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

[Jeff Gedney]

dont forget...

WE have laws against selling spoiled meat in our modern mundane ordinances. Do we eat spoiled meat?

Such ordinances as exist today do not translate into inferring a custom of intentionally cooking spoiled meat adulterated with spices or other substances today.

Therfore basing the supposition that people in the middle ages adulterated and ate spoiled meat on the existence of laws against the sale of spoiled meats in the middle ages is unfounded.

We have such laws now. We dont tend to eat spoiled meat now.
they had such laws then. It is logical to assume that they did not tend to eat spoiled meats then either.

To support your argument that people in the middle ages ate spoiled and adulterated meats, you need to present a clear example of the intentional consumption of spoiled and adulterated meats. You have failed to provide such.

You have only said "plenty of examples exist in the corpus". But you have not provided any such examples. Please provide them.

You provided proof that people found ways to deal with the smell of some birds, which even in the example you gave was described as "goaty" or gamey, not "putrid". 

You provided proof that people sold spoiled meat, and that such a practice was of sufficient concern that the city fathers of York and Ipswich regulated against the practice.

You have yet to back up the original assertion you made, that there is proof to be found that is counter to the general opinion on this list that the spicing of rotten meat to make it edible is a debunkable myth. Please show this proof.

Frankly I think that if a butcher sold rotten meat, and the city felt it had to regulate against it, it was because the butcher was selling meat that turned out to be unfit to eat, and people complained to the city fathers against the practice. 

To my mind, such laws are counter example to your claim. 

If people complained sufficently to the authorities that they felt it warranted a law prohibiting the practice of SELLING rotten meat, then it may be reaonably inferred that people found the concept of EATING rotten meat sufficiently abhorrent that they needed to get the authorities to prevent the practice of selling it for consumption. 

Saying that this supports the concept that people chose to use spices to cover the smell (as if it could - which it can't) of rotten meat, to make it possible to consume it, is highly illogical.

Capt Elias
-Renaissance Geek of the Cyber Seas

- Help! I am being pecked to death by the Ducks of Dilletanteism! 
There are SO damn many more things I want to try in the SCA than I can possibly have time for. It's killing me!!!

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If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather 
wood, divide the work, and give orders.  Instead, teach them
to yearn for the vast and endless sea. 
  - Antoine de Saint Exupery