[Sca-cooks] Rotten meat and spices... (a few excerpts from Apicius)

[El Hermoso Dormiendo]

Anybody got a pointer to "Drummond et al, 1958", which appears to be the sole 
source for reference to "using spices to hide rotten meat" in this work.  

Seems odd - as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, spices tended to 
be more expensive than fresh meat in the first place, and the paper is 
talking about the butchers, not the cooks, using the unspecified "spices" to 
allegedly "mask decay".  (Alternative explanation - some spices [cloves, 
etc.] DO have antimicrobial properties - if the butchers are wealthy enough 
to throw spices on the meat that they are selling to the cooks, perhaps 
instead of spicing "spoiled" meat it may have been done to PREVENT decay? 
Spiced pickling solutions or spiced brine, maybe? Purely speculating here...)

If the BUTCHERS were selling spoiled meats, that doesn't indicate that the 
cooks didn't get them home, cook them, taste them, and then exclaim "UGH!  
This crap is inedible!  That bastard sold me bad meat!" rather than just 
dumping more spices on it in hopes that nobody will notice and blame them 
when they get sick...

Seriously - I WOULD like to find out what "Drummond et al, 1958" is so I can
dig up a copy to read.  If someone could dig up the full citation there I'd 
like to look it up and read it.  

On Wednesday 13 April 2005 08:51 am, Speaker To Idiots wrote:
[...]
> Food safety in urban contexts
> soon became the target of city government, and the
> duplicity of butchers selling cheap meats spiced to
> mask decay and of other merchants trying to dump
> lower-cost spoiled foods on consumers meant that
> these hazards increased as socioeconomic status and
> purchasing power decreased (Drummond et al.,
> 1958). This meant that dietary improvements experienced
> by the poor were partially offset by questionable
> food quality.