Medieval Food in Paris, From Royal Feasts to Street Pies

We all know the French love their food and believe it to be the best in the world. In fact, French haute cuisine was once again voted the best in the world by the judges of Bocuse d’Or, a fine-dining competition held every two years. Their love affair with food and wine is known worldwide.

But what would medieval food in Paris have looked like? Would they have held the prize for the best gastronomy? And I wonder what a Parisian medieval foodie’s Instagram would have looked like?

Medieval Paris wasn’t the beautiful city it is today. It didn’t have the bevy of restaurants or cafes we have access to today. And there was a big difference between the food on the tables of the affluent Bourgeoisie and the common people. From peacocks to porridge, we’re taking a look at what you might have had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner during the Middle Ages.

What Was Paris Like in the 1300s?

Paris in the 1300s was the biggest city in Western Europe. A tax survey in 1328 counted more than 61,000 households, which historians think means about 200,000 people, all packed inside the city walls.

Most of the streets were narrow lanes of mud. In the 1180s, King Philip Augustus was standing at a window of his palace when passing carts churned up the muck below. The smell was so bad that he ordered the main streets paved. Most of the others stayed as they were.

Pigs were a real problem. In 1131, the king’s eldest son, also called Philip, was riding through Paris when a pig ran under his horse. He was thrown and died of his injuries. After that, pigs were banned from the streets, except for those belonging to the monks of St. Anthony, which wore little bells so people knew whose they were.

The heart of it all was Les Halles, the city’s main market. Philip Augustus had covered market halls built there in 1183. The butchers worked nearby at the Grande Boucherie by the Châtelet, and they were rich enough to build their own church, Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie. Only its tower survives, rebuilt in the 1500s, and it still stands by the Rue de Rivoli.

Paris had the population, the money, and the connections. Which meant you could find a whole different menu depending on which side of the street, or which side of the river, you were on.

The Social Divide: Tables of the Rich and Poor

What ended up on your plate depended entirely on your place in the world. If you had money or titles, you ate to impress. If you didn’t, you ate to survive. The city was filled with contradictions.

Gilded banquets took place just a few streets away from smoky rooms where people scraped burnt bread crusts into their stew. Everyone was hungry for something, but the flavors were far from equal.

Nobility and the Affluent Bourgeoisie

We know a surprising amount about how rich Parisians ate, thanks to two books. One is Le Viandier, a recipe collection linked to Guillaume Tirel, known as Taillevent, who cooked for Kings Charles V and Charles VI.

The other is Le Ménagier de Paris, written around 1393 by an older, well-off Parisian for his fifteen-year-old wife. He wanted her to know how to run a household, and that included how to plan a dinner.

Lavish Banquets

A grand dinner came in several courses, and each course put many dishes on the table at once. Guests didn’t eat everything. They took what was near them. The Ménagier sets out menus with pottages, roast capons, rabbit, and pork, and plenty of fish for the many days when the Church banned meat.

The sauces are what stand out. Cameline was made with cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and bread soaked in vinegar. Jance used ginger and almonds. Green sauce got its color from parsley.

Spices came from Asia through Alexandria and Venice, and they cost a lot, so a well-spiced sauce told your guests exactly how well-off you were.

Presentation and Prestige

Taillevent gives a recipe for a swan that was roasted, then sewn back into its own skin and feathers, so it came to the table looking alive. Cooks also colored food, using saffron for yellow, parsley for green, and sandalwood for red.

The most famous Paris feast of the century went much further. In January 1378, Charles V gave a banquet in his palace on the Île de la Cité for the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV.

Between courses, a ship big enough to carry men rolled across the great hall, and actors dressed as crusaders stormed a model of Jerusalem. These shows between courses were called entremets.

What the Elite Actually Ate

Pies were savory pies, filled with pigeon, eel, or small birds. The pastry was thick and tough, more a baking dish than something to eat. Trenchers were made of bread, not pastry. These thick slices soaked up the juices and were often given to the poor after the meal.

Sugar counted as a spice, not a sweet. At the end of the meal, guests drank hippocras, a sweet spiced wine, with thin wafers, and nibbled on dragées, spices coated in sugar.

And while nobles dined in private halls lit by candlelight and musicians played in the corner, the growing bourgeoisie were trying hard to copy them. Wealthy merchants in Paris were beginning to host their own banquets, featuring nearly as many spices, servants, and sugar sculptures.

They may not have had titles, but they had money, and food was the quickest way to prove it.

The Common Folk

For most Parisians, there were no feasts. Bread was the center of every meal, and most people bought it from a baker. Paris bakers had to follow strict rules. The price of a loaf stayed the same, but its weight went up or down with the price of grain, so in a bad year, the same coin bought a smaller loaf. Poorer people bought darker, coarser bread.

With the bread came pottage, a stew of whatever was cheap. That meant cabbage, leeks, onions, peas, and beans, with a scrap of bacon if you were lucky. On the many fast days, there was no meat at all, only salted herring if you could afford it.

And most Parisians drank wine, not ale. Cheap wine came into the city by the boatload, some of it from vineyards on the hills around Paris itself.

Cooking at Home (Or Not)

Most poor households didn’t have ovens. Firewood was expensive, and cooking fuel was rationed. People relied on communal bakehouses or purchased hot food from street vendors.

You might grab a warm meat pie from a stall or a bowl of hot gruel on a cold morning. These vendors were a lifeline for the working poor, especially in winter, when fresh food was scarce and storing anything without spoiling was a constant battle.

What Was in the Pot?

Vegetables were seasonal and local, and that hasn’t really changed in rural France, where I live. No tomatoes, no potatoes, no corn. Those hadn’t reached Europe yet. You had turnips, carrots, garlic, and sometimes dried herbs like thyme or parsley.

Lentils and broad beans were common, both cheap and filling. Fermented and pickled foods helped keep things edible a bit longer.

A Bit of Celebration

On feast days or saints’ days, things got a little better. The Church calendar gave people an excuse to cook something more special. Maybe a roast chicken shared among neighbors or a sweet dish made from boiled grain, honey, and dried fruit. 

Culinary Staples and Ingredients

Bread: The Base of Every Meal

Rich or poor, everyone in Paris ate bread, but not the same bread. The finest white loaf, made with wheat flour sifted again and again, was called pain de Chailly. At the other end was dark, heavy bread made with the coarse leftovers of the milling.

Nothing went to waste. Old bread went into soups, and cooks used breadcrumbs to thicken their sauces.

Meat and Fish

Rich Parisians ate a lot of meat, mostly beef, mutton, pork, and capons, with swan or heron at a big feast. Poorer people bought cheaper cuts and offal, such as tripe.

Fish mattered just as much, because the Church banned meat on Fridays, all through Lent, and on many other days. Rich households kept carp and pike in their own ponds.

Fresh sea fish came from the Channel coast in fast carts called chasse-marée, which drove through the night so the fish reached Paris still fresh. Everyone else ate salted herring, bought by the barrel.

Vegetables, Legumes, and Grains

Paris grew many of its own vegetables. The Marais, today one of the smartest parts of the city, takes its name from the marshland that was drained and turned into vegetable gardens.

The Ménagier gives recipes for porée, a soup of greens. There’s a white one made with leeks, a green one made with chard and other leaves, and a black one cooked with bacon. Dried peas and broad beans fed the poor through the winter, and on fast days, the rich ate them too.

Spices and Flavor

The people who sold spices in Paris were the épiciers, which is where the French word for a grocer’s shop, épicerie, comes from. The Ménagier tells his young wife which spices to buy. Alongside pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and cloves, he lists grains of paradise, a peppery seed from West Africa that was very fashionable in France at the time.

Doctors thought spices did you good, too. They followed the old Greek idea of the four humors, and most spices counted as “hot and dry,” so they helped balance foods thought to be “cold and wet,” such as fish.

Poor cooks didn’t have much money for flavor, so they relied on sharp, sour things. The most common was verjuice, the juice of unripe grapes, which turns up again and again in Paris recipes.

Vinegar did the same job, and Paris had its own vinegar and mustard makers, who sold their goods from shops and barrows in the street.

Herbs were cheap and easy to grow. The Ménagier has a whole section on the garden, with advice on when to sow parsley, sorrel, sage, and marjoram. Poorer Parisians bought small bunches at market, picked them on waste ground outside the walls, or grew a few in pots by the door. Monasteries kept larger herb gardens, partly for the kitchen and partly for medicine.

Authentic Recipes to Relive the Past

You can read about medieval food all day, but there’s nothing quite like trying it for yourself. The flavors are different, sometimes surprising, sometimes oddly familiar, but they give you a real taste of how people once lived.

These two dishes were popular across social classes, with variations adapted to suit what was on hand. One is a creamy comfort food from noble tables, the other a humble staple that could stretch through the week.

Blancmanger, a Dish for the Sick

The name means “white food,” and the color was the whole point. In Taillevent’s Viandier, the cook boils a capon, pounds the white meat with ground almonds and some of the cooking broth, and sweetens it with sugar. To finish, you scatter fried almonds or sugar-coated aniseeds over the top.

Taillevent lists it as a dish for invalids. It was soft, mild, and easy to eat. With sugar and almonds in it, it was also expensive, so only well-off families could make it for someone in their sickbed.

Over the centuries, the meat disappeared, and blancmanger slowly turned into blancmange, the sweet, wobbly pudding many readers will remember from childhood.

Ingredients:

• 1 large chicken breast, poached and shredded
  
• 1 cup short grain rice (like Arborio or pudding rice)
  
• 2 ½ cups unsweetened almond milk
  
• 1 cup chicken broth (from poaching the chicken)
  
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  
• ½ teaspoon ground ginger
  
• Pinch of salt
  
• 1 tablespoon sugar (optional)

Instructions:

1. Poach the chicken in lightly salted water until fully cooked. Set aside to cool, then shred it finely.
   
2. Cook the rice in the almond milk and chicken broth over medium heat, stirring often so it doesn’t stick.
   
3. When the rice is soft and thick, stir in the shredded chicken and spices. Simmer for another 5–10 minutes until creamy.
   
4. Taste and adjust. If you want a hint of sweetness like some wealthier households did, stir in a little sugar.
   
5. Serve warm. If you’re feeling fancy, top with chopped almonds or a sprinkle of extra cinnamon.

Frumenty

In French, it was fromentée, from froment, meaning wheat. You took whole wheat, beat off the husks, and boiled it until the grains burst and went soft. For a poor family, that was more or less it, a bowl of wheat cooked in water or a little broth.

In a rich kitchen, it became something quite different. Taillevent’s version cooks the wheat in milk, thickens it with egg yolks, and colors it yellow with saffron. It was served with venison, and on fast days with porpoise, which the Church counted as fish.

Frumenty lasted far longer in England than in France. Country fairs still sold it in the 1800s, and Thomas Hardy opens The Mayor of Casterbridge with a man who gets drunk on frumenty laced with rum and sells his wife.

Ingredients:

• ¾ cup whole wheat grains (or bulgur wheat or pearled barley if easier to find)
  
• 2 ½ cups water or light broth
  
• 1 cup whole milk or almond milk
  
• 1 tablespoon honey
  
• ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
  
• Pinch of salt
  
• Optional: dried fruit like raisins or currants

Instructions:

1. Soak the grains overnight if you’re using whole wheat berries. It cuts down the cooking time and helps soften them up.
   
2. Boil the grains in water or broth over medium heat for about 30–40 minutes, until they’re soft and plump.
   
3. Stir in the milk, honey, salt, and cinnamon. Let it simmer another 10–15 minutes, stirring occasionally.
   
4. If you’ve got dried fruit, toss some in near the end so it plumps up a bit.
   
5. Serve warm. You can add a splash of milk or another drizzle of honey if you like it richer.

Bringing the Past to the Table

Some of medieval Paris is still on the table, if you know where to look. The city’s grocers are still called épiceries. Verjuice is back on some chefs’ shelves. Blancmanger turned into the British blancmange, and frumenty found its way into Thomas Hardy.

For me, it’s the Ménagier that brings it all to life. Here’s an older man in the 1390s, worried that his young wife won’t know how to buy fish, grow parsley, or plan a dinner. It’s the closest thing we have to a look inside a real Paris kitchen.