At least since The Can­ter­bury Tales, the set­ting of the medieval tav­ern has held out the promise of adven­ture. For their cus­tomer base dur­ing the actu­al Mid­dle Ages, how­ev­er, they had more util­i­tar­i­an virtues. “If you ever find your­self in the late medieval peri­od, and you are in need of food and drink, you’d bet­ter find your­self an inn, tav­ern, or ale­house,” says Tast­ing His­to­ry host Max Miller in the video above. The dif­fer­ences between them had to do with qual­i­ty: the tav­erns were nicer than the ale­hous­es, and the inns were nicer than the tav­erns, hav­ing begun as full-ser­vice estab­lish­ments where cus­tomers could stay the night.

As for what inn‑, tavern‑, or ale­house-goers would actu­al­ly con­sume, Miller men­tions that the local avail­abil­i­ty of ingre­di­ents would always be a fac­tor. “You might just get a veg­etable potage; in some places it would just be beans and cab­bage.”

Else­where, though, it could be “a fish stew, or some­thing with real­ly qual­i­ty meat in it.” For the recipe of the episode — this being a cook­ing show, after all — Miller choos­es a com­mon medieval meat stew called buke­nade or bok­nade. The actu­al instruc­tions he reads con­tain words reveal­ing of their time peri­od: the Bib­li­cal sound­ing smyte for cut, for instance, or eyroun, the Mid­dle Eng­lish term that ulti­mate­ly lost favor to eggs.

The cus­tomers of tav­erns would orig­i­nal­ly have drunk wine, which in Eng­land was import­ed from France at some expense. As they grew more pop­u­lar, these busi­ness­es diver­si­fied their menus, offer­ing “cider from apples and per­ry from pears,” as well as the pre­mi­um option of mead made with hon­ey. Ale­hous­es, as their name would sug­gest, began as pri­vate homes whose wives sold ale, at least the excess that the fam­i­ly itself could­n’t drink. How­ev­er infor­mal they sound, they were still sub­ject to the same reg­u­la­tions as oth­er drink­ing spots, and alewives found to be sell­ing an infe­ri­or prod­uct were sub­ject to the same kind of pub­lic humil­i­a­tions inflict­ed upon any medieval mis­cre­ant — the likes of whom we might rec­og­nize from any num­ber of the high-fan­ta­sy tales we read today.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Medieval Tav­erns: Learn the His­to­ry of These Rough-and-Tum­ble Ances­tors of the Mod­ern Pub

Tast­ing His­to­ry: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Oth­er Places & Peri­ods

How to Make Medieval Mead: A 13th Cen­tu­ry Recipe

How to Make Ancient Mesopotami­an Beer: See the 4,000-Year-Old Brew­ing Method Put to the Test

The Entire Man­u­script Col­lec­tion of Geof­frey Chaucer Gets Dig­i­tized: A New Archive Fea­tures 25,000 Images of The Can­ter­bury Tales & Oth­er Illus­trat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Even if you don’t speak Ital­ian, you can make a decent guess at the mean­ing of the word man­gia­mac­cheroni. The tricky bit is that mac­cheroni refers not to the pas­ta Eng­lish-speak­ers today call mac­a­roni, tubu­lar and cut into small curved sec­tions, but to pas­ta in gen­er­al. Or at least it did around the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, when i man­gia­mac­cheroni still had cur­ren­cy as a nick­name for the inhab­i­tants of the pas­ta-pro­duc­tion cen­ter that was Naples. That iden­ti­ty had already been long estab­lished even then: Atlas Obscu­ra’s Adee Braun quotes Goethe’s obser­va­tion, on a trip there in 1787, that pas­ta “can be bought every­where and in all the shops for very lit­tle mon­ey.”

Some espe­cial­ly hard-up Neapoli­tans could even eat it for free, or indeed get paid to eat it, pro­vid­ed they were pre­pared to do so at great speed, in full pub­lic view — and, as was the cus­tom at the time, with their bare hands. “Many tourists took it upon them­selves to orga­nize such spec­ta­cles,” Braun writes. “Sim­ply toss­ing a coin or two to the laz­za­roni, the street beg­gars, would elic­it a mad dash to con­sume the mac­a­roni in their char­ac­ter­is­tic way, much to the amuse­ment of their onlook­ing bene­fac­tors.” As you can see in the Edi­son film above, shot on the streets of Naples in 1903, their mac­cheroni came in long strands, more like what we know as spaghet­ti. (For­tu­nate­ly, if that’s the word, toma­to sauce had yet to catch on.)

“On my first vis­it there, in 1929, I acquired a dis­taste for mac­a­roni, at least in Naples, for its insalu­bri­ous court­yards were jun­gles of it,” writes Waver­ley Root in The Food of Italy. “Limp strands hung over clothes­lines to dry, dirt swirled through the air, flies set­tled to rest on the exposed pas­ta, pigeons bombed it from over­head,” and so on. By that time, what had been an aris­to­crat­ic dish cen­turies ear­li­er had long since become a sta­ple even for the poor, owing to the pro­to-indus­tri­al­iza­tion of its pro­duc­tion (which Mus­soli­ni would relo­cate and great­ly increase in scale). Nowa­days, it goes with­out say­ing that Italy’s pas­ta is of the high­est qual­i­ty. And though Ital­ians may not have invent­ed the stuff, which was orig­i­nal­ly brought over from the Mid­dle East, per­haps they did invent the muk­bang.

Relat­ed con­tent:

When Ital­ian Futur­ists Declared War on Pas­ta (1930)

A Free Course from MIT Teach­es You How to Speak Ital­ian & Cook Ital­ian Food All at Once

Julia Child Shows Fred Rogers How to Make a Quick & Deli­cious Pas­ta Dish (1974)

Quar­an­tine Cook­ing: 13 Pro­fes­sion­al Chefs Cook Pas­ta at Home with the Most Basic Ingre­di­ents Avail­able

Pas­ta for War: The Award-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion That Sat­i­rizes 1930s Pro­pa­gan­da Films & Fea­tures March­ing Riga­toni

His­tor­i­cal Ital­ian Cook­ing: How to Make Ancient Roman & Medieval Ital­ian Dish­es

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Above, we have the Alu­lu Beer Receipt. Writ­ten in cuneiform on an old clay tablet, the 4,000-year-old receipt doc­u­ments a trans­ac­tion. A brew­er, named Alu­lu, deliv­ered “the best” beer to a recip­i­ent named Ur-Amma, who appar­ent­ly also served as the scribe. The Mesopotami­ans drank beer dai­ly. And while they con­sid­ered it a sta­ple of every­day life, they also regard­ed it as a divine gift—something that con­tributed to human hap­pi­ness and well-being.

In our archive, you can find the recipe for Sumer­ian beer and also watch it get made. That’s all free. No receipts will be issued.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Dis­cov­er the Old­est Beer Recipe in His­to­ry From Ancient Sume­ria, 1800 B.C.

How to Make Ancient Mesopotami­an Beer: See the 4,000-Year-Old Brew­ing Method Put to the Test

5,000-Year-Old Chi­nese Beer Recipe Gets Recre­at­ed by Stan­ford Stu­dents

Play­ing video games, road-trip­ping across Amer­i­ca, binge-lis­ten­ing to pod­casts, chat­ting with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence: these are a few of our mod­ern plea­sures not just unknown to, but unimag­in­able by, human­i­ty in the Mid­dle Ages. Yet medieval peo­ple were, after all, peo­ple, and as Ter­ence put it more than a mil­len­ni­um before their time, humani nil a me alienum puto. For us mod­erns, it’s a com­mon blun­der to regard dis­tant eras through the lens of our own stan­dards and expec­ta­tions, which pre­vents us from tru­ly under­stand­ing how our lis­ten­ers lived and thought. But per­haps we can begin from a con­sid­er­able patch of com­mon ground: medievals, too, liked their sex and booze.

Such are the points empha­sized by medieval his­to­ri­an Eleanor Jane­ga in these episodes of His­to­ry Hit, which exam­ine the more-than-age-old enjoy­ments in which peo­ple indulged between antiq­ui­ty and moder­ni­ty. Our received image of Europe in the Mid­dle Ages may be one of Church-dom­i­nat­ed, dankly plea­sure-free soci­eties, but Jane­ga and his­to­ri­an of sex­u­al­i­ty Kate Lis­ter point out that, strict though the reli­gious dic­tates may have been about sex­u­al activ­i­ty and oth­er mat­ters besides, many sim­ply ignored them. (And though they may have lacked access to dai­ly hot show­ers, we can rest assured that they were much more con­cerned with how they smelled than we might imag­ine.) In any case, repro­duc­tion was one thing, and court­ly love — or indeed com­mer­cial love — quite anoth­er.

As Bil­ly Crys­tal famous­ly joked, “Women need a rea­son to have sex. Men just need a place.” In the Mid­dle Ages, the place was often a prob­lem for women as well as men, but also for nobles as well as com­mon­ers (though some roy­al­ty did enjoy the ben­e­fit of a cur­tain around their four-poster bed, which afford­ed at least the illu­sion of pri­va­cy). It seems to have been much eas­i­er to find some­where to drink, accord­ing to Jane­ga’s episode about alco­hol. In it, she vis­its a fine exam­ple of “the hum­ble pub,” where even medieval Brits would go to drink their ale, beer not yet hav­ing been invent­ed — and to tell their sto­ries, a prac­tice that would become so deeply ingrained in the cul­ture as to pro­vide a for­mal foun­da­tion for the Can­ter­bury Tales. Even if Chaucer, as a pub-own­er inter­vie­wee reminds us, invent­ed Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture as we know it, we should bear in mind that sex hard­ly began with Wife of Bath.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How to Make Medieval Mead: A 13th Cen­tu­ry Recipe

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Medieval Tav­erns: Learn the His­to­ry of These Rough-and-Tum­ble Ances­tors of the Mod­ern Pub

Peo­ple in the Mid­dle Ages Slept Not Once But Twice Each Night: How This Lost Prac­tice Was Redis­cov­ered

What Sex Was Like in Medieval Times?: His­to­ri­ans Look at How Peo­ple Got It On in the Dark Ages

How Toi­lets Worked in Ancient Rome and Medieval Eng­land

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.