Manor In Middle Ages

Enjoy your beetroot fresh from the soil

Isn’t it fascinating — the leaves of the humble beetroot, which is a cool-weather biennial that evolved from wild sea beet, was eaten in early times for medicinal reasons.

From the Middle Ages, beetroot was used as a treatment for a variety of conditions, particularly illnesses related to digestion and the blood. It was also thought to nullify the effects of garlic breath. Just for the record I tried that after eating a dish of garlic prawns, but my friends assured me it didn’t work.

Now the modern world has woken up to its virtues and is embracing it with as much enthusiasm as the ancients once did —calling it a superfood, owing to the abundance of calcium, iron, vitamins A and C, folic acid, fibre, manganese and potassium it contains — and because it tastes good.

Beetroot is such a rich source of potent antioxidants and nutrients and is so important for cardiovascular health, that it really is worth adding to your diet, particularly as it is so reasonably priced.

At most pick-your-owns a bunch of freshly harvested beetroot will cost very little more than a pound.

It is not generally known that you can get yellow beetroot, too, which in many ways is a more practical choice as it doesn’t leave red stains wherever it goes.

There is very little difference in taste between yellow and red, but for me the flamboyant red roots have the edge over the yellow. There are also some varieties with pink and white stripes.

Because beetroot has a very dense texture, its roots tend to take longer to cook than you would expect. I find the easiest way of cooking them is to wrap them just as they are in tinfoil and place them in a moderate oven for at least a couple of hours or until they feel soft to the touch.

Having removed them from the oven, I allow them to cool for a few minutes. Then, having peeled back a little of the tin foil, I peel off the outer skin. This method keeps the rich flavour trapped in perfectly.

The leaves — when cooked in a little apple juice, as you might cook spinach — are absolutely delicious and make for a glorious second vegetable.

Actually it is the leaves that are the best indicator of the beetroot’s freshness. If they hang limp and lifeless, you should set aside for someone else to pick out.

You are looking for crisp, shiny leaves that couldn’t be anything but fresh. As the leaves wilt rapidly, you will rarely find gleaming fresh ones in the supermarket.

medieval manoralism and genetic relatedness « hbd* chick

Been reading michael mitterauer’s “Why Europe?: The Medieval Origins of Its Special Path” — really interesting stuff! i quoted mitterauer at length here on the shifts in kinship terms across medieval europe and how they mirrored the loosening of genetic ties brought about by the church and tptb’s new regulations on marriage.

anyway, so i’ve been learning all about manoralism , at least carolingian style. mitterauer explains (nice and clearly for those of us who don’t know nothin’ about the medieval period) all about the medieval agricultural revolution — how rye and oats were the latest, trendy crops (in northern europe); the importance of the new three-field system ; how crucial the heavy moldboard plow was; and how nobody could do without the new-fangled grist mills — which were mostly owned by rich people or monks.

in case you don’t already know, manoralism was your basic economic unit in feudalistic europe (prolly inherited kinda-sorta from the romans ) wherein dependant people (like peasants or even serfs) were tied to, you guessed it, a manor (owned by a lord or attached to a monastery) and owed a certain amount of labor to the manor in return for protection and some farmland of their own and the use of those mills, amongst other things.

from how mitterauer describes it, the system sounded fairly flexible — at least in different places at different points in time. i mean, it sounds like peasants weren’t 100% stuck on whatever farm they grew up on. in fact, rather the opposite — in looking at some manorial censuses, mitterauer works out that most households did not consist of large, extended families but, rather, parents and children — and while the eldest son might “inherit” his father’s farm (or the right to work it), other children would move on elsewhere.

mitterauer makes the argument that the development of the manor system started with the franks. here he quotes another researcher in the field:

“This type of agricultural reform [manorial village, field, and technical agrarian structures associated with this concept] was first put in motion in Austrasia around the middle of the seventh century, or somewhat earlier, under the Pippins, the majordomos of the Merovingians.”