[Sca-cooks] Here we go again- that old rotten meat myth

[Honour Horne-Jaruk]

Respected friends:
--- On Tue, 3/16/10, Laura C. Minnick <lcm at jeffnet.org> wrote:
> Raphaella DiContini wrote:
> > http://chicagoweekly.net/2010/03/11/medieval-hard-times-the-society-for-creative-anachronism-finds-things-aren%e2%80%99t-what-they-used-to-be/comment-page-1/#comment-18411
> > 
> > "These “period Nazis” (snip)
> Widespread bowel pain constituted that night’s party
> favor. "
> > 
> > I completely dislike the term "Nazi" used in any way
> outside of appropriate WWII reference, and the seemingly
> endless falacy of rotten meat being serves is one of my
> biggest culinary misinformation pet peeve.
> > 
> > In joyous service, Raffaella   
> I left a comment. We'll see if they actually put it up.
> 
> 'Lainie
> 
> -- "It is our choices Harry, that show what we truly are,
> far more than our abilities."  -Albus Dumbledore
 
     So did I. Just in case they don't post it, here's what I said. Go ahead and print it up for your Baronial press kit.
Urban legend: “people in the middle ages ate rotten meat and covered up the taste with spices.”
I heard this in High school, and still hear it today. Unfortunately, it says more about how bad modern education is than it does about the middle ages. In those days, most animals were either kept alive till they reached the kitchen door (very common) or bought from the butcher only a few hours before cooking. So the stuff simply didn’t have time to decay.Most of the people too poor for either of the above ate almost no meat, so when they got it at all, they cooked and ate it very quickly rather than risk it spoiling.In the late winter, there was a lot of salted, smoked,and pickled food on the tables; but salted food isn’t rotten, just boring. Cookbooks from that period mention more spices for preparing meat than we would use now for the same dishes. However, that was because spices were expensive, and using lots was showing off. That kind of food change happens all the time. For example, nowadays serving twenty guests two-pound lobsters would
 definitely be showing off; but in the 1600s, the prisoners in Boston jail rioted because lobsters were the cheapest protein around, so the jailer was stealing their meat money and giving them lobster. By the way: Dogs can eat meat that is no longer safe for humans. Some of them prefer it. The Nobles, who ate most of the meat, kept dogs. So…
Were they able to eat all the meat from larger animals ( for example sheep) before it spoiled?
Well, since most of the meat was going to the Higher Classes, they would have a household much larger than ours are now. Start with grandparents, unmarried aunts, more children, perhaps a resident chaplain or clark, plus servants. Suddenly a sheep (then a third to half the weight of sheep now) isn’t stretching very far. The live weight included stuff we include in the meat at sale, such as bones, that they used separately or sold. The larger an animal of any given breed is, the smaller the proportion of its total body weight is inedible bones, skin, tendons, etc; so the amount of edible meat on those smaller live animals was even smaller in proportion to their live weight than it is today. Start with Sunday’s large meal for guests, the next day’s mince in sauces for the family and servants, the third day’s pottage which has been kept sterile at a slow simmer for three days, and, of course, all that you can spare from that into the salt-barrels to
 store for winter. The there’s the innards your cook sold to the poor (heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, sweetbreads, stomachs, brains and tongue) and the best scraps for hawks and worst scraps for the dogs. Fifty pounds or less of meat spread across all that isn’t long for this world. When the poor killed a sheep, they promptly dried, salted and smoked the vast majority of it. So it would not be at all rotten, just not very tasty to our over-nice palates. There’s a big difference between the two.
An example: I loathe dried salt cod. Really loathe it. But it’s not in any way bad for me, very nearly bacteria-free (unlike ‘fresh’ fish in a grocery in the midwest) and will keep me quite well and safely fed. Would I add herbs or spices if I could? Yes, lots. Would they be covering spoilage? No, not even a little.
Also, some spices– alliums like garlic and leeks, ginger, cloves, and others- are, in and of themselves, anti-bacterial. So spiced fresh meat would be better the next day than our un-spiced meat.
Our meat, shipped from a tiny handful of midwest slaughterhouses, is often eight or more days old by the time it hits the Supermarket meat counter. Then we take it home and eat it a week later. And lots of very bad bacteria can grow in the cold.
     Just when you think it's safe to go out of the kitchen...
Honour/Una/Alizaundre de Brebeuf, COL SCA