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

[Phlip]

Ene bichizh ogsen baina shuu...

> 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.
> --
> David/Cariadoc

Well, I was interested in historical cooking long before I became involved
in SCA, with my mother, and one of the things we discovered was that the
recipes we'd found and the spicings and cooking they required were what we
felt was overkill- extreme overkill, particularly dealing with venison
recipes. Having read a fair amount in the way of Medieval romances and the
like (Mom read me the Morte d'Arther and the Once and Future King until I
got big enough to grab the books and read them for myself ;-) we came to the
conclusion that the reason these recipes for game meats were so over-cooked
was the knightly habit of scaring the blazes out of the poor beasts and
running them all over the landscape- that, combined with the usage of beef
in period, in other words, cattle were slaughtered when they were too old to
work or milk, other than the (male) excess calves) led us to believe that
the meats they had in period were tough and required long cooking. Add in
the then-belief that their teeth were rotton (after all, we were fixing
cavities at the dentists every six months, not realizing that our modern,
high sugar diet might have something to do with that), and we "knew" the
only dental care they had was teeth pulling, so.. it seemed to make sense.

I figure another factor that contributes to the "rotten food" thought
pattern is that we're so proud of our modern conveniences like freezers and
refrigerators, that we tend to forget that they slaughtered in the cool of
the year, and had numerous methods of preparation, appropriate to their
seasonal variations- nowadays, we can ship in all sorts of stuff from half
around the world within 24 hours- then, obviously, they couldn't, so had to
put up with "rotten" food much of the year. Add in the value and
desirability of spices, and it's easy to jump to a false conclusion- after
all, which of us, having left something special in the fridge or freezer, a
bit past its prime, hasn't chosen a spicy dish rather than a bland dish, to
disguise the foodstuff's faults? Obviously, they did the same, but they were
dumber than we are, so did it with rotten food ;-)

And then again, don't get me started on anthropolological theories. Suspect
a lot of their more creative errors might be avoided if the folks in ivory
towers came down long enough to do for themselves...

Phlip

"When in doubt, heat it up and hit it with a hammer."
 Blacksmith's credo.

 If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is probably not a
cat.

Never a horse that cain't be rode,
And never a rider who cain't be throwed....