According to most books about the British Stone Age, everybody ate a long list of a few dozen different types of mammal and bird (many not currently on the menu), seafood, and.....hazelnuts. Maybe also "berries".
The only-hazelnut thing really annoys me - although obviously meat is a massive deal to any subsistence society, all modern hunter-gatherer cultures that I am aware of back up meat with a thorough knowledge about their local plants - both what to eat, what not to eat, and what can be used "medicinally" (including recreationally).
To fully disclose my motives here, my son and I are both vegetarian, so I have created a (very loosely) Old Stone Age vegetarian meal that can be cooked on an open fire for living history activity purposes - non-vegetarians could easily add some venison, duck meat or whelks etc (not pheasant or rabbit, they weren't here yet). The key teaching point about the food for the Old Stone Age is that it would need to be found wild, so you need to avoid grains, beans/peas and milk products. It also needs to be found locally, so nothing native to another continent (tropical fruit, tomato/potato/sweetcorn etc).
Whilst researching this I found out a lot of information about foraging for wild plants in Britain today, none of which looked hugely appetising for the amount of effort needed, and much of which looked fraught with potential danger (to a non-hunter-gatherer everything seems to look like very toxic hemlock, which you definitely don't want to feed to your child or yourself). The exception is obviously elderberry and blackberry-picking in autumn - wash well and pick from above dog-wee height - and for the slightly more adventurous, finding someone with a garden tree that has a surplus of sloes, damsons or plums. You can also pick the tops off nettles for soup at the right time of year (I have done this, nettle soup is quite edible - though to be honest nettle leaves may still be preferable as a nutritious supplement stirred into some Heinz tomato).
Fortunately for the time-poor, it appears that you can also be a stone age chef very efficiently at Waitrose, who sell things like duck eggs, honey with a chunk of honeycomb in the jar, out-of-season blackberries and - less authentically - bottled Fentiman's dandelion & burdock drink (mostly pear juice, but pears are still on-brand). They also sell the most stone age ready meal I have ever seen; venison steak with blackberry and elderberry.
If you extend the meal to the New Stone Age then you encompass the invention of farming and you can have barley risotto with goats cheese and mushrooms, duck-egg and watercress rolls (provided you get speciality bread rather than sliced white), stewed (heritage) apple with cream, and so on. Domestication of aurochs (cow), boar (pig) and wild sheep/goats starts at this time, so more familiar farmed animal products appear - but not chicken or turkey yet.
(hazelnuts, blackberries, apple, honey/honeycomb, duck eggs, mushrooms, elderberries. Nettles. Dandelion & Burdock. )
Neolithic: add grapes, wheat/barley.
Comments