[Sca-cooks] Origin of the "spice to hide taste of rotten meat" myth?

[Robin Carroll-Mann]

On 24 Jul 2003, at 12:37, david friedman wrote:

> In the course of a Usenet discussion, someone raised the question of 
> when and where the belief that medievals used lots of spices to hide 
> the taste of rotten meat originated. The best I could do was point at 
> the reference to the strong stomachs of our ancestors in the 
> introduction to _Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books_, done about 
> 1890--but that says nothing about rotten meat. I said I would put the 
> question to this list.

I looked around on the Web.  The only explanation that I could find for the origin of 
the myth came from The Jargon File, which atrributes it to Samuel Pegge.  
http://www.elsewhere.org/jargon/html/entry/saga.html
(Scroll to the bottom of the page)

I've looked through Samuel Pegge's introduction to his 1780 edition of "The Form of 
Cury".  It says nothing about rotten meat, but does promote the idea that medieval 
people ate highly-spiced food, and rarely ate plain roasted meat.

Here are a few relevant quotes:

"My next observation is, that the messes both in the roll and the Editor's MS, are 
chiefly soups, potages, ragouts, hashes, and the like hotche-potches; entire joints of 
meat being never _served_, and animals, whether fish or fowl, seldom brought to 
table whole, but hacked and hewed, and cut in pieces or gobbets [77]; the mortar 
also was in great request, some messes being actually denominated from it, as 
_mortrews_, or _morterelys_ as in the Editor's MS."

"Many of them are so highly seasoned, are such strange and heterogeneous 
compositions, meer olios and gallimawfreys, that they seem removed as far as 
possible from the intention of contributing to health; indeed the messes are so 
redundant and complex, that in regard to herbs, in No. 6, no less than ten are used, 
where we should now be content with two or three: and so the sallad, No. 76, 
consists of no less than 14 ingredients."

"But then it may be said, what becomes of the old English hospitaliiy in this case, 
the _roast-beef of Old England_, so much talked of? I answer, these bulky and 
magnificent dishes must have been the product of later reigns, perhaps of queen 
Elizabeth's time, since it is plain that in the days of Rich. II. our ancestors lived much 
after the French fashion."

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext05/8cury10.txt

I've read through the whole preface, and it doesn't seem that Pegge held to the rotten 
meat theory.  (I have not read any other writings by him on the subject.)  However, it 
does show that the notion of "highly spiced" medieval food goes back at least a 
century before your Victorian example. Someone reading Pegge's preface would be 
presented with two "facts":

1. Medieval dishes were "highly seasoned".
2. Meat was usually served in stews and potages, rather than as plain roasts.

>From this point on, I can only speculate.  Someone may have taken Pegge's 
research, and jumped to the conclusion that there was only one reason that 
Englishmen would eat spicy stews instead of good honest roast beef.



Brighid ni Chiarain *** mka Robin Carroll-Mann
Barony of Settmour Swamp, East Kingdom
rcmann4 at earthlink.net