[Sca-cooks] Books for Cooks at British Library

[Lonnie D. Harvel]

Daniel Myers wrote:

> Aaarrrggh!
>
> "Food was flavoured with as many spices as could be afforded,  just to 
> disguise the flavour of salt, pickling vinegar or putridness."


If a enough folks point out the error, they will change it.  I sent the 
following to: learning at bl.uk

I encourage others to send polite corrections as well, with whatever 
references you deem appropriate.

Aoghann

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Greetings,

First, thank you for a wonderful site and resource. However, there is an 
error on your page regarding Medieval Food. It is a common misconception 
that "Food was flavoured with as many spices as could be afforded, just 
to disguise the flavour of salt, pickling vinegar or putridness."  
Modern scholarship has shown this to be false. One excellent reference 
to this commonly held fallacy is the following quote from "British Food: 
an Extraordinary Thousand Years of History" by Colin Spencer:

    "A medieval food historian of the 1930s obviously considered the
    recipes to be thoroughly unpleasant; what is more, not having worked
    out the amounts of spices per person, he seriously thought that an
    excessive amount was used and that this must be because they were
    necessary to mask rotting food. Thus began that particular canard
    which, though eminent historians since have considered it nonsense,
    has been difficult to destroy."

Again, I greatly appreciate the time and effort that went into creating 
the "Texts in Context" resources. I am sure that you want your 
commentary to accurately reflect the best in modern scholarship and not 
outdated misconceptions produced by interpretations taken out of context.

Sincerely,
Lonnie D. Harvel
Senior Research Scientist
Georgia Institute of Technology