If I walked into an Inn in days of yore what could I typically order to eat?

by ubbergoat

So tonight my girlfriend made me an amazing potato and sausage soup with baked bread. As I was devouring it I was thinking to myself this would be the type of meal I would have scooped out of black cauldron over a fire in an Inn a long time ago.

If I walked into a Tavern in medieval Europe what could I have ordered to eat? Was it mostly soups and dry meats? What kind of drinks would people have ordered to was there meal down?

MartinGreywolf

paceminterris is actually quite wrong, there are Czech chronicles that mention inns near monasteries and in cities as early as 11th century, and they kept becoming more and more common as the time went on, even including what were essentially motels for people transporting goods over long distances. The source for this is Středověký svět by Míla Linc, written in Czech.

As for available food, most common would be local produce, baked stuff, and lots of different gruels, especially from legumes.

Meat would be somewhat pricey, but not as expensive as people claim - things like deer were usually only readily available to nobles or rich, but pork, chicken and lamb were all there. You could expect to have some meat in your diet about once a week, minumum for fighting men to keep fighting properly was three meat meals a week. Then there is other produce from animals, like eggs and milk.

For seasoning, local herbs and expensive honey, only the most luxurious establishments would have any exotic spices, since those cost their weight in gold many, many times over.

Drinks would be either beer or wine, and expensive mead, depending on what was available.

Lastly, many inns served as shops where you could buy things like some of the aforementioned spices, salt or other food-related goods, and a lot of them were also breweries.

paceminterris

There were no such public "taverns" as you might imagine from Lord of the Rings in middle ages Europe. Such an invention only arose in the renaissance in response to a growing class of traveling pilgrims and merchants. Furthermore, meats were very expensive and only the nobility could expect to dine on them with any regularity.