Spice Use and Food Poisoning, etc.

[Judy Gerjuoy]

Adamantius,

I agree:  I don't think that spices were necessarily used to cover *spoiled*
meat; however, I do think that spices were in part used to cover slightly, to
more than slightly, off flavors.   I will grant that the spices most likely to
be used were the cheapest -- not saffron and its ilk.

To take on your point about hanging meat to tenderize them -- that is often
one reason given; however, as an avid consumer of venison, I have never
noticed a difference between meat hung for a couple of days and meat not.  The
difference is in the cooking.  

Regarding the issue of bakers in France, that point was to support the fact
that people did use old meat, sometimes not being terribly careful enough
about how old it was.  (BTW: The author in Savoring the Past also mentions the
use of spices for jazzing up aging food and leftovers.)

That said,  I was going on to point out other reasons why spices were used
heavily at times.  I apologize that this was not clear in my post.  

>I feel that the _presence_ of the spices might indicate status, but
>there being no indication in the recipes of how much of any of them were
>used, it is impossible to say that they were used in a heavy-handed
>fashion. We know they were expensive, and have a fair idea of why. 
Actually, there are some ways -- perhaps not the best -- to determine how much
of different spices were used.  What we can do, as suggested in Savouring the
Past, is look at the household bills and see where the increases in spending
for spices occurred.  What Savouring pointed out was that we could see
increases in spending and that these increases were more than could be
accounted for in just increased amounts of food.  In addition, the author
quotes a few steward diaries complaining about the cooks' heavy hand.  Now
just how heavy that was to our modern palates is hard to say, but we do have
some recipies that serve as a starting point.   

Derdriu