SC - Spicing of Meats (longish)

[Nick Sasso]

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Micaylah,
     I thank you for your post.  It was thought invoking and challenged me
to put together in my mind some ideas that have been amorphically
wandering for some time.  I agree with your staements that the
experiences of a person are, by definition, valid experiences.  The
stories we share here of our rich personal histories must be gaurded
and treated with dignity at all times, as they are who we are and where
we come from.  below are some refutes to some of the other
assertions you suggested in your post.  Your post is included at the end
of mine.

1)  I read the posts along this thread, and seem to see a confusion of
terms growing as it does each time this thread comes up.  Rancid and
spoiled are different from aged and a little off.  Rancid/spoiled seems
very definitely to imply rotten, while old or a little off imply a whole other
degree.  Aged meet has a tanginess and intensity of flavor that is
sought by some factions (including myself) and abhorred by others,
while rancid meat will make your body repulse and purge (unless you
have survived to acclimate your body to rotten animal flesh?).  If the
affore mentioned family regularly ate ROTTEN flesh, they are stronger
men than I will ever be!!

Covering sightly tainted meat, the stuff that just started to get that film on
it and has a bit of 'aroma', with herbs and spices (salts would kill the
beasties and prevent further spoilage--heat may destroy some of the
toxins) could be effective, but there is no covering the stench or flavor
of full blown rancid meat that I can come up with.  Experimented with it
last month without tasting it.......no dice.  Let a small piece of chicken or
beef sit on a counter for two weeks.  Put it in a ziplock, please!!  See if
you can even force your mind even to consider spicing to 'hide the
rancidness'.  Please let me know how you turn out.

2)  The handling of meat and dsiparagement of laws statements are
probably true to my estimation.  The use of anecdotal supposition like
this to characterize an entire era may be overgeneralizing.  When
describing the practices of a region or time block, we have to stay with
the majority or most common practice.  To generalize to the middle ages
from personal annecdote, granted their validity and irrefutability, goes
beyond logical scope as well.

3)  The underclass has not been shown to write cookbooks in the times
we study, so we don't know of their spicing practices.   WE WISH THEY
HAD!  Spices were far too expensive for the serfs and lowest
economic strata.  Most of the recipes we have record of seem to be
from middle class up, who had access to spice wealth and had
resource for fresher meat sources/practices.

4) "The time line thingy, conditions back a few hundred years and the
fact that there were not new and improved killer diseases makes for a
completely different resistance system."..................Two words came to
mind:  Black Plague.  There were Lots of horrible diseases ravishing
Europe for many years, centuries, even (leprosy also comes to mind). 
They certainly had different immune systems.  They also had a different
sense of paranoia in many places about the plague and other
epidemics.  The fact that they did not have microscopes and agar to
study the microbes of the day does not mean they did not have
pneumonia, chickenpox, or even AIDS.  We do know they had many
diseases, and people contracted them and people died from them.  

5) Some microbes may be acclimated to, while others are just not gonna
cooperate.  Ameobis infestation in the intestines cannot be acclimated. 
Girardia will make you wish you were dead........salmonella & anthrax
seem to be far too deadly to allow surviving such innoculation.  Modern
common could  viruses are non-immunable.  This acclimitizing to irritants
IS a good logic to keep in mind (lead in ancient Rome).....you are right. 
We must remember to be judicious in using it as premiss for supposing,
though.  

     Tthank you for the time and space to post here.  I invite and welcome
further private or public discussion of these points and this topic.

niccolo diofrancesco



**********Micaylah wrote: 
If I am reading Sister Mary Endoline correctly she has not indicated that
spicing meat to cover up badness was period, but a fact of life where
she was raised. To me that is pretty much first hand documentation. We
all have come to the agreement long ago that spices were NOT used to
cover up rancid meat in period, but you also seem to disagree with her
statement all round. Unless you can prove that her family/country etc
did not practise this I will be inclined to believe exactly what she says.
Disagreeing with her is moot because her original statement still stands
the test of living thru it and we weren't there to discount it.

There were obviously times when meat in the middle ages wasn't
palatable by our standards. Heck I wouldn't even buy meat in the
supermarket in Mexico when I lived there just because of this issue. I
saw how they handled it, stored it, prepared it etc. If this is going on in
the present day "here and now" I imagine it may have happened in the
middle ages. Granted there were laws about meat selling conditions etc.
but whose to say what happened when it got carted home? Those
same laws, albeit more stringent I would imagine, exist today, but I know
for a fact that different people have different ideas about what is bad
meat and what is not.

Alot of ideal situations and assumption can be made about it being hung
in the earth cellar and so forth, but poverty, ignorance and indifference
makes you do strange things and sometimes lowers your standards of
acceptance of what may have been edible and not. Having the
opportunity to have some meat in the house may just have been enough
incentive to occassionally overlook the fact that meat was a "bit off".
Who knows. Again, we weren't there. Making these assumptions based
on an educated guess is, I think, a good idea here. But blantently saying
that NOBODY ate meat that was off is probably not very accurate.

At any rate, we also have to take into consideration the fact that the
humanbody was very obviously different several hundred years ago.
The time line thingy, conditions back a few hundred years and the fact
that there were not new and improved killer diseases makes for a
completely different resistance system. Now I may be out of my element
here but given the fact that were are a biologically evolving species I
just bet we may have had a whole different system of flora and fauna
in our systems then than now. Perhaps coping with the "little beasties"
was easier then? Does anyone know the differences between "then
and now" as far as our resistance is concerned?

This is an interesting topic to me. Again, having lived in Mexico I had to
train my system to drink the tap water. Very gradual process started by
brushing my teeth in it and progressing from there in increments daily. If
I can change my system in the present to this extent then I can imagine
the difference over several hundred years. But then I'm assuming aren't
I.

Micaylah

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