Lenten food doc

If you want to partake of Lent the medieval way, you'll have to limit yourself to one meal a day between Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday, and abstain from all meat and dairy produce. Allowed foodstuff: fish, vegetables, legumes, grains, wine and beer, sugar and honey, fruit, dried fruits and nuts.

Medieval Lenten rules (as described Saint Thomas Aquinas) were as follows:

Ash Wednesday and Good Friday were black fasts: no food at all.
No food from waking until 3pm (the hour when Christ died). This practice of fasting till 3pm goes back to the 5th century (see Socrates’ Church History V.22).
No animal meat or fats (no lard).
Fish was allowed. Click here to understand the theology of why fish was is allowed, but not meat.
No eggs.
[img=211x0]http://1ywpi925eu8i25ne6noy0131.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/monk-drinking-beer.jpg[/img]No lacticinia or “dairy products”: milk, cheese, cream, and butter. However, Catholics of the British Isles before the arrival of Saint Augustine of Canterbury were still consuming dairy products and perhaps eggs during Lent. Roman influence brought this to an end.
Wine and beer were allowed.
Medieval Europeans during Lent subsisted on bread, vegetables, and salt.
No sexual intercourse between spouses. Pagan kings were pretty pissed to learn about this after they married hot Catholic princesses.
No Sundays off. All these rules apply for 46 days. The 6 Sundays in Lent were relaxed liturgically (less penitential), but the fasting and abstinence were not relaxed on Sundays.
For the Good Friday black fast, many would begin fast from Maundy Thursday night till about noon on Saturday. The Easter Vigil was usually celebrated about noon on Saturday and this ended the Lenten fasting officially.

Christians observed at least three fast days a week for much of the Middle Ages, usually on Wednesday, the day Judas betrayed Christ; Friday, in penance for His suffering; and Saturday, to commemorate the Virgin Mary. In addition to that, there were other periods of fasting throughout the year, the longest of which was the 40 days of Lent. Fasting was a form of self-discipline, writes Bridget Ann Henisch in Fast and Feast: Food in Medieval Society: “a spring-cleaning to freshen the soul and make it ready to receive God’s grace.”

All of these restrictions led to some flagrant misinterpretations of what was or was not a fish. The Benedictine abbey of Le Tréport, in northern France, came under firefrom the local archbishop, in Rouen, when it was discovered they were regularly noshing on puffins. These, they argued, were mostly found in and around water and must therefore be fish.

Some of these justifications were very dubious. Dolphins, porpoises and other cetaceans were mammals, but acceptable to eat as mammals of the sea (the medieval German word for dolphin is “merswin,” or “pig of the ocean,” while “porpoise” comes from the Latin for pig fish: porcus piscis).

A cookbook from a 15th-century Austrian nunnery, as translated by Melitta Adamson, suggests: “From a dolphin, you can make good dishes. You can make good roasts from it … one also makes sausages and good venison.” (These mammals, known as “royal fish” in the United Kingdom, were forbidden from commoners’ tables from 1324—as they are still, bar some arcane exceptions about whales over a certain weight.)

Other questionable permissions included the tails of beavers, which were scaly and apparently tasted enough like fish to qualify and, more horrible still, the unborn fetuses of rabbits, known as laurices.

Strangest of all was the Barnacle goose, a small black and white species that breeds in the Arctic circle and wings its way across Europe for the winters. Its intercontinental migratory habits led some Medieval birdwatchers to conclude that it hatched not from eggs but from the goose barnacles that clung to driftwood or rocks.

Sir John Mandeville, writing in the 14th century, believed these barnacles to come originally from trees that “bear a fruit that become birds flying, and those that fell in the water live … hereof had they as great marvel, that some of them trowed [found] it were an impossible thing to be.”

Impossible is correct—but the myth was widely accepted as fact. Gerald of Walesbelieved them to be “born at first like pieces of gum on logs of timber washed by the waves. Then, enclosed in shells of a freeform, they hang by their beaks as if from the moss clinging to the wood and so at length in process of time obtaining a sure covering of feathers, they either dive off into the waters or fly away into the free air.”