I've addressed this topic on a couple of earlier occasions!

• How the Middle Ages invented an entire late-night drunk meal
• The first part of What is the history of drunk snacking? looks at the late Middle Ages and early modern era:

(1)

Because the Middle Ages love you and want you to be happy, the late medieval nobility invented an entire meal of evening drunk snacking.

Today in English, a "banquet" is a lavish meal to celebrate something or other. Medieval food historian Johanna van Winter, however, has traced the evolution of the word back to the 14th century in Burgundian sources. In 1337 and 1369, at least, a "banquet" wasn't a separate meal at all! It was merely an extra last course tacked onto dinner at fancy, multi-day noble/royal feasts. According to Winter, the typical "dessert" banquet consisted of a boar's head.

By the mid-fifteenth century, however, the meaning of banquet had shifted. Banquet had become its own meal! While it had once appended the last big meal of the day, it was now its own big meal, to finish off a night of politicking and drinking and dancing. Furthermore, as the wedding menus Winter studied indicated, it took on a quite different nature from the earlier multi-multi-multi course proper feasts. During the daytime meals, servants would circulate with each course in proper hierarchical order by exquisitely arranged table, codes of manners fully in effect.

The nighttime banquet was different. All of its food was laid out on tables for guests to select from as they wanted. In some cases, the tables wouldn't even be in the formal dining room at all--perhaps they would be outside under some kind of awning or pavilion-type roof, if the temperature permitted.

The food listed in the menus seems like typical feast fare:

A first dish...a ‘cretonnée de lart’ (veal or kid baked in lard with mashed peas or beans, egg yolks and spices), a stew with cinnamon, and venison with cloves. The second dish mentions peacocks, swans, herons, rabbits with a spiced sauce, and partridges with sugar. The third dish contained stuffed capons with cream, pigeon pie, and kid. For the fourth, we have eagles, pears in spiced sweet wine, gilded slices of sweetmeat, jelly, and cress. The fifth and final dish was cream, almonds, nuts, pears, and sweets.

From 1571, a Dutch banquet for a chivalric order's gathering involved:

the banquet should consist of four dishes with meat in aspic, four dishes with hazelnuts, four dishes with pancakes and wafers, four with baked apples, four with a salad of lettuce or red cabbage, five dishes with sweets, three with thick rice porridge, four with cookies with a hole, and four with chestnuts.

As for alcohol? Burgundian Duke Philip the Good hosted a 1454 feast whose banquet starred a perpetual wine fountain.

These late medieval and early modern banquets, moreover, seem to have developed a reputation for particular gluttony and raucousness. There is a famous allegorical play written around 1480 but not printed until the 16th century called, and needing no translation, La condemnacion de banquet. Personified Dinner, Supper, and Banquet are called to account in court for the harm they do to people's lives. The play is partially, maybe mostly, a laundry list of all the horrible maladies caused by gluttony.

The verdict? Dinner and Supper are allowed to stay. Banquet--the late night meal of debauchery--receives the death penalty.

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(2)

I want to start with an important distinction: the drunk foods/drinking foods that people were eating, versus the drinking foods that polemicists denounced people for eating. Unbridled alcohol consumption and excessive food consumption became strongly linked in Christian Europe under the banner of gluttony, a deadly sin, and we'll see that relationship play out through the centuries.

In early modern Europe and colonial America, when a lot of drinking was done at taverns that might double as boardinghouses or inns, it was often a question of luck of the draw. Were you in 16C Augsburg? Good luck, because outside of standard meal hours, your innkeeper wasn't supposed to serve anything but bread, cheese, and fruit. Inside meal hours, though, you might get some serious meat to go along with your beer or wine--butchers' guilds complain bitterly about tavern owners who were, against the rules, owning and slaughtering cows.

There was also the issue of quality. While English innkeepers had to be stopped from buying too much fish everyday, suggesting they couldn't keep food on hand long enough for it to spoil, apparently taverngoers in early America often ran into the opposite problem. In her diary from 1704-1705, Connecticut teacher Sarah Kemble Knight described her hostess preparing:

a twisted thing like a cable, but something whiter...[which she laid] "on the bord, tugg’d for life to bring it into a capacity to spread.

To disguise whatever it was, Knight noted, the tavernkeeper dumped the mysterious white thing into a cabbage stew.

It wasn't just the food, either. Numerous accounts from 18th century America attest to the use of dirty bedsheets as tablecloths.

But people were definitely grasping the connection between eating along with food and not getting drunk as quickly. Reportedly, a 1793 drinking contest between expatriate British and French elites in Philadelphia ended quite poorly for the British, because Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin made sure his countrymen ate enough to keep pace with the multiple varieties of wine and enormous bowl of rum punch--paid for by the Brits, of course.

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I hope these help!