[Sca-cooks] Rotten Meat and Spices

[johnna holloway]

Johnnae llyn Lewis sends greetings.

Earlier this summer there was an on-going discussion
of medieval spices used to disguise rotten meat and
was this folklore or not?

I've stumbled across another source, this one by Andrew Dalby.

Dalby writes:

"It is also necessary to look critically at what earlier historians
have said. It is easy to perpetuate errors. At some time in the
twentieth century, a British historian unfamiliar with foreign food
was told (possibly by his mother) that spices serve to mask the
flavour of rotting meat. This assertion is now made of medieval
cuisine in several otherwise well-researched histories written in
Britain. It is undocumented, and, in general, for ancient and
medieval cuisines, it is most unlikely to be true. Spices were a
luxury item, affordable only by those who could afford very good food.
No recipe or household text recommends them to mask bad flavours. On
the contrary, spices are called for liberally in ancient recipe books
for their positive flavour, their aroma, their preservative and dietary
qualities."

This is taken from page 156 of Andrew Dalby.  Dangerous Tastes.
The Story of Spices. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
(In the UK by the British Museum Press, 2000.)

Thought it might be of interest to those who were involved or
followed the initial discussion.

Johnna Holloway