> pickling, salting, drying, smoking, fermenting, sugaring, and confit. Which makes for quite a long list

None of which preserves the taste/nutrition well for a wide range of foods like greens/fruits/vegetables, you the limits in seasonal availability don't get resolved

There's a difference of being a bougie bitch expecting to have fresh greens in the dead of winter with a meter of snow on the ground and being thankful you stored the fall's harvest in such a way that you have food to last until that meter of snow has melted. Maybe they could have utilized green houses earlier, but when did it become practical to make clear sheets of glass?

The point is they had many workarounds for being "limited to seasonal availability." That doesn't mean everything was available or as nutritious.

Plus the excellent point that dylan604 made, they weren't bougie bitches.

> pickling, salting

Yes, but also my understanding is that the preservation technique of that name involves much more salt than modern palettes are willing to tolerate, and also salt itself was much more limited in supply.

Despite this, salt as a preservative was indeed critical to civilisation.

> fermenting

True, and also I want to say "blessed are the cheesemakers" etc. here. :)

There's nothing intolerable about pickled vegetables. I eat them all the time

Properly picked, as in preserved and can be stored ambient for extended periods, or "pickled" as sold in a supermarket where the small print says "keep refrigerated after opening"?

I have been told there is a huge difference between the two.

Qualify it as three types.

There are the fermented pickles

There are the pickles that get mixed with prefermented preservative (usually vinegar/salt) and pressure-canned

And then there are the pickles that get flash cooked or not cooked, mixed with preservative, and refrigerated for a limited time

Traditional "properly picked" also had to ve consumed after being open or stored cold. Once you open it, backterias can get in and spread.

There is some difference in taste, due to modern additiomal conservants and minor changes in receipta, but not all that much.

That is why some salt-preserved foods are traditionally soaked before consumption: to remove the excess salt.

Also because salt itself was much more valuable back then you wouldn't have as much or even any salt in your fresh food so you use the "preserved in an intolerable amount of salt" food products with the unsalted food products to get a quite tolerable middle ground at consumption time. Mash potatoes and pickle bits mmm

> Mash potatoes and pickle bits mmm

And thus potatoes and sauerkraut was born.

While sauerkraut fermentation uses salt, the main technique preserving the cabbage is the fermentation and sauerkraut is thus not super salty (about 1% of the weight is salt)

Without the potatoes, they hadn't arrived from the Americas by this point.

Clearly, they meant rutabegas, turnips, and cabbages.

>Plus, various foods like grains, root vegetables, onions, and even apples could be stored for months using proper techniques. They didn't have the luxury we have of not paying much attention to how we store things and just replacing them when they go bad, so they became quite good at this.

I would also expect them to have various special variaties of apples/pears that actually improved their taste with storage. For example a variety that was best with 2 months of storage, another one that was best after 6 months.

Then you have cheeses, yoghurts, milk. Those things could be available year round. One would expect the king of France to have quite a variety of cheeses at his disposal. Then we have meats prepared in a hundred different ways. From simple roasting, to gelling, pickling like modern hams. And so on.

Then we have various types of wild mushrooms. I wonder if the king ate wild mushrooms and who picked these mushrooms for him... Poisoning would be so easy to get away with if he did.

It would be tough without potatoes, tomatoes and peppers, but I think food-wise I'd be just fine (assuming money and power).

Exactly. People today seem to forget why fermentation was discovered in the first place.