Cooking with Bruce and Mark

Culinary Myth #49: In the Middle Ages people covered the taste of rotted meat with honey and spices


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It's Tuesday and we're taking down another long held culinary myth. This is one you can read anywhere. You probably even learned it in school. That in the Middle Ages people covered the taste of rotted meat with spices and honey. Where do we start to say how crazy that is. True, there was no refrigeration and in warm weather fresh meats went bad quickly. Which is why drying, curing, and smoking meats were so popular as ways of preserving them. And sometimes whole joints of meat were even submerged in vats of honey to keep them airtight. But no one ate rotten meat, period. There was no refrigeration but there was also no antibiotics or anti-parasitics. If you ate rotten meat you got sick and often you died. It's as simple as that. Plus spices were the commodity of the day. They were expensive. They were willed from father to son. They were considered treasures. Listen in to this episode to find out how this myth started and the next time you hear someone say that people covered rotted meat with honey and spices, you can set them straight.
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Cooking with Bruce and MarkBy Bruce Weinstein & Mark Scarbrough

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