The Tudors used spices to cover up the taste of bad meat
What you may have been told
The Tudors used to drown their meat in spices to disguise its vile smell and taste because in the days before refrigeration it had often gone off or was even rotting.
The debunking
This is a famous one. You’ve probably heard it during a tour of a Tudor building, or perhaps you were even taught this in school.
Although often connected to the Tudors, sometimes the claim resurfaces in relation to other eras, but the general gist is always the same. When you hear this, a few alarm bells should automatically start ringing. Let’s destroy this myth bit by bit.
First, why would anyone eat rotting meat? Our ancestors were not stupid – they knew what could happen if you ate food that had gone off. Eating it would be an act of extreme desperation, but of course people regularly were desperate; famines were not unheard of and when you’re hungry, you’re often willing to do things most of us modern people can’t even imagine.
OK, so far so good, but the myth suggests this was a regular occurrence, not something that only happened in extreme cases, as if meat was sold in that condition and then cooked and placed on the dinner table all the time, even at feasts. But we know there were strict laws regarding the selling and preparing of meat, and if you were the servant responsible for people getting food poi-soning, you would be in trouble.
It is true that our Tudor ancestors didn’t have refrigerators, but they knew how to keep meat. Salting became more affordable after the Middle Ages and people also dried and smoked meat and fish, which was not that difficult as fires were burning in almost every house every day. Sometimes all you had to do was hang the meat above the fireplace. And in some fancy places they even had ice cellars – little basements they filled with ice during the winter and that stayed cold for many months afterwards.
But even if they kept messing that up for some reason and had to deal with meat that had gone rotten all the time, why on earth would they choose spices to camouflage their food? For starters, it does not work.
Try it. No, wait, don’t. You could sue me, so officially I’m telling you not to try it. So imagine trying it. Get a nice chunk of rancid meat. If you can even hold it while gagging all the time, cover it in spices, cook it and… Do you think the spices will be enough for you not to taste the gooey, mouldy, wriggly bits?
Maybe, just maybe, if you use the hottest spices available, you might not taste the meat, or anything, ever again, as your tongue will be numb and probably glow in the dark. But even if you manage to eat the meat, you, your belly and perhaps your backside will soon be regretting this decision. Still, even the fact that it doesn’t work is not the main reason the whole story is just plain silly.
Most spices came from abroad. They had to be transported from faraway places, which made them very expensive. The claim therefore suggests that people would use something they couldn’t afford, that often literally cost a fortune, to make something comparatively cheap easier to eat after they failed to store it properly.
There are no historical sources that prove that this happened.
There are a few very rare recipes that suggest solutions for tainted meat but those never involve spices. The suggestion is to cut the bad parts off and wash the meat.
A good steak, lamb or pork were not types of meat that most people could afford very often, but chicken, rabbit, birds and so on were not rare ingredients. With the money you would have had to spend on a pile of spices to cover up the taste and smell of spoiled meat you could have bought a lot of new fresh meat instead.
Admittedly, medieval and Tudor recipes seem extreme to our modern tastes. Not only did the rich enjoy food that many of us today would find exceptionally strange, they of course also liked the idea of showing their guests that they could afford something really expensive. So yes, they did like to add spices to their food but it was a way of showing off.
We may be tempted to smirk and once again mumble something about how silly people were back then – forgetting we’ve just seen yet another chef on TV plastering gold leaf on his deconstructed, cucumber foam-covered, charcoal-grilled, oak-smoked potato, so that some celebrity can pay a small fortune for the honour of posing with it on Instagram before scoffing it down in one bite. Perhaps we’re not that different from our ancestors after all.
Source ~ ‘Fake History 101 things that never happened’ by Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse
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