (not all varieties store well) in the fridge (which acts like a cellar in a cold climate) and eat them for months. They also dry quite readily, so you could be eating them year round.
Civilizations without refrigeration know all the preservation techniques - which, even in the absence of drying, included a lot of controlled putrefaction and fermentation, much of which has been abandoned today in Western cultures. This included even dairy, meat and seafood (“aged” meat can be hung for months; fermented food can end up buried for years).
The modern, Western approach is to remove as much bacteria as possible from food - that wasn’t the traditional approach, though. It was about making sure the bacteria that were in the food weren’t poisonous. Modern food handling and preservation techniques actually work against such practices - “sterile” (or rather lacking the “right” bacteria) environments, too-cold refrigeration and anaerobic environments prevent helpful fermentation and can breed some nasty results. Modern Inuit peoples end up sometimes poisoning themselves because traditional food preservation techniques (which involved a lot of fermented meat and seafood) end up breeding things like botulism in air-tight Tupperware, etc.
We’d consider a lot of traditional foodstuffs to be “rotten.” A number of traditional foods (beyond those with carefully controlled micro-organism cultivation like bread, beer, cheese, sauerkraut, kimchi, surströmming , etc. etc.), have been sterilized in recent times. E.g. sushi - it long pre-dates refrigeration; the dish originates in fish being transported from coastal regions packed in cooked rice - by the time it reached its destination, both the rice and fish were fermented. (Something close to the original form remains as a regional dish in Japan.)
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Understatement; as a native Midwesterner, I can say that fresh produce was a revelation.
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Lack of fluoride and calcium supplements, too.
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Yeah, there’s a lot more variety possible with seasonal eating here. I just picked some tomatoes (though they were so tasteless, they were like store-bought, which made me question if it was still worth keeping the remaining plants.)
I was recently looking at some recipes from a cookbook for seasonal, local eating in Scandinavia, which would work well for the Midwest as well - the fresh ingredients for winter included a lot of root vegetables and fungi. (So much fungi - I think the cookbook was even more narrowly looking at foraged foods, so it was a heavy focus.)
Also something that struck me was that people have abandoned a lot of regional foods that would be available in winter, in favor of nationally-standardized diets (that heavily favor vegetables that are easily grown by industrial farming). The possibility of getting, even frozen or canned, the same vegetables and fruits year round has significantly limited people’s diets, ironically.
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