Well known audiobook narrator Travis Baldree recently release a "comfy" fantasy novella about an orc barbarian who opens a coffee shop. Quite a lot of people have enjoyed the book, so there was the inevitable "here's why I don't like it" post on /r/fantasy. The post included a very interesting criticism of the book:

What you do get though is a town in which cinnamon and cardamom can be easily procured. Coffee beans are just a shipment away, but apparently you can easily put in long-distance orders so yay!

The user is prepared to accept coffee beans as necessary for the premise, but not chocolate or the easy acquisition of cardamom and cinnamon.

It's the resistance to cardamom and cinnamon that gets me. Anyone who knows anything about medieval trade knows that these were common trade goods and well established by the mid-14th century. Perhaps not as easily accessible in a small rural town as a coastal town or major trade hub but, then, the town in the book is a fairly major port.

Not only were both spices available in the Middle Ages, but you could actually make a theoretically affordable biscotti ("thimblet" in the book) with them. Using a fan recipe - approved off by the author - with a couple of substitutions for ingredients (almonds instead of walnuts, raisins instead of currents) and conservative estimates where no data existed, I calculate that the price of a thimblet in Naverre in 1402 would have been under 6 pence, or 1/12th of a male labourer's daily wage (72 pence). A journeyman carpenter or adobe mason earned even more, at 96 pence a day, 16 times the price of the thimblet.

The prices:

(1lb = 372g)

1lb cardamom = 412.7 pennies

1lb sugar = 181.2 pennies

100 oranges = 108 pennies

12lbs of raisins = 82.4 pennies

1lb almonds = 24.6 pennies

1 egg = 1 penny (1409)

As I had no price for flour, I assumed it was no more than 10 pence a pound (as female labourers on 30 pence a day needed to be able to afford it), and I doubled the price of materials to account for labour and firewood, which I also lacked data for.

This all goes to show: unless it's materially impoverished and bland, people don't think fantasy is realistic even when realism is clearly not the end goal.

Bibliography

Money, prices, and wages in Valencia, Aragon, and Navarre, 1351-1500 by Earl J. Hamilton