SC - rancid meat

[WOLFMOMSCA at aol.com]

One of the theories I like to ponder as possible concerning this whole "spice
to cover bad meat" thing is this:

The spicing of meat from domesticated animals may have "evolved" from earlier
uses of herbs & such to remove the taste of fear from the meat of game
animals.  Having grown up in a hunting family, and being a moderately
efficient hunter in my own right, I know from first-hand experience just what
that "fear" tastes like.  Being also a fairly decent cook of game meats, I
know that soaking and marinading what I call "run-shot" game can remove enough
of the hormones involved to make the meat palatable to even the most modern
human.

It goes like this:  You've got a nice, big deer in your sights.  You squeeze
the trigger, and the durn thing moves.  Instead of taking him cleanly and
efficiently by severing the spine, the bullet (or buckshot, for the
shotgunners in the crowd) rips through a haunch.  Have you ever been shot?
Hurts like crazy, and your adrenal glands kick into overdrive almost
immediately.  The "smell of fear" is a real thing, caused by hormonal
overload.  That "smell of fear" becomes a very intense odor in all of the meat
you get from the animal, once you track it and finish killing it.  A deer has
extra-large adrenal glands, anyway, and now he's been running, scared out of
his wits, for a mile or more.  Frugal hunters (those who actually hunt for the
table, not for weird things like trophies) don't throw away this meat. There
are a zillion recipes, passed down from mother to daughter and father to son
(or vice versa), for making this meat edible.  It's work, and it's time-
consuming, but then haste does make waste, doesn't it?  The end result is
worth it.

Now, translate this to the Middle Ages.  Spears, arrows, and other
projectiles, thrown by hand or with some extra oomph from a bow or thrower,
probably made a clean kill once in a while.  If you read the hunting bits from
letters and minor treatises on other subjects, you will find that the need to
chase a game animal was almost always present in the literature.  If they had
to chase it, I guarantee the meat tasted pretty god-awful unless the cook knew
what he was doing.  Therefore, I suspect that the heavily-spiced meat recipes
from the earliest medieval cooking texts were originally used for game meats,
not domesticated ones.  I imagine that when a manor house cook was told the
King was coming to visit, the first thing he did was send out hunters, so the
meat could be properly prepared for palatability.  Imagine his dismay when
said King showed up on the doorstep three hours later, hard on the heels of
his time-delayed messenger.  Two options:  Feed the King some pretty rank-
tasting game, or find something else to serve up for supper.  I don't think
I'd like to be the cook who served up fresh-killed game to his sovereign.
They didn't have unemployment benefits in the Middle Ages.  ;=)

Walk in peace,
Wolfmother
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