[Sca-cooks] Re: Rotten meat and spices...

[Chris Stanifer]

--- smcclune at earthlink.net wrote:
> Yes, but .... refrigeration isn't the only way to preserve meat.  They could (and did) smoke,
> pickle/"sowce", and salt meat.  They could even bake it into a coffyn or turn it into sausage to
> preserve it.  We have recipes telling us how to do all of these things.  Do we have any reason
> to believe that they would have preferred the taste of "off" meats to any of these?


There is no implication for preference in my message, merely that it was done, and with enough
apparent regularity that it has made it into the cookbooks of the day.  The fact that it is
mentioned at all in an otherwise 'sophisticated' cookbook or treatise on foods is an indication,
at least to me, that spicing or otherwise masking meats and other foods which had 'gone off' was
an acceptable (or even necessary) practice, even amongst the wealthier classes.

> Having said that, I do seem to remember seeing one recipe somewhere that said something about
> making old meat new again by washing it in wine, but of course, I can't find it now!
> 
> Still, that's one out of hundreds, so while they might have tried to pass off old meat as new
> once in a while, I can't help but feel that it was the exception rather than the rule.
> 


Yes, there are recipes which call for 'fine' or 'fair' meats...and there are others which tell you
how to handle those which are not so fine or fair.  The mere mention of fine or fair meats does
not, in any way, indicate that older, gamier or even putrid meats were not used as well.  The
recipes for how to handle these meats, in fact, is a direct implication that it was done.

We take the good with the bad :)  I'd love to think that the populace in my dreamy medieval world
only ate the best of the best, too.... but the evidence speaks against it time after time.

William de Grandfort





>

Through teeth of sharks, the Autumn barks.....and Winter squarely bites me.


		
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