-In those days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew had food on it that had been there for quite a while - hence the rhyme "Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot nine days old". Sometimes they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of a wealth that man "could bring home the bacon". They would cut off a little to share with guests and all sit and "chew the fat".

-Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with a high acid content cause some of the lead to leach into the food, causing lead poisoning and death. This would happen most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were thought to be poisonous. Most people did not have pewter plates, but had trechers, a piece of wood with the middle scooped more like a bowl. Trenchers were often often from stale bread, which was so old and hard that they could be used for quite some time. Trenchers were never washed and a lot of times worms and mold got into the wood and bread. After eating off workmy, moldy trenchers, one would get "trench mouth". Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the familiy got the middle, and the guest got the top, or "upper crust".