{"id":1036,"date":"2008-06-26T01:19:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-26T01:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1036"},"modified":"2008-06-26T01:19:00","modified_gmt":"2008-06-26T01:19:00","slug":"good-meat-good-spice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1036","title":{"rendered":"Good Meat, Good Spice"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have just started reading The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice<\/a><\/em> by Michael Krondl.<\/p>\n

And I am so happy that in the first pages he destroys the persistent myth that people in the Middle Ages ate heavily spiced food to disguise its rottenness. He offers several good rebuttals:<\/p>\n

• Anyone who could afford exotic spices (e.g., pepper, cinnamon) was well-off enough to afford good meat. The rich could afford to eat fresh meat and spices. The poor could afford neither.<\/span><\/p>\n

• Medieval cookbooks — yes, they existed, for the upper classes — directed cooks to add spices at the end of cooking for a greater olfactory whammy, which negates the idea of concealing or preserving “off” meat.<\/p>\n

• Salt is the best cheap, traditional preservative for meat. So why would anyone use expensive imports?<\/p>\n

All this is to say that spices weren’t the truffles or caviar of their time but were more on the order of today’s expensive extra-virgin olive oil. But like the bottle of Tuscan olive oil displayed on the granite counter of today’s trophy kitches, spices were part and parcel of the lifestyle of the moneyed classes…<\/em><\/p>\n

So I gave tonight’s quick supper of sardines, garlic, and pasta an extra flourish of pepper. Got to support the spice trade, you know.<\/p>\n

Medieval cooking is on my mind since Sunday night, when a colleague from the university absolutely knocked herself out preparing an Elizabethan<\/a> feast for her “Midsummer Night’s Dream” party. <\/p>\n

There were lots of sweet-and-sour meat-and-fruit dishes, some wrapped in dough, as pasties<\/a> but without potato, which would not be correct for the period.<\/p>\n

And then some players from a community theatre troupe did scenes from the play <\/a>outdoors under the pines and Douglas firs.<\/p>\n

That’s as close to a 16th-century feast as I will ever get.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have just started reading The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice by Michael Krondl. And I am so happy that in the first pages he destroys the persistent myth that people in the Middle Ages ate heavily spiced food to disguise its rottenness. He offers several […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-1036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-gI","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":746,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=746","url_meta":{"origin":1036,"position":0},"title":"Leaving the meat uncovered","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 26, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Sheik Taj Din al-Hilaly, Australia's senior Islamic cleric, explains rape and how women serve Satan:\u201cIf you take uncovered meat and put it on the street, on the pavement, in a garden, in a park, or in the backyard, without a cover and the cats eat it, then whose fault will\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1252,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1252","url_meta":{"origin":1036,"position":1},"title":"Spices, Speak to Me","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 13, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"The Mistress of Spices is sort of like the wort-cunning herbalist witch archetype, only with (Asian) Indians and a Bollywood star whose \"acting\" is very stylized, mostly about eye makeup.We ordered it from Netflix months ago, and it finally reached the top of our queue. The whole movie is so\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"herbalism\"","block_context":{"text":"herbalism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=herbalism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=chascli-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B000NVT0T8","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1883,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1883","url_meta":{"origin":1036,"position":2},"title":"Giving Animal Sacrifice a Bad Name","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 19, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"You know that I am all for polytheism, and I say \"All honor to Durga,\" but isn't this a bit much? The Los Angeles Times reports that more than 40,000 people, many of whom were inebriated, took their sacrificial goats to the Tildiha village temple in Bihar state to pray\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Hinduism\"","block_context":{"text":"Hinduism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=hinduism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4651,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4651","url_meta":{"origin":1036,"position":3},"title":"Kennewick Man Was Buff","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 13, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"How buff? Five foot-seven,\u00a0 170 pounds, and all muscle, according to recent skeletal analysis. He also had eaten a lot of seal meat. (Hat tip to Peculiar.)","rel":"","context":"In \"archaeology\"","block_context":{"text":"archaeology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=archaeology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":816,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=816","url_meta":{"origin":1036,"position":4},"title":"This is going out to all my writer friends","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 9, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"True, I drink cheap wine. But I eat good meat. There is an expression for my condition: The wolf is at the door. But I want the wolf at the door. I am tired of living in a world without wolves.Charles BowdenBlood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America","rel":"","context":"In \"writing\"","block_context":{"text":"writing","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=writing"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":494,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=494","url_meta":{"origin":1036,"position":5},"title":"The logistics of sacrifice (1)Looking\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 21, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"The logistics of sacrifice (1)Looking at an artist's rendition of the Roman temple of Minerva Sulis at Bath, UK, you will see a thin plume of smoke arising from the altar outside the temple. There appears to be no fuel, just smoke.I got to thinking about animal sacrifice, not the\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}