[Sca-cooks] Cooking techniques- Was Funges Follies-

[grizly at mindspring.com]

Sorry for the butcher job below, but I tried to take the material I am responding to and maintain the context.

One thing we must consider in modern livestock characteristics is anabolic steroids, other steroids and other chemical/hormonal treatments.  If you haven't seen a "cancer pile" outside a chicken processing plant, you haven't lived.  I contend that we ARE changing animal characteristics in ways we may not even understand.  They react differently to cooking methods now than even 50 years ago.

The other issue I wanted to bring to thought is the reality that there are other tissues at play in our animal foods than just proteins and fats (and there are numerous types of each floating around ina carcass).  We have to consider ratios of connective tissues like callogenous fibers as well as entrails.  Callogen adn other connective tissues vastly change the quality and cooking behaviors of meat, and I suspect that a vastly sendentary penned animal today fed on a varied feed including sometimes (though not much any more) animal proteins would develop various tissues differently.  Certainly conjecture, but it is a big consideration in how we prepare and cook our meats . . . and the final product qualities available to us.

Entrails are a food product greatly overlooked in our US culture and greatly influenced by modern chemical husbandry.  Those innards can be awfully different than a wild or free range beastie.

I cannot speak inteligently of the more heard-raised critters, so I'll leave off here.

niccolo difrancesco
(not to mention aging and frozen and thawed meats . . . oy)

--- Phlip wrote:
<<<I tend not to think so, the reason being that while fashions in animals change-fattier here, leaner there, the basic muscle fibers of animals are structurally the same. . . SNIP. . . Yes, she/they have a point- we aren't necessarily
eating EXACTLY the same things that were eaten in
period- there are some differences- but I don't feel that they're significant enough that what we eat now is all that different from what they ate then. <<SNIP>>. Cow is cow, pig is pig, chicken
is chicken, and our minor modifications in body shape and fat content in the past few hundred years are nothing like the evolutionary changes across millions of years. Muscle tissue is muscle tissue, regardless.  >>><<<SNIP>>> While we don't necessarily have materials that are exactly the same as medieval materials, we do have materials with the same characteristics.
Or, at least, that's my thinking on the subject. "A difference which makes no difference, is no difference".

Phlip