> "Fish Bad, Sugar Good"

> "Similarly, some fruits were safer than others: citrus fruits improved digestion, especially in hot weather, while raisins were good for the stomach, lungs and liver. And nuts were nutritious and good for the brain."

My impression is that refined sugar was extremely rare in medieval times and into the renaissance. But everybody loved raisins, and they were used extensively, even though they were usually imported from Italy and other Mediterranean regions. Various forms of raisin bread (often with dried figs, citrus peels, and currants,) were the definitive medieval festival/feast-day food. Their distant descendants are the stollen, panettone, etc., still popular as holiday treats in Europe.

Certain regions of medieval Germany (and presumably France) grew grapes but had to resort to ingenious methods to dry them into raisins: https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/27/raisins-in-a-cold-cli...