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

[Edouard de Bruyerecourt]

What piques my curiosity is the current cultural /joke/perception of 
English cuisine as bland and tasteless, while a Victorian opinion upon a 
contemporary cookbook is the meat was heavily spiced.

I can understand the practice of cutting meat up into small bits, or 
shredding it/braying it. It's makes the logistics of sharing at table 
that much easier, rather than staffing every joint with a carver. And 
not all joints are as visually attractive as others, so the hall steward 
doesn't have to deal with who gets which joint. Assuming they are all 
joints. And depending on the size of the animal, the appropriate sized 
chunk of meat/bone may not be that visually appealing. The dishes become 
more visually homogenized, easy to pick up with one's fingers.

Personally, I don't think the practice of serving meat in whole animals, 
joints, or 'chunks' has to do with the condition of the meat as much as 
the practicality of serving. If spicing and shredding meat was primarily 
a way to cover up the off-flavour of old meat, I would expect to see 
references in the documents for preparation of both fresh and off meat. 
At one point, all meat is fresh, and I can't imagine not eating it fresh 
when they had the chance, nor covering up the fresh flavour in the same 
way the did for off meat.

It may be a cultural value that the more complex a recipe (i.e. the more 
ingredients) and the more complex a flavour (heavily spiced) that it was 
more 'cosmopolitan' or 'civilized.' I refer to Pegge's comment " that in 
the days of Rich. II. our ancestors lived much after the French 
fashion." If wild animals eat raw meat, primitive base men eat meat just 
cooked over fire, then civilized man eats spiced and chopped food. 
Heavily spiced food cut into bite sized morsels is seen as an 
improvement over nature. If man now wears fine clothes and lives in 
houses in lieu of skins and caves, then why not do the same with his 
food? Prepared food is an advancement over tearing at meat with bare 
teeth or hacking away at in at the table with the claw-replacing knife.

I might suggest that the idea about medieval spicing of food to cover 
bad taste may have _started_ closer to the early to mid-19th century. I 
recall there was a lot of research at that time into food preservation, 
mostly due to the logistics of large armies of the time and the 
difficulty of feeding them off the land, as well as the rise of military 
navies and their peculiar preservation needs. Heavy spicing of food may 
have started as a way of covering up failed preservation techniques, and 
somebody may have assumed the medieval practice was for the same 
reasons. It may also explain why large roasted animals and joints became 
so popular, as proof in themselves of fresh, healthy meat.

It's quite possible that the 1890 publication was by academic scholars 
who were not really that interested in modern food preservation, so the 
analogy was never made by them, but by others reading the publication, 
thinking "oh, they spiced their food heavily. And we all know what 
_that_ means...."

-- 
Edouard, Sire de Bruyerecourt
bruyere at jeffnet.org
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"After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument
 than why I have one." - Cato the Elder (234-149 BC)