A Standard Peasants Meal

Presumably peasants had homegrown vegetables sautéed in the olive oil so prevalent, oatmeal from the wheat kernels they ground, scrambled eggs from the chicken coop, milk, cheese, yogurt and butter from the family sheep and goat, and said “yuummm” when they bit into a summertime piece of fresh fruit such as pears or peaches.

“For I am bringing you into a good land - a land of streams and pools of water, with springs flowing in the valleys and hills; a land with milk and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey, a land where bread is not scarce and you will lack nothing, a land where rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills.” (Deut 8:6-9)

They dried fruit on their roofs, and probably stored it in a cistern. Grapes, often converted to wine, joined wheat and olives as a top-three crop in Galilee, and fig trees were probably popular since they produced ten months of the year. Most families had both an oven and a stove, both of which were cheap and made of clay. Fish sauces, based on various types and parts of fish, were popular, inexpensive and used on innumerable dishes including fish, eggs and bread. Coastal areas such as the one pictured above probably had tilapia fried in pomegranate wine or quite possibly carp baked in a lemon garlic sauce, although I’m not sure they grew lemons.

Sound too modern? Tilapia Galilea, called musht, were plentiful in the Sea of Galilee, pomegranates were a popular crop and olive oil was one of the three staples of Galilee. Carp were fished there extensively, they grew both garlic and onions as well as squash and a variety of other vegetables, and while they probably couldn’t afford to have jars of twenty different spices in their cupboard it’s likely that they had some herbs growing in their courtyard. “You tithe a tenth of your dill, mint and cummin…”

Chickens birthed the all-important eggs for the average fisherman, but Galilee was an agricultural society and chicken meat may have been popular on farms. Fish, presumably enormously popular in the coastal regions where it could be consumed fresh – or fresher, at least – were also preserved and packed off for the interior.

Pasta would have been too much work to make – as it was the women spent up to four hours a day smushing wheat kernels into flour and turning out the daily bread. (I gained a new appreciation for Wegman’s when I read that, in the Nazareth Village book.) Any kind of beef was beyond a peasants means on an average day, and the Sabbath meal – the weekly special treat – was generally a kind of fish called carp, and thus presumably not daily fare. Salted sardines, on the other hand, were common food.

For the most part, peasants had barely enough money to eat and frequently lived in debt, so they ate whatever was cheapest at that time of year. (I have yet to run across mention of blueberries, which is very distressing. The poor people! What kind of life is life without blueberries?)