SC - Re: Spice Use and Food Poisoning, etc.

[Terry Nutter]

Hi, Katerine here.  Allison responds to Phillipa:

>Philippa,
>
>>> I quite understand growing up using what to some would be "heavy
>handed" spicing, but for what reason did this heavy use of spice start? 
>It is now tradition, but what were the origins?  And even if it weren't
>to cover the taste of meat going slightly "off", could it have been
>because the wild vegetables and gamier meat had stronger basic flavors
>which are balanced better by stronger spicing?<<
>
>If you try eating the dandelion greens and other wild herbs, you will
>find them to be quite bitter.  A great deal of game has a strong taste
>compared to our supermarket meats.  These would be very good reasons to
>add sugar to so many foods and to use many spices.  

The difficulty with this argument is that the vast majority of medieval
foodstuffs, at least in upper class kitchens (which is where spice use
is most concentrated) were domestic -- both meats and vegetables.
Also, sugar is not particularly common in medieval cuisine outside
England prior to the 15th (and in some places 16th) century.  Pot
greens and herbs were cultivated and grown in gardens; chicken and
pork, the staple meats, were raised domestically (as were a wide
variety of other meat sources, including ducks, geese, doves, cattle,
sheep, and goats).  Principles of selective breeding were well
understood, and used to develop desirable properties.

>                                                    Given the natural
>foods and the use of verjuice in so many receipts, I think that medieval
>preferances must have been rather different from ours.  Personally, I
>don't much like 'sour' and do not at all enjoy 'bitter'.  And, I'm far
>too fond of salt.  

A dish with verjuice or vinegar in it need not be sour, and I've never
produced a dish from a medieval recipe that was bitter.  As to salt, it
is one of the most common ingredients in the corpus; and there's good
reason to believe that it was taken for granted, to the extent that 
it may have been expected in dishes where it wasn't mentioned.  (There's
a recipe that contains the instruction "Salt it with sugar", indicating
that the use of salt was so basic that the term was used as a verb
meaning "sprinkle something on that".)  Also, of course, salt cellars
were on the table.  I don't see much reason to believe that medievals
at significantly less salty food than most modern Americans.

>                   A medieval diner, transported to one of my feasts
>would very likely say 'Yech!' to even my carefully redacted attempts. 

Thus *may* be so, but I don't think we have enough evidence to say that
it is very likely.

>And I'd do the same in reverse...  :-p

Same here.

>However carefully we attempt to redact, there is a certain propensity for
>tastes in the modern palate that I believe are different than the period
>ones.  We do the best we can, but do we really think we're doing the
>same?  I don't.

We can't know.  But I'm less concerned about the tendency to reject from
distaste than about the tendency to make assumptions -- either that the
original would have tasted unacceptable to moderns, or that it would have
tasted normal to us.

>As for the current heavy use of pepper in foods, I think that followed
>the popularity of Mexican--or American-version Mexican--foods.  Tests
>have been done by restaurant chains and food companies, and they have
>found that more people ate more food if it were heavily spiced.  

Pepper was the cheapest medieval spice, and the one most heavily documented
as used widely not only in upper class cookery but in every class right
down to peasants.  The current use is a revival (not particularly of
medieval practices; relative to a significant drop here in the middle of
this century).  Medievals used a number of pepper-like spices, including
cubeb and grains of paradise (I'm not speaking botannically, but in
terms of general flavor class), both of which I've fed to people with
no interest whatsoever in historical cuisine, to rave reviews.  The
bottom line, I think, is that people everywhere use spices because they
*taste good*.  That so many spices show up across so wide a swath of
culinary traditions suggests that this is simply a human tendency.  How
much spices we eat results, among other things, from the food we're
used to.  Whether people in general like the flavor of any spices at all 
seems more strongly related to the interaction between human taste and 
smell and the spices themselves.

Cheers,

- -- Katerine/Terry