Midwinter pottage

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If C.J. Sansome was right in his Shardlake novels set in Tudor England (and I think he was), then pretty much everybody (except for Henry VIII) lived on pottage then. What was in the pottage depended of course on what you had. A good variety of garden vegetables would have made a huge difference. If you had some meat or fish, so much the better. If you could eat your pottage with a dark, hearty bread made from rye, oats, or barley, with some ale, then you were truly rich. And probably healthy as well. Butter and cheese? Princely.

Historians say that medieval peasants burned 4,000 calories a day. That would mean that they worked from dawn until dark. They probably were very thin, because that’s a lot of calories for poor people. Henry VIII weighed almost 400 pounds when he died. Thus I think it’s safe to assume that he wasn’t living off of pottage and that he wasn’t working from dawn until dark.

I’m 98 percent vegetarian. This was the first beef stew I’d made in more than two years. The midwinter gloom made me do it.

The beef, though, is almost like a seasoning. You don’t need much beef. It’s the vegetables that make the stew, the heavenly combination of potatoes, carrots, onions, and peas, in a sauce reddened with tomatoes. The key to good beef stew is the brown flavor, umami, which comes from browning the beef, the onions, and the flour (for thickening) before the other ingredients or any water are added.

When I think of beef stew, I automatically think of cherry pie for dessert. There was no cherry pie today, though. That’s something I’d make only for company.