Covering the taste of rotten meat with pepper

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

Dear Cecil,

In writing about salt and pepper you attributed the popularity of pepper to its use in masking the taste of rotten meat. I realize you are re-running an old column, but I believe this is now a discredited theory.

If people around the world really used spices to mask the taste of food rot, they would have been killing themselves. The nasty taste of rotten food is not just unpleasant or culturally specific, it’s a handy way of stopping us from eating what will kill us.

Instead, a lot of these strong seasonings (and this includes garlic and onion) actually retard spoilage by inhibiting the growth of common food bacteria. I don’t know how potent pepper is in retarding spoilage, compared to onion and garlic and allspice, but I would bet its practical effect is a big reason for its popularity.

Nick Pappas
New York City

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The column is: How did salt and pepper become the standard table spices?

3

Wow. This theory is still being expounded? Way wrong…

Medieval cooks didn’t use spices because they were covering up the taste of rancid or rotten meat. There is a very simple reason for this: eating bad meat will make you very very sick, and quite possibly kill you (especially if you live in a time when you can’t get electrolyte drinks or IV fluid replacement). Covering it up with cinnamon and pepper will not fix that. Medieval people did not eat rotten meat, because, while they didn’t have our modern germ theory, they were capable of noticing that people who ate meat that smelled bad got very sick and often died.

It is true that a lot of meat in the middle ages was not eaten right away, but then, a lot of modern meat is not eaten right away – what do you think aged steak is? And yes, accordingly, some of the meat eaten at the time probably had a somewhat different taste and texture than our refrigerated meats. (Also, not surprisingly, they very often dealt with the no-refrigeration problem by preserving meats, by salting or drying or sugaring or pickling or submerging in fat. But they preserved them before they went bad, because that’s the point of preserving.) And yes, absolutely, people in the middle ages liked their food heavily spiced, and also sweeter than most modern people do. But they liked it that way because that was what they liked; it was a luxury, and also just a preference. I like the way pickles taste, but that doesn’t mean I eat them because I had to do something with a bagful of rotten cucumbers.

But they didn’t eat rotten meat, because eating rotten meat isn’t something people do – our digestive tracks can’t handle it. It’s almost impossible to hide the smell or taste of rotten meat (being as it’s one of the things our bodies are designed to teach us not to eat), and even if you could, you’d get out of that habit pretty quickly after the first round of people got sick and died.

(Also, since spices were extraordinarily expensive, and therefore province of the wealthy, it just doesn’t make sense. You save nothing by refusing to throw out a piece of meat and instead putting on spices that cost many times the cost of the meat; it would be financially wiser to just throw out the meat and slaughter another animal.)

Medieval people didn’t think like modern people, but they weren’t stupid. They just liked spiced food, when they could afford it.

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Is there not evidence, however, that in pre-industrial times the natural flora of humans was better able to accommodate rotten meat, as well as a variety of other rotten/spoiled products? I sort of doubt the digestion of the average “I gotta right to chicken done right!” American in 2010 is the same as, say, a Normandy hog farmer in 1300. I’m going to the research library today to find some more things for Cecil, perhaps I can look up some items to see if there is factual evidence for a difference in digestive hardiness.

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Be real, how far do you thing we have degraded [or advanced] in a few hundred years to ‘lose’ the ability to digest unsafe meats?

Dudes … how many times do I have to repeat this - animals were slaughtered at the time of eating, with any spare bits preserved by drying smoking or salting/pickling.

Spices were conspicuous consumption items. Also, when you look at something like a medieval cookbook, they are aide memoires to professional chefs employed by nobility and royalty [except a couple like Gud Huswifes Jewell, which was written by a dirty old man for his teenaged wife, to teach her how he thought his house should be run] When they have a list like:

they are not telling you to chuck in an ounce of everything, it is like our using 5 spice powder, there were specific spice blends that were commonly purchased and used … so you might use a pinch of each. Also, when you see a huge list of 20 or 30 ingredients, think of something like worchestershhire sauce … lots of ingredients blended together to make something else, they couldn’t go out and buy a bottle of bbq sauce, or of premade hunters gravy, they had to make it themself - so all the ‘natural flavors and spices’ we get on an ingredient panel translates out to a list of ingredients they had to put together.

So, that imposing wall of medieval - you get this dish:

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The danger is not the microorganisms in rotten food but the toxins they produce.

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This research notel is highly suggestive to me, that “ability to digest” particular items can be gained and lost quite quickly due to bacterial flora composition. One only has to go to a country whose water supply is drinkable to the resident, but introduces revenge to the traveler, to find out that this cultural/regional flora difference can strongly affect what makes one sick.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the “digest rotten meat” superpower (if it existed) is historically permanently lost.

8

Of course ‘rotting’ is a spectrum, not a yes or no proposition, and you’ll note Cecil says semi-rotten.

OTOH, you’d think if I could afford pepper, I could afford fresh.

OTOOH
‘I think we shoulda finished this up yesterday.’
‘yeah, well, cook it a little longer and throw in an extra measure of pepper.’
seems pretty believable.

9

“Be real” yourself. I said it was something that ought to be investigated.

…and if your body is able to kill, out-compete, or prevent the bad microorganisms from taking hold in the first place, that means it’s adapted to dealing with them.

Related to this are theories that stomach acidity used to be higher in the past, based on related complaints and medical reporting.

I thought it was something worth looking at for the sake of due diligence.

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As noted, this was a 1986 column. The taste of umami was not mentioned, but it was not recognized until later. Taste - Wikipedia Just an aside.

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They also practiced things like bloodletting, using mercury for medical purposes and not taking baths for the good of their health… it took a while but they caught on to the fact that those were not good for them… there were a lot of ways to die unexpectedly, many of which were thought to be supernatural… who says they are gonna pin it on the bad pepper steak they ate the night before… it was just another one of the many bad things that people did to themselves at that time…

I disagree… people eat rotten meat to this day, whether it is by accident, stupidity, or by desperation, people eat rotten meat… I seen it!!!

Now take yourself out of the supermarket age and put yourself in a place where high density cattle lots weren’t available… You are gonna be a lot less likely to throw out spoiled meat than you would if you could just mosey on down to the supermarket and easily buy another steak…

What is an unscrupulous tavern owner gonna do? Throw away money or heavily spice and pass it off to an unrefined drunken patron?

While I agree that people didn’t think that pepper was a magic fix for rotten meat and they weren’t eating it themselves… I’m sure it was served to others much more commonly than you think…

12

I just wanted to point out that Cecil says the pepper “could be used to disguise the taste of semirotten meat”. There’s obviously a point where the meat is bad and is going to kill you no matter what you do to it. But I’ve no doubt that meat that started to go bad, started to taste or smell a little off, was spiced up, sold and eaten. There wasn’t a FDA back then. Were there people who got sick off of it? Probably. But I seem to remember that pre-refrigeration days people routinely got sick and sometimes died from eating spoiled food. I don’t think Cecil is saying that people threw liberal handfuls of pepper on green meat and cooked it up. But given that the window of meat freshness had to have been pretty small back then, I wouldn’t be surprised if people got served meat that we’d turn our noses up at today. And pepper would help out a bit.

13

Read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair to see how recently rotten meat was spiced up to sell in America.

Mexicans and Thais, to name a couple of cultures, have long known that many spices are antibacterials. Whenever I buy local food which has already been prepared in Mexico I always follow a local’s advice to give it a dash of cayenne.

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No offense, but while I know High School teachers like to point to The Jungle as an expose on the food processing industry, it was more an essay on how Socialism could get a foothold in the US because of the terrible working conditions of the food processing workers. A much better source of information would be both Spice by Turner (http://www.amazon.com/Spice-History-Temptation-Jack-Turner/dp/0375707050/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1287945538&sr=1-1) and Swindled by Wilson (http://www.amazon.com/Swindled-History-Poisoned-Counterfeit-Coffee/dp/0691138206/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1287945520&sr=8-1).

15

Please note that it was not until after the plagues killed off many of the people in Europe that serfs were able to actually leave the land that they had previously been bound to and move to cities. It was in the cities that they had to rely on purchasing foods instead of producing it themselves. It was in the marketing that the food purity laws were enacted, to protect the now city dwelling populace. Try reading Tuchman’s Through a Distant Mirror for an interesting overview on laws in medieval europe and how they changed because of the pressure of urbanization. Although I still would love to see someone throw a chicken through the loop created by touching a hand to their waist while standing on a rooftop [to determine how far the chicken can legally range.]

When you are faced with the option of taking the chickens eggs, or killing and eating it, you use the eggs. When you live in a town/city and are faced with buying a dead chicken/parts of a chicken or eggs, you go with what you can afford. chickens are easy to keep alive in coops, they don’t take up much space. When you have a cow, it makes more sense to make butter from the cream, and cheese from the milk than it does to kill it. When you live in a city, the butcher can kill and part out the carcass with very little spoilage because he has a market for the meat - if you live on a farm killing a whole cow is wasteful unless there are enough people around to consume the entire thing in a day [a feast] The only person around that can not waste the cow is either the entire town at a festival, or a major household [knight holding the feif or higher] or a religious order that has not forsworn meat.

Economics have really not changed in several thousand years … people who are poor are not generally going to waste anything [if they are smart, lets not go into the poor in cities who do not have access to good grocery stores and hence live on junk and fast foods] and if the choice is egg/milk/cheese or kill an animal and let part of it rot, do the math.

16

No offense taken, Una. The Jungle, does have a graphic and, I believe, accurate account of the doctoring of spoiled meat. Plus you get a good dose of Socialism in the mix. It’s two, two, two books in one. :wink:

I’m familiar with Spice and am now putting Swindled on my reading list. Thanks.

17

IIRC Sinclair intended The Jungle to show the wretched conditions workers had to face and that socialism would be their salvation. He was quite annoyed when people focused on the tainted products instead.

18

Amusingly, I’m in the middle of reading Krakatoa by Simon Winchester. He has a lengthy history of the area of Sumatra and Java and Western involvment. In the book, he brings up the spice trade and especially pepper, and how lucrative it was to Dutch traders. He also repeats that there is no truth to the rumor that pepper was used to cover the taste of spoiled meat, though that it does serve as a preservative.

I mention it not as evidence, merely an interesting coincidence in timing.

19

Don’t dispute your main point about the pepper, but this bit isn’t necessarily true. The things that make food stinky may not be unsafe to eat and the things that make it unsafe may not be stinky. Granted, in the case of a corpse left out in the sun, they both happen together, but with stored or prepared foods, this is no longer an absolute correlation.

20

Good point, Mangetout (and what an appropriate name)!

It seems to me that several of the early posts in this thread were basically saying “Eating stinky meat = death.” Not so.

Many years ago, I went away for a few days, leaving an uncooked hamburger patty in the refrigerator. While I was gone, it started to smell so bad that my roommate decided to put it in the freezer until trash day.

You can see where this is going.

I came home, got hungry, saw the burger in the freezer, popped it right into the frying pan, cooked it, and ate it. I noticed that the consistency was odd, but thought nothing of it. It wasn’t until trash day, when my roommate asked, “What happened to the hamburger in the freezer?” that I found out what had happened. And I suffered no ill effects whatsoever.

Had the meat not been frozen, it would have stunk to high heaven, and I probably would not have eaten it. But if I had slathered it in pepper and then wolfed it down (as I, in fact, did), I’d have been fine (as I, in fact, was).

I’m just sayin’.