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Acquired Taste
The French Origins of Modern Cooking
by T. Sarah Peterson
Eating in America
by Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont
Food and Culture: a Reader
edited by Carole Counihan and Penny van Esterik
Food in History
by Reay Tannahill
From Fireplace to Cookstove
Technology and the Domestic Ideal in America
by Priscilla J. Brewer
Hungering for America
by Hasia R. Diner
A Mediterranean Feast
by Clifford A. Wright
Near a Thousand Tables
by Felipe Fernandez Armesto
Paradox of Plenty: a Social History of Eating in Modern America
by Harvey Levenstein
Spices and Rotten Meat
Old Saw: "They Used A Lot of Spices to Disguise Spoiled Meat."
by Alice Arndt
Medieval cuisine is notable for its astonishing seasoning. Sharp, spicy sauces pointed with vinegar and richly flavored with numerous spices, accompanied each dish of meat, fowl, or fish; vegetables were stewed with herbs and spices; an the final course of a grand meal invariably featured a highly spiced wine called hippocras. After dinner, the nobility retired to their rooms to nibble epices de chambre. Spices were the consuming passion of the Middle Ages, devoured by all but the poorest. The wealthier one was, the more spices one consumed.
The number of different spices familiar to the medieval cooks exceeds that of any other period in the West, yielding complex flavors (though generally the seasonings were not hot—chilies, after all, were still to be introduced from the New World.) This is true even though the ancient Romans had been very fond of exotic spices and had conducted a busy trade with India. It remains true today, despite our own recent curiosity about ethnic foods and the fact that spice imports to the US have risen steadily for over a decade.
Later historians and chefs, at a loss to explain this extravagant taste for spices so foreign to their own culinary customs, came up with an explanation which—although it is wrong—has been embraced and repeated with great relish ever since: namely, that medieval eaters, poor dears, had to season their food heavily in order to disguise the unsavory taste of spoiled meat.
This theory allows us in the 20th century to feel a comfortable superiority to the people of the past (and often, we suspect, as well, to tropical regions in what we call the Third World.) We are modern, scientific, technologically advanced. They were backward, lacking refrigeration, modern canning technology, and any notion of the bacteria which were acting on their foods. Unable to feed their herds, we assume, through the long winters, they had to slaughter all their cattle in the fall and salt the meat in an attempt to preserve it. Even so, it went off, and would have been impossible to eat without a lot of potent spices, however bizarre the flavor that amount of seasoning might be. Our tastes are far more refined than those of the simple, undereducated, benighted souls of the Middle Ages, and thank Heaven, we don't have to eat that way.
Of course, many cultures today use a good many spices to produce rather tasty dishes. Spices are the splendor in wholesome, delicious, and, incidentally, often vegetarian, Indian food. The cooking of southeast Asia is another example of an extraordinarily fine—and spicy—cuisine. And the tremendous popularity of fiery peppers in Mexican fare is virtually a mainstream taste in modern North America. Perhaps the cooking the Middle Ages was no so aberrant after all. It is time to take another look at our old notions about medieval, and later, seasoning.
Spices and spoiled meat: During the middle Ages, large market towns, and many smaller ones, controlled the quality of the goods sold there, and provided inspectors to enforce its laws. The records of regulations and court cases concerning the sale of putrid meat show that people were aware of the importance of freshness, and what's more they felt it was possible to ensure that they were given fresh meat. When in 1319, William Sperlyn was pilloried in London in front of two carcasses of putrid beef he had attempted to sell, there is no evidence of a resigned, "what-the-heck,-I'll-just-cover-up-the-off-flavors-with-spices" sort of attitude toward his product.
Medieval recipes do not suggest heavier seasoning for tainted meat than for fresh; indeed, the only author I know who mentions spoiled meat at all is Platina, whose De honesta voluptate was destined to become the first printed cookbook in 1475. Platina warns cooks to salt carefully the flesh of piglets "lest it start to spoil or taste rancid." In his section on ham, he instructs the reader to plunge a knife into the middle and smell it; if it does not have a good odor, one should let it alone.
Sir Jack Drummond in his book The Englishman and His Food, offers another alleged proof of the "tainted meat" hypothesis. Drummond quotes Hugh Platt's The Jewell House of Art and Nature, 1594, suggestion of wrapping "greene" venison in a cloth and burying it for a few hours to make it "sweet enough to be eaten." The word "green" was often used in past times to describe fresh foods, including meat, in this case quite probably venison not yet hung for flavor and tenderness.
In medieval cookbooks, meatless Lenten dishes are just as highly seasoned as meats and meat's sauces. Vegetables, too, are copiously spiced: chickpeas are cooked with cinnamon and sage, for example; mushroom tarts contain ginger, cloves, cinnamon, and grated cheese; and saffron, cubebs, cardamom, and mace flavor applesauce. To make hippocras, grains of paradise, long pepper, and sugar—then a rare, expensive substance which was also considered a spice—are added to wine.
Spices and preservation: Spices certainly contribute to the preservation process but their use in tropical cuisines has more to do with inducing perspiration, which helps cool the diner, than to preserve meat. Contrast the heat of tropical cuisines with those of hot, desert regions, where perspiration is not as desirable, and flavoring tends towards aromatic and herbal and avoiding extremes of pungency.
Finally, medieval methods of food preservation were effective and produced the same delicious products we produce today: bacon, salt fish, spiced sausages, and dried beef have remained popular over the centuries. Furthermore, spices in medieval quantities were abandoned in European cuisines long before the introduction of modern methods of refrigeration and preserving.
Spices and conspicuous consumption: Imported over long distances from Africa, India, Indonesia, or China, spices were indeed expensive. Yet surviving household accounts show purchases of vast amounts of spice, quantities which work out to a annual consumption per person far beyond what we consume today. Those who could afford to indulge themselves this extent could also afford to feed their cattle through the winter and so eat freshly slaughtered beef. Besides, the nobility also had year-round access to the wild animals in their game preserves.
What did medieval food taste like? It is difficult to tell. Period recipes do not specify quantities. Keep in mind that the long time spices spent in transit, coupled with the customary long storage period—up to ten years—probably made medieval seasoning much less potent than what we use today. But medieval dishes would not have been bland, for the flavor of the spice was the flavor of wealth and power. Conspicuous consumption was the feature at every medieval banquet, where precious silver pieces were routinely displayed on a sideboard and the host was honored by the placement of an elaborate salt cellar squarely in front of him. The music and entertainment, the elegant decor, the abundant food—predominately meats—and the spicing thereof, were all designed to impress guests and onlookers.
Spices and the Doctrine of Humors: Spices were not limited to grand occasions. They were used at every meal, and their primary purpose was to ensure the good health of the master and his household. Since ancient times, the humoral system of health described all foods and even the physical natures of all human in terms of varying quantities of hot or cold, moist or dry, which had to be kept in balance. Disruption of the balance led to illness. In keeping with accepted medical theory, the cook carefully selected spices to add to food in accordance with its humoral make-up. For example, the potentially dangerous moistness of beef could be tempered by a dollop of a sauce redolent of dry spices, while the hot natures of the spices themselves would be balanced by the vinegar basis of the sauce.
There is a great deal more evidence for this argument than for the old spoiled meat explanation of medieval spicing. Every herbal takes great pains to list the humoral nature of each herb or spice. Medieval medical books, where we often find recipes, discuss diet at length. While these cookbooks contain no special instructions for cooking with fresh or spoiled meat, there are some variations in the sauce making methods for summer and winter, since according to the doctrine of humors, the seasons, too, have different qualities of heat and moisture.
In our age, in which physicians are largely oblivious to diet, we may be skeptical of the humoral theory, and find people of the Middle Ages were far more credulous than we are. But credulity depends on what one is asked to believe. Medieval people may have believed that cinnamon came from the nest of the phoenix, that serpents guarded pepper plants, that grains of Paradise grew in the Garden of Eden, and that spices could cure their ills, but they would laugh in amazement at the preposterous notion that they were using spices to disguise the taste of spoiled meat.
"The people of twenty generations ago knew perfectly well the difference between fresh food and rotten food. They knew of several very effective ways to preserve food over long periods, and they had enough common sense not to try to prepare or to eat rotten food by dousing it in strong spices.!" Terence Scully, Early French Cookery
On the food of the late medieval Britain "...for the gentry fresh
meat, newly slaughtered on the manor farm, was in fact available through
much of the year, while poultry was never killed until it was needed for
the table. Regular spicing, however, became a habit; and once palates
were accustomed to strong aromatic flavours, unspiced foods tasted insipid."
C. Anne Wilson, Food and Drink in Britain more