One more way to store fresh meat without electricity. My grandma told me this and it really WAS a thing in Hungary even in the 20th century. So my great grandfather had a small butchery that time (the '30s) in a small village in Hungary and people around and from the neighbouring villages needed fresh meat (i.e. not smoked or dried). In the winter they cut big chunks of ice from the small river called Zagyva. They dig up big pits or holes in the earth with a bell-shaped cross section so that there was a small hole on ground level and it gradualy widened up the deeper you went. They used a ladder to get in. They plastered the walls with clay and laid all the ice blocks in the pit. It funcioned like a refrigerator all year around (even if the weather got really hot in the summer), until the last bits of ice melted. They laid hay on the ice blocks and put the meat on them. She said it (the ice) lasted until the next winter if enough ice was used. A small wooden trapdoor was used to close the opening. In Hungarian it is called 'jégverem' (ice pit).
@@enysuntra1347 Hey, do you mean jégverem? With IPA signs it's [ 'jeːgvɛrɛm] or if I'd try to write it with English letters then I'd say ['yehg-verem].
My mother grew up in a village in the Balkans without electricity. The slaughter season for pigs was November. They ate very little fresh pork and the rest would be turned into sausage, blood sausage, bacon, smoked ham, pork rinds etc. Even the hair would be used to make rough cloth. Same goes for goats. The only meat that would be eaten mostly fresh was veal but since they had very few calves for a lot of people, storing it was not an issue. Also milk was basically never drunk fresh but made into cheese, buttermilk and butter. A lot of vegetables were pickeled and fruits made into jam. Some, like grapes and apples could even be carefully kept fresh until deep in the winter.
My experience in some little rural towns in Mexico, in a hot humid tropical region: Meat is almost never preserved. Everyone raises pigs in their backyard and when they sacrifice one, they go around gifting (yes, for free) parts of the pig to all the neighbors. Every neighbor will do the same when the time comes, so over time they all get a full pig for free. The meat is cooked fast and is preserved only for a couple of days in the form of a stew, that you can keep boiling.
@@obsidianjane4413Nitpicking? Actually, you do get almost a whole free pig back after first giving yours away. Yours is gone after gifting it. After that point in time you buy parts or get them free.
@@Croatlik No its a rational fact. A "free pig" would mean you end up with 2 of them. You aren't "gifting" it, you are paying into the social contract that makes you entitled to draw an equivalent benefit. Saying you get a free pig after giving yours away is the same fallacy and stupidity like "free healthcare".
@@obsidianjane4413why are you so triggered by this? Not everyone I. Such a society would have raised pigs but since they are a tight nit community who knows each other they support and care for one another, and contribute in different ways. Not everyone else sees all human relationships in transactionall terms.
i think it's because some problems in XX centuries made us think past is usually violent It was mostly the same as now. Except for certain periods of excess. There were excessively peaceful times in certain civilizations too, more so that the Western world now
Well that's kind of the point, because we only live the best part of a century we can't relate to people who are long gone from our current time and so we just automatically presume they lived life in some vastly different abstract almost non human way. What we forget is that we ARE those people, they live on in the DNA of all of us 500 years later so whatever we feel, think or have an instinctual attitude towards they did too cos after all they came first, we re just repeating their attitudes.
This is partly why I hate hate HATE it whenever someone says “It’s X year” as a stand in for “you shouldn’t think/talk like that”. The year is an arbitrary unit of measurement and has exactly zero impact on our status for “progress”. People who are alive this year have more in common with people 4000 years ago than I think others are comfortable with.
@@Aaron-n8o2g yes I can't stand the year argument either it's used all the time, you'll see it in tv shows which are now long dated, it's the 80s, it's the 90s, it's the millenium, just referring to the decade as modern is meaningless, every decade is modern to those living in it.
Also I think people forget one of the most important reasons why medieval trade revolved around them: spices are just easy to transport. They are often sold as powders or dried leaves, and can be packed in burlap, boxes, barrels and more. They keep for a long time when kept dry, and they don't need to be handled with a ton of care. If you want the ideal trade good for medieval routes that could take months or even years to traverse, spices and dried herbs should be at the very top of your list.
Finally a historian channel keeping it real! People often treat our history like some foreign Alien being's that differentiate from the people we are today. It's our societal construct that is different, not our biological make up. Definitely following this channel. Cheers.
As a lifelong Minnesotan who has a Scandinavian heritage and grew up eating lutefisk: when it's prepared right it's indistinguishable from buttered lobster or crab. It's absolutely delicious. Unfortunately a lot of people's experiences are not of it being prepared correctly.
My dad has told harrowing stories about my grandma preparing lutefisk at home, and this was a woman who could not be trusted to cook canned vegetables properly 😬😭😱
Can't say I love it but my grandpa loved lutfisk. And I can add I’m not norwegian or from Minnesota, nor was he, we’re Swedish and lutfisk is traditional here too. In the old days they even did it on freshwater fish like pike, not just on fish that’s more common in a country like Norway with a long ocean coast. It’s common actually to see things that’s tradition in all Nordic countries to be attributed to just one Nordic country.
Rose Nylund (Betty White): Excuse me, I couldn't help but notice you took several of my tasty, delicious, lutefisk puffs and you've hardly touched them. Blanche: Uh, I just don't care for them. Rose: Yeah, well, you're an aging whore.
I guess you really need to get that lye out. I assume that is why we don’t use alkaline as often as pickling with vinegar. Acid is sour but alkaline tends to be bitter and soapy.
It is amazing how many people are unaware of food preservation methods such as drying, smoking, salting, pickling, fermenting, and root cellars. Thank you for videos that is teaching about those things to the younger generations.
Wow! You just made me realize that Lent isn't just about "forsaking a food pleasure for the Lord", but also preserving food for the coming months. I love food history. Thank you!
It goes completely against logic anyway. Spices were expensive, if someone was so poor he had to eat spoiled meat, he sure would not be able to afford spices...
Lactofermented sausages are some the tastiest around. Try an uncured sopressata or other salami sometime. Make sure it has the ingredient "lactic acid starter culture."
I remember learning about preservation in Home Ec and the history of preservation, yet in history we learned the myth of rotten meat! You think I would have put 2 and 2 together! It explains it so well, particularly the food examples! The bit of Hank slapping John did have me in hysterics though
People from the future: In the commercial era, most people wouldn’t eat unpackaged food. Their lives were full of toil and gloom, so their capitalist leaders provided convenience food as a social benefit. People also only ate food “gift wrapped,” to invoke the lingering hunter/gatherer instincts of encountering a fruit patch, while also honoring their commercial cultural traditions. “Bare food” was only eaten for aesthetic reasons. This is evident by the archeological data remnants on “Instagram” (a prominent institutional power.) They also smelled reallyyy bad… like I mean.. bad. They basically pickled themselves with analogues of primitive artificial “scents.” Unfortunately, corporal micro-flora engineering hadn’t been invented. 😬
If you want to figure out how people were able to eat meat in an age without refrigeration then just look at the cultures that exist now that don't have refrigeration. You get a lot of salting of meat and smoking of meat and curing of meat which is the same thing that you would have gotten in the Middle ages.
It isn't true. Europeans had centuries of food preservation techniques most of which we can still use today. Brining, Smoking, packing in Lard to exclude the air (see pemmican), storing where the area was colder, then there was the daily hunting - most of which was hung - and then packing it in spices and salt, drying in the sun as well. Sausages are everywhere. Then there's canning (bottling). Pickling as well. Boiling also works. Confit is a delicacy that you can make yourself.
I live in Pennsylvania and we make a really old school Italian meat called sopresata. It’s seasoned pork in a natural casing. We usually make them and let them dry late winter but traditionally they were probably made late fall.
My mother would tell me about how my great-grandfather would smoke meat from his farm (~ 20s and 30s). He lived in Louisiana and lived a very simple life even though he was quite wealthy. I remember seeing a picture my mother took as a kid and there are hundreds of slices of meat all hanging from racks in a tall wooden smoker. Another thing that’s neat is my mother learned French as a child in order to speak to my great-grandfather as he couldn’t speak English.
Lovely video! the same confit method was also used in North Italy. In Piedmont "Salamin d'la Duja" were made by preserving sausages under lard and in Lombardy there was "Rustin nega' " basically the traditional veal Milanese but preserved in butter. In some traditional restaurant you can still find this delicious dishes😊
I'm a Norwegian who has lived the last few years in rural Morocco and even though the meat in the local butchers isn't refrigerated the meat seems fresher here. A lot fresher. For instance if you buy a chicken they kill it right in front of you and you take it home still warm. I'm pretty much a vegetarian now.
That's funny. My father went to some relative's farm when I was around 10. They hung a chicken up, slit its throat and then let it run around for a bit. Then they took it inside, stripped it of feathers in mere seconds and gutted it on a table that looked like a coroner's table: stainless steel, slanted and with drain on end. We had it for dinner that night. My brother, who also witnessed this, would not eat chicken for a decade after.
@@cobramcjingleballs I grew up in rural America and at least once a year the family would come together and do a "hog killin" where a pig and chickens would be slaughtered from beginning to end to prepare all of the meat and other products to distribute to the family. I remember breaking a chickens neck or cutting the head off myself as a child which is very morbid in retrospect...
Rural Alabama raised here, my dad killed chickens in front of us, cleaned them, and we ate those jokers. lol This was only around 20 years ago? People take care of themselves when they are poor. I'm a yuppie engineer now. Don't have any dietary qualms, but I also don't kill my own meat.
@@bigalkool2897 I've heard you just tie their balls up till they drop off. Sounds cruel, but the cutting off methods sounds more brutal and more damage.
I saw a program where they went to Norway to try Ludefisk because it was "traditional" and they asked the waitress if she ever eats it and she looked at them like they were the stupidest people in the world for wanting to eat it...lmao. They spit it out and the waitress laughed at them. :) I suspect a lot of "delicacies" are like that, but there are certainly delicacies that aren't THAT outside the norm. For instance, many won't eat haggis, but lots of Scots DO love it, it's not just tradition! Same with snails. Or for me, I grew up eating all parts of the animal so I don't feel superior to certain parts, like tripe is amazing when prepared correctly...the thing is if you seperate a food from its culture (and proper preperation) it becomes inedible and disgusting. Imagine if we were all trying to cook sheep's stomach without directions! So much in history is lost in translation...like spoiled meat, lol!
When I visited Scotland I had haggis every morning with breakfast and loved it. I was kind of surprised given its bad reputation. But then there are some traditional American dishes that I really don't like, like chitlins. People's tastes really have changed a lot in the past century or two. It used to be that everyone ate all parts of the animal. Now most people, at least in the West, stay away from a lot of things. I don't know if that's because of overabundance, or what foods freeze/can better, or what. Such a good point about old techniques being lost. How many recipes are disappearing because no one is carrying them on?
Lots of younger Scandinavians have not even tried some more traditional foods, fermented stuff, offal, lutfisk. Nowadays it'd be older generations, and the more adventurous younger ones or those who still grew up with those. Nowadays they may be more familiarised with pizzas and kebabs and thai food than with surströmming, lutfisk or pölsa (a bit similar to haggis but from Sweden). You still see those products at the shops though.
I don't know what show that was, but that's ridiculous. A lot of people love lutefisk. It's one of those aquired tastes, I guess, and certainly a lot of people (especially young people) don't like it. It is however very common to eat it at some point during the christmas holidays. I expect that the reaction from the waitress (who probably doesn't like it much) was more of a "no foreigner likes this" thing. If not then she is an idiot who probably just doesn't like it herself and "can't imagine how anyone could" haha
@@edgarburlyman738 And yet I eat tripe with no problem but detest fish in every shape and form. I think lutefisk would be a special kind of hell for me.
Back in the '90s in ATL, a friend of mine bought a 1963 AMC Rambler and it had an old bumper sticker on it reading: _"If lutefisk is outlawed, only outlaws will have lutefisk."_ Presumably the car had come from the midwest.
this is what I’ve been thinking to myself ever since I was a little kid that didn’t know anything about anything. I kept thinking, who in the hell would eat rotten meat and how would covering it in spices make it any better, and how would all those masses of people afford the spices to begin with. All while I was a kid. Wild.
Only rich people could afford spices during the Middle Ages, which made them a status symbol. But they probably liked the taste, as well ( I know I do.) 🌶️
Also wonder how they could afford all these spices if they had to deal with rotten meat to begin with. I've heard the same thing but about hot peppers and spicy food, that it was for masking spoiled meat, it's just weird.
Peppers were used to prevent spoilage too, capsaicin + fermentation are more effective than just simply fermenting the food for fermentation so I bet that they read about it and didn't understand at all that fermented doesn't mean spoiled...
Townsends did a video on pemmican that this reminds me of. Just like the confit you mentioned but somewhere between that and beef jerky. In combination with hard tack it was used as a fatty energy bar that could last months or even years if made a certain way
This is one of the silliest myths about the middle ages. Even today there are MANY parts of the world where refrigeration (and stable electricity) isn't the norm - at least a billion people get by fine without fridges. Meat is either eating directly after a slaughter before bacteria has a chance to spread and rigor mortis sets in, or is preserved for later consumption. Steak fans are familiar with "dry aging" as a concept, but before vacuuming sealing made wet aged beef the norm, dry aged beef was just... Beef. Leaving meat to dry for a few weeks in the right conditions results in most of the harmful bacteria being killed off by a combination of lack of moisture + penicillin molds.
It's amazing to me that some people can acknowledge that human beings have been eating meat for hundreds of thousands of years, but refrigeration only showed up about 100 years ago, so they must have just been eating spoiled meat. 😆
I remember something maybe UA-cam vid about Catherine De Medici that she found the meat of the royal French family was often spoiled, that didn’t make sense to me, because I live in Saudi Arabia, my father is 87 and he lived the first 20y of his life in a literal medieval world, and I knew from his stories that they rarely let meat go bad, and when it goes bad they’ll throw it away, they’ll always cut it to strips and air dry it or not as often they’ll cook it with fat as you mentioned, or just buy fresh meat for whatever needed for one meal, it was the job of a butcher to sell fresh meat.
I saw someone mentioning ice-pits. I haven't seen evidence of this, but this seems very plausible also for medieval times in north-western Europe. And a friend of mine studied germanic laws, and found somewhere that there were rules that you had to mention to the village community during the weekly meeting when you were going to slaughter, so there could be sharing in fresh meat in different periods of the year between the different farms.
A friend of mine dislikes spicy food and resents how popular spicy food has become. Whenever a spicy food is proposed to eat he gets huffy and says ACKTUALLY SPICES ARE TO HIDE THE TASTE OF RANCID MEAT. We all just roll our eyes and tell him he has the palate of a small child.
I never really thought past the "spices for rotten meat" argument tbh I suppose I just thought that because they might eat spoiled meat regularly, their gut biome would have some kind of bacteria that would help prevent food poisoning illness.
Very classy to call out a myth in the way you did! Bravo. I am going to try to adopt a similar approach in my future videos where I call out misinformation.
What I was taught in school in the early 1960's that Europeans went to Asia to get spices - because they wanted spices. Later I learned that certain spices, such as cloves, were use to _preserve_ meat, for example sausages. I didn't never read that they were used to disguise the flavor of spoiled meat. This is the first place I've heard that myth. Oil of cloves kills bacteria. It used to be widely used in dentistry for that reason. Some dentists may still be using it to some extent.
The Middle Ages slander is too real. I personally think it’s down to the hilariously false belief that we as a society are currently in our apex of culture and intelligence, evolving higher and higher. We’re devolving if anything. The average person in 1250 was no less intelligent than the average person today.
I loved reading through these comments and seeing how people would preserve food in different parts of the world, it’s so interesting! I asked my dad, and he said that when he was young in brazil, they would kill pigs and preserve the meat well within a bunch of the pig’s own fat. This could keep it preserved for over a month. When they kill animals like chickens though they would just eat it the same day since it was small.
Finally, a proper history channel with only information and no biases. I love how you drive the points of misconceptions and the levels of certainty in theories.
Bit of a nitpick about lutefisk. It’s not a method of preservation, but rather preparation preparation of stock fish, specifically, which you also mentioned. Lye treatment is done when you prepare the stock fish for eating.
The man in the video and a commenter both mentioned animals being slaughtered in November. I'll add to this by saying that one term for November found in Old English is "blotmonaþ" which meant "sacrifice month". The thinking is that animal sacrifices were made in the month they slaughtered animals for food.
I remember being told this in grade school but not in any college level courses. What I'm more curious about is where the myth comes from. My guess would be it started in the mid to late 20th century. Before the 20th century, no one had refrigeration. And well into the early part, most people were probably familiar with the traditional methods of preserving food because they used them themselves. This lack of understanding seems like something only an urban population in the later parts of the 20th century would even accept much less come up with.
Confit styles preservation exists in many other cultures. In Turkey (were I’m from) we ‘comfit’ and jar cooked cubed lamb in jars covered in its own fat and it lasts for ages. I know that others do it with mince, this is quiet common in the middle east
Hey I really like your videos, you have a great style of production and I always find it very entertaining and informative. Something I was always taught in school that you might find interesting to cover is the rarity of salt in the Middle Ages, I was always told that salt was very difficult to produce and people would kill each other for it because of how necessary it was for food preservation. I think debunking salt myths and talking about historical production of salt might be an interesting topic for a video
I think you're mixing up rotten meat with meat that is starting to turn. If you have a cut of meat, and it's turning, you can still cook it, kill the bacteria and it's safe. However, you can still smell the taint from the spoilage before cooking. PEPPER is great for masking this odor. Also, some meats, especially if wild, can have very pungent odors and tastes. Spices, will help with the flavours. It's like cooking duck. Duck is super fatty and it leaves a film in your mouth. But, if you cook it with orange, this changes the starches. Wild meats are different that your grocery store corn fed mutants. So, yes, no one was eating completely rotten meat, but they would eat meat that stank but could still be cooked and eaten. Waste not want. The spices were also neutralize some microbes. So, there is some truth to the myth. Europeans did want to spice up the bland cooking. England especially. Jamie Oliver, we're looking at you.
Uncured meat would be eaten immediately after butchering the animal though. You simply keep the animal alive until then. Unlike today, where we are eating meat that is 'starting to turn' all the time.
Don't lump Jamie Oliver in with us English when his entire culinary training was in Italian food (doesn't mean he's good at that either tbf). We might not make the best food on Earth but we're not *that* bad. The main reason English cooking gets dumped on so hard is after 2 world wars which left entire towns without a male population (forcing the women to work rather than teach their kids how to cook) crippling food standardisation to avoid starvation (as one example, pre-WW1 Britain had over 3,500 cheese manufacturers each with their own centuries old recipes, by 1945 there were less than 100 which were legally forced to make only 5 varieties) plus rationing that continued through to the 50's meant we lost most of our culinary herritage. When the nation finally started to recover rather than look back for inspiration on how to cook not-terrible food people looked abroad instead, sealing the fate of English cusine.
@@Neion8 Nah. All my ancestors are British, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, etc. My mother would always cook our traditional foods. Many, many I love. Yorkshire pudding is my favourite. But, I don't like the way the chefs do it when I was an apprentice. It was all light and fluffy and big. My mom's wasn't. Hard to describe. But I love the whole deal. However, there is a whole host of traditional meals I don't like and won't touch with a ten food spoon. Anything with eels, yick. Kidney pie! WHY? I could go on. I love me granny from Glasgow, Scotland most. I know you're not suppose to pick favs. But she had such a tough life, I owe her too much. Haggis, oh haggis, what rhymes with haggis? Nothing. That's what. "The proof is in the tasting of the pudding." There's many puddings I wouldn't even taste given the ingredients. For a second, I thought I was wrong in think custard was British and thought is was probably French. NOPE !!!! BRITISH !!!! Of course, disgusting. I win the argument. The food was gross way before WW II. Good day, sir or ma'am.
@@RobinMarks1313 You think custard is disgusting? Your opinion is now irrelevant. ;) You're right about yorkshire puds though and you missed out toad in a hole (no toads involved if foreigners are wondering), Cottage/shepherds pie (shared culinary herritage with France) and English stuffing which - when done well - I'd put on par with any food I've had from anywhere else on Earth. Most of it though is food that's often done badly but done well is great. One of the things you need to remember though is I pointed out how many recipes and the like that were lost. The ones we have now are but a shadow of the thousand+ years of pre-war cullinary development that you can see in other European nations where practically every family had their own variations on traditional dishes with efforts made to preseve their culture. Not all, but most of that was lost in Britain (England in particular) due in no small part to the government actively erradicating it in the name of standardisation. On a different note, how are you okay with Haggis and rendered fat in your food but squeam at kidney in pies and blood sausages? I understand being taken in by the American-influenced hysteria about offal but it seems weirdly mannifested in you my friend.
This explains how meat could be stored, the 1st part of the myth. However, when I made my hunting permit, it was told that before refrigeration, there was the "Haut Gout", which was indeed achieved through (controlled!) decomposition. It was seen as a delicacy, medically, it is possible because decomposition / spoilage toxins themselves decay into more harmless substances; and eating one rabbit with "Haut Gout" during a holiday meal as one course of a menu ("the solution to pollution is dilution") may just confer an interesting taste where the whole meal might make you sick. I don't know when Haut Gout was begun to be seen as a delicacy, but it might well be the Middle Ages. The 2nd part of the myth was that spices were a motivation for the exploration. Can it be that preserved meat, albeit not spoiled, was bland or salty that spices indeed were in high demand in the upper classes to "spice things up"? While the 1st part of the myth was misrepresented, then, the 2nd part may still hold true. What's the opinion of history about this?
Where I live there's a stately home that was used by various kings in the middle ages. There's an underground stone igloo structure on the grounds that was filled with ice so they could keep food fresh in the house throughout the year.
Popular history and unfortunately even academic historians do not view people in the past as people just like we are today, cultures can change but we share so much more in common with people in the past than superficial analysis would have us believe.
Regarding the use of spices, I would think that most people who we assume would be eating spoiled/rotten meat would be those on the lower income spectrum. Given how expensive it was to even buy spices, my thought would be that using spices to cover up the smell/taste of spoiled meat is not taking this simple connection of income into account. If no money means spoiled meat, it would have also meant no spices to mask the flavor.
You don't have to dry or smoke sausage. The fat and salt content is enough to keep it at cellar temperatures. I'm guessing everyone made as much sausage as they had fat for. Pigs would've been the main source of fat, other animals are too lean. Also, you know pemmican? It's just sausage. Pemmican is sausage.
People will accept anything they are told since they don't have the means to refute what they hear and read. That's why you might hate people from other nations, religions,...etc that you never even met before just because you saw them being portrayed in a negative and unrealistic way in some movies and news outlets.
It's not just tradition that keeps these techniques around, but also because often it makes food better. Smoking meat adds flavor. Dry aging beef is amazing for steaks. Bacon is a kind of salt cured pork. That sort of thing. Also the techniques are ancient. We have records of meat and fish being dried and salted from around 3000 BC in Mesopotamia.
I agree with one caveat. Even today traditional rural markets, as I see in Mexico for instance, have fresh meat but unrefrigerated. Like a pickup truck filled with plucked dead chocked sitting in the hot Sun. But you can eat this stuff, which definitely does not pass FDA standards. Looking at ethnic cuisine, one immediately notices that most recipes are for what we would call stews. Basically spiced liquid used to boil meat. For hours. Essentially sterilizing the meat. Poultry, also at risk can be stewed or roasted, their frames conducive to circulating hot air. Cooking kills the vast majority of bacterial or fungal decay. So, I don’t think they ate ROTTEN meat. But surely spoiled in the modern sense. Aged meat also is a decaying meat. Stored in a salt cellar ( not refrigerated) the meat gets moldy-which kills bacteria. The moldy parts are then cut away when ready to consume. The FDA permits such meat to be eaten rare. While refrigerated today, it wasn’t years ago, though the cellars were naturally cool. PS, my brother-in-law tells me that the secret of a restaurant’s famous chicken fricassee dish was…letting it tot before preparing. There is an art to these processes, and again, cooking fixes a lot of issues!
Pagpag is a term for leftover food scavenged from garbage sites and dumps in Philippines, they often mask the bad taste by cooking it with a lot of spices. So the idea of using spices to make expired food palatable is not completely bunk. Of course, I don't think medieval people with the means to afford spices would be eating expired to meat.
First, you have to define what "spoiled" is. Newspapers in the 18th and 19th century have recipes about making meat that had become spoiled to some degree safe and palatable to eat.
I heard of a study of why some cultures eat spicy food and others don't. They found that usually cultures in hot and humid climates eat spicy food because it was a way to preserve the meat.
A good rule to keep in mind is that if you're ever studying history and think to yourself "Wow! People back then sure were stupid!" You're probably misunderstanding something or missing context.
Are you implying people are not stupid & cruel in all ages? Research Nongqawuse - they slaughtered their cattle and starved themselves. Or FGM. - Adûnâi
@angamaitesangahyando685 No, he is implying that modern men tend to look upon their progenitors with great narcissism, and great contempt, which ironically does serve to reveal our ongoing stupidity, as you've pointed out.
Ok, so I'm going to take a stab at why this myth is so enduring. Hung game meat. When I 1st told my then-young wife about hung pheasant she mouth vomited. People just assume that an undressed animal hung outside is going to be a rotten maggot infested mass after a week but in reality, if you hang a bird for a week in the proper weather it stays in good shape. We use to hang pheasant and game birds for a few days, it made them easier to pluck and dialed back the gaminess. Even the offals would be in good shape assuming they were not shot through.
I believe that the motivation behind the spice trade revolved more around the introduction of sugar than its use for meat. Pepper was the main spice used for meat, but that had been common since the Roman Empire. The spices that motivated the later exploration were spices like nutmeg, cinnamon, or cloves which were used more for desserts and even different varieties of gruel like oatmeal or arroz con leche.
Another point is that people used to have, on average, large families and often multigenerational in homes. And Animals were generally smaller. So you often could slaughter a duck, goose or even a sheep or goat and eat most of it in one setting. Or at least have it as the basis for a stew that you kept slow cooking for days.
This was very informative. I would add the obvious that in Asia many of the markets have live animals because there isn't a refrigerator big enough to hold everything and keeping the animals alive for as long as possible is a great way to keep meat from going bad :)
I imagine that this came about because meat starts to smell bad, much before it has gone bad, due to oxidation. You can't actually smell bacterial growth.
You're wrong though, it wasn't the reason European looked for Spices but they did eat rotten meat to an extent. And I'm not talking of do or die situations like famines or wars. English doesn't seem to have a word for it but French literally has a word for the process of letting meat spoil to improve its taste and texture : "faisander" which come from the the french word for pheasant as that bird was often left to hung by the neck, whole, in the attic for up to a month before being eaten, "til the neck gives" according to some traditions. And it's not just a French thing, the romans did it to (we have text from Ciceron attesting of it), the Inuits are also quite food of spoiled meat, as do a lot of other peoples throughout the world.
As a person from one of several non-Mongolian nations that still managed to conquer Siberia in the winter, I agree. (Just without using google, SIberia was conquered in winter, besides Mongols, by Evanks, Kipchaks, Cumans, Russians and Czechoslovaks).
Frankly, Crash Course is way worse than that. WatchMojo are just annoying because they're click-baity and normie; Crash Course is actively malicious in how they intentionally spread bad misinformation about history and different cultures and beliefs.
People use spices because they taste good. Another reason for spices is as a sartorial expenditure, cover that food in spices to demonstrate your wealth.
I think it's really an over exaggeration. When they say people in the Middle Ages were eating rotten meat, it was more like they were eating slightly spoiled meat, and sometimes they would get sick, just like we do.
A typical preservation method from the Middle Ages is, for example, matjes. Herring is placed in oak barrels in a brine for 5 days and begins to ferment slightly. Matjes is incredibly tasty. And there is also Bismarck herring, which is pickled with salt and vinegar to mature and preserve it. Both are still an absolute delicacy today. If you're ever on a northern coast in Central Europe, you absolutely have to try matjes fillet housewife style or a herring fish roll ;)
In sweden we call fermented/pickled herring ”sill”. Matjessill is one type of a huge variety of pickled herrings available in Sweden. (Although swedish matjessill is very different from durch matjeshering.) Many households have their own special variety aswell. In my family we make our own senapssill, mustard sill.
In more rural/ traditional households, mustard is a really big thing. I got told it's because the antibacterial nature of it helped with meat, that tasted a little funky (but not rotten !)
There are a lot of myths relating to the middle ages. Like for example this idea that the Norse were these psychotic barbarians who were all obsessed with war. War may have been a central part of their culture, but it was of pretty much every culture. There were also plenty of people who just wanted to get by, had no interest in violence. There were even multiple gods for different purposes, not every god was a god of war. Odin was likely more popular with the ruling classes but the majority of people would have been farmers and labourers who would have focussed their worship on gods that tended to those things. Not everyone wanted to die in battle. The Norse could be pretty cultured too, they may have not had as much masonry as the Romans did but they still had infrastructure and a working economy.
My dad, who grew up in Northern Minnesota during the Depression and WWII, recounts that bales of dried cod were delivered by train (specifically dropped onto the platform where they were ... attended ... by the local dogs until they were picked up). The cod was then reconstituted in lye, which results in a sort of jellied fish. Much like boiled cabbage, it generally makes the house in which it's being prepared smell horrible. Like a lot of food preserved for long periods and food made from disfavored parts of animals, lutefisk is poor folks' food. (Rich folks can afford fresh foods much more easily.) And like a lot of poor folks' food, it's an acquired taste and can definitely become comfort food for those who grow up with it. And as others have noted, lutefisk is considered a delicacy by some people.
I'm also super annoyed by the modern and (I would call it tone-deaf) perception that before the ipad, basically everyone was a dirty idiot that didn't know how to do anything. This is said almost exclusively by people who would die if you put them in the wilderness and said "you're here for 3 weeks, rely on your own wits". I think about this sort of thing often, and I think it has to stem from a new cultural attitude that this era is the "era of science", that we have a personal generational monopoly over knowledge, and that before now basically nobody ever thought about anything ever. This is the only era to have intellectuals. People from the past were stupid and dirty and ugly, haven't you ever watched Game of Thrones? Everyone in the middle ages was a dumb ugly guy covered in mud and plague boils, and you know they burned witches every Tuesday! You have to figure that with even our most distant ancestors, let's go beyond history and say even pre-homo sapiens, it's obvious that we've always been *extremely* intelligent both emotionally and mentally. Reading about the ways even prehistorical people learned to preserve food, make tools, forge metal, build wind and water powered contraptions, make beautiful art, work stone and wood, build structures, survive AND thrive in their harsh environments simply makes your head spin. You could give me centuries and I'd never figure out what they figured out just from their sheer intuitiveness. Everyone was a craftsman in their own right. There's been geniuses for thousands and thousands of years, no less thriving during times where oral tradition was the only means of communicating information. People just like to look down on their own forefathers rather than revere them. I guess they think, "what have all those dumb ancient people done anyway", well, besides build and invent all of everything forever.
@@EverylastGAZANshouldDIE Yeah, people in the past used to burn children alive in tophets, they had slavery, and smallpox was so commonplace, not having scars of it in the 18th century France was considered worthwhile to mention. Yes, people survived, but it was a brutal and measly existence - something akin to ISIS. (Although they did have sex, something I will never have.) - Adûnâi
Someone from Norway here. Lutefisk is nowadays considered an acquired taste to most of us. We'd rather want the "luxury" and convenience of just... popping in a frozen pizza and have that instead. In fact, we recoil at our own so called delicacies of the past. Treat them as a bad joke even. But if there's one tradition that guarantees an eternal place in our hearts, it's having a steaming pile of cured lamb ribs for Christmas and Easter. May we never tire from the smoky goodness of pinnekjøtt.
we used to have in Romania and still have in rural or for tradition sake pig meat preserved in pig fat usually in a special conical vessel,the meat was boiled or fried and covered with hot rendered fat
Great video. However, small correction: unless I’m mistaken, lutefisk is heavily dried for preservation. The lye/water is only used right before eating as part of the reconstitution process (to break down the tough leathery flesh)
Here's the thing, refrigerators did exist (sort of) in the middle ages. Even in desert environments like Iran there were "ice houses" that were kept cold even in the summer
There is a 4th way to save your meat. Seal it with fat to keep the air away from it. They would place it in a crock then cover it with rendered fat . It was kinda like an old fashioned short term canning. It will keep for a week or two. Sometimes longer.
I have enjoyed this channel if for no other reason than just reminding myself that people were still people. Everything we learned growing up made it seem like after Rome fell, we went through a period where it seemed like aliens roamed Europe until the Renaissance
This reminds me of the time one of my old coworkers tried (unsuccessfully) to explain something very similar to me lol. I’m aware the previous sentence sounds extremely vague but I’ll explain. To preface, my entire family is originally from Mexico although I was born and raised in the US. My coworker’s family was originally from Argentina but much like myself he was also born and raised in the US. We were hanging out after work one day at his house when the topic of Latin American food/culture came up. I commented on the fact that many non-Hispanic/non-Latino people assume that all Latin American food is spicy when in reality it’s really only Mexican food for the most part that’s spicy. He agrees then immediately asks me quite smugly “Do you know the reason why Mexican food is spicy?”. Before I can respond he continues, “The reason Mexican food is spicy is because you guys need a way to mask all of the off-flavors from the many terrible quality ingredients you all use. In Argentina our meat and produce are of such high quality we don’t need to cover anything up we only really need some salt and MAYBE a little pepper. But that’s it!” I was honestly taken aback for a moment. I was just about to lay into him for how ridiculous his “hot take” was before his sister beat me to it and yelled at him for being so “dumb” and disrespectful to me. She managed to convince him that his theory was flawed before I even managed to say anything in return.
Ummm... Spices often have been utilized to mask unfavorable taste. The dude was being rude though, one might say a lil spicy lol. People can be so easily insulted... We are all kinda dumb.
im noticing throughout your channel a running theme of "____ were human beings", and i think thats a great take away for so many topics. often times history is treated like the news and its sensationalized and oversimplified or blown out of proportion. in the process, the people of that time are dehumanized. they did live in a different world, but not THAT different. if we switched places, we each would do just fine in each other's time periods
One more way to store fresh meat without electricity. My grandma told me this and it really WAS a thing in Hungary even in the 20th century. So my great grandfather had a small butchery that time (the '30s) in a small village in Hungary and people around and from the neighbouring villages needed fresh meat (i.e. not smoked or dried). In the winter they cut big chunks of ice from the small river called Zagyva. They dig up big pits or holes in the earth with a bell-shaped cross section so that there was a small hole on ground level and it gradualy widened up the deeper you went. They used a ladder to get in. They plastered the walls with clay and laid all the ice blocks in the pit. It funcioned like a refrigerator all year around (even if the weather got really hot in the summer), until the last bits of ice melted. They laid hay on the ice blocks and put the meat on them. She said it (the ice) lasted until the next winter if enough ice was used. A small wooden trapdoor was used to close the opening. In Hungarian it is called 'jégverem' (ice pit).
I'm actually working on a video that relates to this, but I didn't know about how they did it in Hungary. This was very interesting!
Szia! Jo latni mas magyart az interneten!
@@beepbop6542 Szia! Igen, vagyunk egy páran :)
@@tamascsomor Could you give some pronounciation guides?
@@enysuntra1347 Hey, do you mean jégverem? With IPA signs it's [ 'jeːgvɛrɛm] or if I'd try to write it with English letters then I'd say ['yehg-verem].
My mother grew up in a village in the Balkans without electricity. The slaughter season for pigs was November. They ate very little fresh pork and the rest would be turned into sausage, blood sausage, bacon, smoked ham, pork rinds etc. Even the hair would be used to make rough cloth. Same goes for goats. The only meat that would be eaten mostly fresh was veal but since they had very few calves for a lot of people, storing it was not an issue. Also milk was basically never drunk fresh but made into cheese, buttermilk and butter. A lot of vegetables were pickeled and fruits made into jam. Some, like grapes and apples could even be carefully kept fresh until deep in the winter.
Keep your winter apples in the apple cupboard
I’m glad you told me that. The Balkans is off my holiday destination. It all sounds very primitive.
@@bobrobertson9547 naar its nice, good fertile land, lots to see
@@bobrobertson9547 Nobody's forcing you 🤷
@@mg4361 Awe …. Didums.
My experience in some little rural towns in Mexico, in a hot humid tropical region: Meat is almost never preserved. Everyone raises pigs in their backyard and when they sacrifice one, they go around gifting (yes, for free) parts of the pig to all the neighbors. Every neighbor will do the same when the time comes, so over time they all get a full pig for free. The meat is cooked fast and is preserved only for a couple of days in the form of a stew, that you can keep boiling.
You don't get a whole pig for free. You get your pig back at a rate that you can consume without wasting it.
@@obsidianjane4413Nitpicking? Actually, you do get almost a whole free pig back after first giving yours away. Yours is gone after gifting it. After that point in time you buy parts or get them free.
Perfect system that also enhances societal bonding.
@@Croatlik No its a rational fact. A "free pig" would mean you end up with 2 of them. You aren't "gifting" it, you are paying into the social contract that makes you entitled to draw an equivalent benefit.
Saying you get a free pig after giving yours away is the same fallacy and stupidity like "free healthcare".
@@obsidianjane4413why are you so triggered by this? Not everyone I. Such a society would have raised pigs but since they are a tight nit community who knows each other they support and care for one another, and contribute in different ways. Not everyone else sees all human relationships in transactionall terms.
Rancid IS the perfect word, but ludicrous is the perfect word to describe thinking people ate rancid meat. Great video 👍
Love this! Especially the explicit discussion of these ridiculous myths that rely on us not really seeing people from the past as fully human.
i think it's because some problems in XX centuries made us think past is usually violent
It was mostly the same as now. Except for certain periods of excess. There were excessively peaceful times in certain civilizations too, more so that the Western world now
Well that's kind of the point, because we only live the best part of a century we can't relate to people who are long gone from our current time and so we just automatically presume they lived life in some vastly different abstract almost non human way. What we forget is that we ARE those people, they live on in the DNA of all of us 500 years later so whatever we feel, think or have an instinctual attitude towards they did too cos after all they came first, we re just repeating their attitudes.
This is partly why I hate hate HATE it whenever someone says “It’s X year” as a stand in for “you shouldn’t think/talk like that”. The year is an arbitrary unit of measurement and has exactly zero impact on our status for “progress”.
People who are alive this year have more in common with people 4000 years ago than I think others are comfortable with.
@@Aaron-n8o2g yes I can't stand the year argument either it's used all the time, you'll see it in tv shows which are now long dated, it's the 80s, it's the 90s, it's the millenium, just referring to the decade as modern is meaningless, every decade is modern to those living in it.
As a Faroese guy I’m so happy and surprised that you showed my favourite meat as an example for dried meat.
My country always gets forgotten.
Also I think people forget one of the most important reasons why medieval trade revolved around them: spices are just easy to transport. They are often sold as powders or dried leaves, and can be packed in burlap, boxes, barrels and more. They keep for a long time when kept dry, and they don't need to be handled with a ton of care. If you want the ideal trade good for medieval routes that could take months or even years to traverse, spices and dried herbs should be at the very top of your list.
Finally a historian channel keeping it real! People often treat our history like some foreign Alien being's that differentiate from the people we are today. It's our societal construct that is different, not our biological make up. Definitely following this channel.
Cheers.
People definitely didn't eat rotten meat thats wild lol but things were a bit unhygienic. He says so in his new video
This is a false dichotomy. We are society and society is us.
As a lifelong Minnesotan who has a Scandinavian heritage and grew up eating lutefisk: when it's prepared right it's indistinguishable from buttered lobster or crab. It's absolutely delicious. Unfortunately a lot of people's experiences are not of it being prepared correctly.
My dad has told harrowing stories about my grandma preparing lutefisk at home, and this was a woman who could not be trusted to cook canned vegetables properly 😬😭😱
Can't say I love it but my grandpa loved lutfisk. And I can add I’m not norwegian or from Minnesota, nor was he, we’re Swedish and lutfisk is traditional here too. In the old days they even did it on freshwater fish like pike, not just on fish that’s more common in a country like Norway with a long ocean coast. It’s common actually to see things that’s tradition in all Nordic countries to be attributed to just one Nordic country.
Do you guys eat graved salmon and pickled herring too?
Rose Nylund (Betty White): Excuse me, I couldn't help but notice you took several of my tasty, delicious, lutefisk puffs and you've hardly touched them.
Blanche: Uh, I just don't care for them.
Rose: Yeah, well, you're an aging whore.
I guess you really need to get that lye out. I assume that is why we don’t use alkaline as often as pickling with vinegar. Acid is sour but alkaline tends to be bitter and soapy.
It is amazing how many people are unaware of food preservation methods such as drying, smoking, salting, pickling, fermenting, and root cellars. Thank you for videos that is teaching about those things to the younger generations.
You forgot sealing meats, such as in butter or cheese wax and the like.
@@Fastlan3 Those are methods I haven't use as much. Although my mother would put wax on top of jelly when she canned it.
@@harpintn if kept in cold, sealing the meat can potentially last 6+months.
@@Fastlan3 That is good to know, and it the way things are going now it could save my life.
@@harpintn ?
Wow! You just made me realize that Lent isn't just about "forsaking a food pleasure for the Lord", but also preserving food for the coming months. I love food history. Thank you!
It goes completely against logic anyway. Spices were expensive, if someone was so poor he had to eat spoiled meat, he sure would not be able to afford spices...
Exactly. Not sure why so many people in the comments are missing that point.
Lactofermented sausages are some the tastiest around. Try an uncured sopressata or other salami sometime. Make sure it has the ingredient "lactic acid starter culture."
I remember learning about preservation in Home Ec and the history of preservation, yet in history we learned the myth of rotten meat! You think I would have put 2 and 2 together! It explains it so well, particularly the food examples! The bit of Hank slapping John did have me in hysterics though
People from the future: In the commercial era, most people wouldn’t eat unpackaged food. Their lives were full of toil and gloom, so their capitalist leaders provided convenience food as a social benefit.
People also only ate food “gift wrapped,” to invoke the lingering hunter/gatherer instincts of encountering a fruit patch, while also honoring their commercial cultural traditions. “Bare food” was only eaten for aesthetic reasons. This is evident by the archeological data remnants on “Instagram” (a prominent institutional power.)
They also smelled reallyyy bad… like I mean.. bad. They basically pickled themselves with analogues of primitive artificial “scents.” Unfortunately, corporal micro-flora engineering hadn’t been invented. 😬
If you want to figure out how people were able to eat meat in an age without refrigeration then just look at the cultures that exist now that don't have refrigeration. You get a lot of salting of meat and smoking of meat and curing of meat which is the same thing that you would have gotten in the Middle ages.
It isn't true. Europeans had centuries of food preservation techniques most of which we can still use today. Brining, Smoking, packing in Lard to exclude the air (see pemmican), storing where the area was colder, then there was the daily hunting - most of which was hung - and then packing it in spices and salt, drying in the sun as well. Sausages are everywhere. Then there's canning (bottling). Pickling as well. Boiling also works. Confit is a delicacy that you can make yourself.
best channel I've discovered recently. please continue with your work sir.
I live in Pennsylvania and we make a really old school Italian meat called sopresata. It’s seasoned pork in a natural casing. We usually make them and let them dry late winter but traditionally they were probably made late fall.
This myth never made any sense to me. For one thing, if someone can afford expensive spices, surely they can afford fresh meat.
My mother would tell me about how my great-grandfather would smoke meat from his farm (~ 20s and 30s). He lived in Louisiana and lived a very simple life even though he was quite wealthy.
I remember seeing a picture my mother took as a kid and there are hundreds of slices of meat all hanging from racks in a tall wooden smoker.
Another thing that’s neat is my mother learned French as a child in order to speak to my great-grandfather as he couldn’t speak English.
It's sad that French is disappearing in South Louisiana.
Lovely video! the same confit method was also used in North Italy. In Piedmont "Salamin d'la Duja" were made by preserving sausages under lard and in Lombardy there was "Rustin nega' " basically the traditional veal Milanese but preserved in butter. In some traditional restaurant you can still find this delicious dishes😊
I heard this as a kid too in school and immediately called bullshit. Both the rotten meat and the whole spices were only in asia thing.
I'm a Norwegian who has lived the last few years in rural Morocco and even though the meat in the local butchers isn't refrigerated the meat seems fresher here. A lot fresher. For instance if you buy a chicken they kill it right in front of you and you take it home still warm. I'm pretty much a vegetarian now.
That's funny. My father went to some relative's farm when I was around 10. They hung a chicken up, slit its throat and then let it run around for a bit. Then they took it inside, stripped it of feathers in mere seconds and gutted it on a table that looked like a coroner's table: stainless steel, slanted and with drain on end. We had it for dinner that night. My brother, who also witnessed this, would not eat chicken for a decade after.
@@cobramcjingleballs I grew up in rural America and at least once a year the family would come together and do a "hog killin" where a pig and chickens would be slaughtered from beginning to end to prepare all of the meat and other products to distribute to the family. I remember breaking a chickens neck or cutting the head off myself as a child which is very morbid in retrospect...
Btw you can look up how to castrate a goat on youtube should you ever get one
Rural Alabama raised here, my dad killed chickens in front of us, cleaned them, and we ate those jokers. lol This was only around 20 years ago? People take care of themselves when they are poor. I'm a yuppie engineer now. Don't have any dietary qualms, but I also don't kill my own meat.
@@bigalkool2897 I've heard you just tie their balls up till they drop off. Sounds cruel, but the cutting off methods sounds more brutal and more damage.
I saw a program where they went to Norway to try Ludefisk because it was "traditional" and they asked the waitress if she ever eats it and she looked at them like they were the stupidest people in the world for wanting to eat it...lmao. They spit it out and the waitress laughed at them. :) I suspect a lot of "delicacies" are like that, but there are certainly delicacies that aren't THAT outside the norm. For instance, many won't eat haggis, but lots of Scots DO love it, it's not just tradition! Same with snails. Or for me, I grew up eating all parts of the animal so I don't feel superior to certain parts, like tripe is amazing when prepared correctly...the thing is if you seperate a food from its culture (and proper preperation) it becomes inedible and disgusting. Imagine if we were all trying to cook sheep's stomach without directions! So much in history is lost in translation...like spoiled meat, lol!
When I visited Scotland I had haggis every morning with breakfast and loved it. I was kind of surprised given its bad reputation. But then there are some traditional American dishes that I really don't like, like chitlins. People's tastes really have changed a lot in the past century or two. It used to be that everyone ate all parts of the animal. Now most people, at least in the West, stay away from a lot of things. I don't know if that's because of overabundance, or what foods freeze/can better, or what. Such a good point about old techniques being lost. How many recipes are disappearing because no one is carrying them on?
Haggis and escargot are both delicious. But I'd eat lutefisk before I eat tripe.
Lots of younger Scandinavians have not even tried some more traditional foods, fermented stuff, offal, lutfisk. Nowadays it'd be older generations, and the more adventurous younger ones or those who still grew up with those. Nowadays they may be more familiarised with pizzas and kebabs and thai food than with surströmming, lutfisk or pölsa (a bit similar to haggis but from Sweden). You still see those products at the shops though.
I don't know what show that was, but that's ridiculous. A lot of people love lutefisk. It's one of those aquired tastes, I guess, and certainly a lot of people (especially young people) don't like it. It is however very common to eat it at some point during the christmas holidays. I expect that the reaction from the waitress (who probably doesn't like it much) was more of a "no foreigner likes this" thing. If not then she is an idiot who probably just doesn't like it herself and "can't imagine how anyone could" haha
@@edgarburlyman738 And yet I eat tripe with no problem but detest fish in every shape and form. I think lutefisk would be a special kind of hell for me.
Back in the '90s in ATL, a friend of mine bought a 1963 AMC Rambler and it had an old bumper sticker on it reading: _"If lutefisk is outlawed, only outlaws will have lutefisk."_ Presumably the car had come from the midwest.
Having spices were like a huge flex in the Middle Ages. The rich would not spend small fortunes to flavor bad meat!
this is what I’ve been thinking to myself ever since I was a little kid that didn’t know anything about anything. I kept thinking, who in the hell would eat rotten meat and how would covering it in spices make it any better, and how would all those masses of people afford the spices to begin with. All while I was a kid. Wild.
Exactly! If they can afford all those luxury spices, they could just buy fresh meat to begin with...
Only rich people could afford spices during the Middle Ages, which made them a status symbol. But they probably liked the taste, as well ( I know I do.) 🌶️
kids are all born with intact bs monitors then the world demands we accept bs to get along
this is one of the best youtube comments sections i've ever seen. i've learned nearly as much here as i did from the video above
Your channel is just so great. I love your editing, your voiceover, your video topics. Thanks for these great videos.
Also wonder how they could afford all these spices if they had to deal with rotten meat to begin with. I've heard the same thing but about hot peppers and spicy food, that it was for masking spoiled meat, it's just weird.
Peppers were used to prevent spoilage too, capsaicin + fermentation are more effective than just simply fermenting the food for fermentation so I bet that they read about it and didn't understand at all that fermented doesn't mean spoiled...
*for conservation not "for fermentation"
Townsends did a video on pemmican that this reminds me of. Just like the confit you mentioned but somewhere between that and beef jerky. In combination with hard tack it was used as a fatty energy bar that could last months or even years if made a certain way
This is one of the silliest myths about the middle ages. Even today there are MANY parts of the world where refrigeration (and stable electricity) isn't the norm - at least a billion people get by fine without fridges. Meat is either eating directly after a slaughter before bacteria has a chance to spread and rigor mortis sets in, or is preserved for later consumption. Steak fans are familiar with "dry aging" as a concept, but before vacuuming sealing made wet aged beef the norm, dry aged beef was just... Beef. Leaving meat to dry for a few weeks in the right conditions results in most of the harmful bacteria being killed off by a combination of lack of moisture + penicillin molds.
It's amazing to me that some people can acknowledge that human beings have been eating meat for hundreds of thousands of years, but refrigeration only showed up about 100 years ago, so they must have just been eating spoiled meat. 😆
3:15 we actually eat smoked sausages and fermented stuff on easter here and i never thought much of it until now that
I remember something maybe UA-cam vid about Catherine De Medici that she found the meat of the royal French family was often spoiled, that didn’t make sense to me, because I live in Saudi Arabia, my father is 87 and he lived the first 20y of his life in a literal medieval world, and I knew from his stories that they rarely let meat go bad, and when it goes bad they’ll throw it away, they’ll always cut it to strips and air dry it or not as often they’ll cook it with fat as you mentioned, or just buy fresh meat for whatever needed for one meal, it was the job of a butcher to sell fresh meat.
I saw someone mentioning ice-pits. I haven't seen evidence of this, but this seems very plausible also for medieval times in north-western Europe.
And a friend of mine studied germanic laws, and found somewhere that there were rules that you had to mention to the village community during the weekly meeting when you were going to slaughter, so there could be sharing in fresh meat in different periods of the year between the different farms.
A friend of mine dislikes spicy food and resents how popular spicy food has become. Whenever a spicy food is proposed to eat he gets huffy and says ACKTUALLY SPICES ARE TO HIDE THE TASTE OF RANCID MEAT. We all just roll our eyes and tell him he has the palate of a small child.
I never really thought past the "spices for rotten meat" argument tbh
I suppose I just thought that because they might eat spoiled meat regularly, their gut biome would have some kind of bacteria that would help prevent food poisoning illness.
Very classy to call out a myth in the way you did! Bravo.
I am going to try to adopt a similar approach in my future videos where I call out misinformation.
Yes. That's never been done before. You should do a channel "Mythbreakers" or "Mythblasters," something like that.
What I was taught in school in the early 1960's that Europeans went to Asia to get spices - because they wanted spices. Later I learned that certain spices, such as cloves, were use to _preserve_ meat, for example sausages. I didn't never read that they were used to disguise the flavor of spoiled meat. This is the first place I've heard that myth. Oil of cloves kills bacteria. It used to be widely used in dentistry for that reason. Some dentists may still be using it to some extent.
Hops were used to preserve beer on long sea voyages.
Your grocery stores are doing the same thing. Take the expired protein and put marinade on it to "reset" the timer.
The Middle Ages slander is too real. I personally think it’s down to the hilariously false belief that we as a society are currently in our apex of culture and intelligence, evolving higher and higher. We’re devolving if anything. The average person in 1250 was no less intelligent than the average person today.
I loved reading through these comments and seeing how people would preserve food in different parts of the world, it’s so interesting! I asked my dad, and he said that when he was young in brazil, they would kill pigs and preserve the meat well within a bunch of the pig’s own fat. This could keep it preserved for over a month. When they kill animals like chickens though they would just eat it the same day since it was small.
Finally, a proper history channel with only information and no biases. I love how you drive the points of misconceptions and the levels of certainty in theories.
Bit of a nitpick about lutefisk. It’s not a method of preservation, but rather preparation preparation of stock fish, specifically, which you also mentioned. Lye treatment is done when you prepare the stock fish for eating.
Excellent video. Just discovered the channel and I’m happy to see so much interesting content presented in an elegant way. Keep it up!
The man in the video and a commenter both mentioned animals being slaughtered in November. I'll add to this by saying that one term for November found in Old English is "blotmonaþ" which meant "sacrifice month". The thinking is that animal sacrifices were made in the month they slaughtered animals for food.
I remember being told this in grade school but not in any college level courses. What I'm more curious about is where the myth comes from. My guess would be it started in the mid to late 20th century. Before the 20th century, no one had refrigeration. And well into the early part, most people were probably familiar with the traditional methods of preserving food because they used them themselves. This lack of understanding seems like something only an urban population in the later parts of the 20th century would even accept much less come up with.
The myth was started by spice merchants.
Confit styles preservation exists in many other cultures. In Turkey (were I’m from) we ‘comfit’ and jar cooked cubed lamb in jars covered in its own fat and it lasts for ages. I know that others do it with mince, this is quiet common in the middle east
Hey I really like your videos, you have a great style of production and I always find it very entertaining and informative. Something I was always taught in school that you might find interesting to cover is the rarity of salt in the Middle Ages, I was always told that salt was very difficult to produce and people would kill each other for it because of how necessary it was for food preservation. I think debunking salt myths and talking about historical production of salt might be an interesting topic for a video
Great video, your voice is so soothing. I was glued to my chair.
I think you're mixing up rotten meat with meat that is starting to turn. If you have a cut of meat, and it's turning, you can still cook it, kill the bacteria and it's safe. However, you can still smell the taint from the spoilage before cooking. PEPPER is great for masking this odor. Also, some meats, especially if wild, can have very pungent odors and tastes. Spices, will help with the flavours. It's like cooking duck. Duck is super fatty and it leaves a film in your mouth. But, if you cook it with orange, this changes the starches. Wild meats are different that your grocery store corn fed mutants. So, yes, no one was eating completely rotten meat, but they would eat meat that stank but could still be cooked and eaten. Waste not want. The spices were also neutralize some microbes. So, there is some truth to the myth. Europeans did want to spice up the bland cooking. England especially. Jamie Oliver, we're looking at you.
That must have been the origin of the myth.
Uncured meat would be eaten immediately after butchering the animal though. You simply keep the animal alive until then. Unlike today, where we are eating meat that is 'starting to turn' all the time.
Don't lump Jamie Oliver in with us English when his entire culinary training was in Italian food (doesn't mean he's good at that either tbf). We might not make the best food on Earth but we're not *that* bad.
The main reason English cooking gets dumped on so hard is after 2 world wars which left entire towns without a male population (forcing the women to work rather than teach their kids how to cook) crippling food standardisation to avoid starvation (as one example, pre-WW1 Britain had over 3,500 cheese manufacturers each with their own centuries old recipes, by 1945 there were less than 100 which were legally forced to make only 5 varieties) plus rationing that continued through to the 50's meant we lost most of our culinary herritage. When the nation finally started to recover rather than look back for inspiration on how to cook not-terrible food people looked abroad instead, sealing the fate of English cusine.
@@Neion8 Nah. All my ancestors are British, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, etc. My mother would always cook our traditional foods. Many, many I love. Yorkshire pudding is my favourite. But, I don't like the way the chefs do it when I was an apprentice. It was all light and fluffy and big. My mom's wasn't. Hard to describe. But I love the whole deal. However, there is a whole host of traditional meals I don't like and won't touch with a ten food spoon. Anything with eels, yick. Kidney pie! WHY? I could go on. I love me granny from Glasgow, Scotland most. I know you're not suppose to pick favs. But she had such a tough life, I owe her too much. Haggis, oh haggis, what rhymes with haggis? Nothing. That's what. "The proof is in the tasting of the pudding." There's many puddings I wouldn't even taste given the ingredients. For a second, I thought I was wrong in think custard was British and thought is was probably French. NOPE !!!! BRITISH !!!! Of course, disgusting. I win the argument. The food was gross way before WW II. Good day, sir or ma'am.
@@RobinMarks1313 You think custard is disgusting? Your opinion is now irrelevant. ;)
You're right about yorkshire puds though and you missed out toad in a hole (no toads involved if foreigners are wondering), Cottage/shepherds pie (shared culinary herritage with France) and English stuffing which - when done well - I'd put on par with any food I've had from anywhere else on Earth. Most of it though is food that's often done badly but done well is great.
One of the things you need to remember though is I pointed out how many recipes and the like that were lost. The ones we have now are but a shadow of the thousand+ years of pre-war cullinary development that you can see in other European nations where practically every family had their own variations on traditional dishes with efforts made to preseve their culture. Not all, but most of that was lost in Britain (England in particular) due in no small part to the government actively erradicating it in the name of standardisation.
On a different note, how are you okay with Haggis and rendered fat in your food but squeam at kidney in pies and blood sausages? I understand being taken in by the American-influenced hysteria about offal but it seems weirdly mannifested in you my friend.
the best part about these preservation methods is that most of it is also delicious.
This explains how meat could be stored, the 1st part of the myth.
However, when I made my hunting permit, it was told that before refrigeration, there was the "Haut Gout", which was indeed achieved through (controlled!) decomposition. It was seen as a delicacy, medically, it is possible because decomposition / spoilage toxins themselves decay into more harmless substances; and eating one rabbit with "Haut Gout" during a holiday meal as one course of a menu ("the solution to pollution is dilution") may just confer an interesting taste where the whole meal might make you sick. I don't know when Haut Gout was begun to be seen as a delicacy, but it might well be the Middle Ages.
The 2nd part of the myth was that spices were a motivation for the exploration. Can it be that preserved meat, albeit not spoiled, was bland or salty that spices indeed were in high demand in the upper classes to "spice things up"? While the 1st part of the myth was misrepresented, then, the 2nd part may still hold true. What's the opinion of history about this?
Where I live there's a stately home that was used by various kings in the middle ages.
There's an underground stone igloo structure on the grounds that was filled with ice so they could keep food fresh in the house throughout the year.
Popular history and unfortunately even academic historians do not view people in the past as people just like we are today, cultures can change but we share so much more in common with people in the past than superficial analysis would have us believe.
Regarding the use of spices, I would think that most people who we assume would be eating spoiled/rotten meat would be those on the lower income spectrum. Given how expensive it was to even buy spices, my thought would be that using spices to cover up the smell/taste of spoiled meat is not taking this simple connection of income into account. If no money means spoiled meat, it would have also meant no spices to mask the flavor.
You don't have to dry or smoke sausage. The fat and salt content is enough to keep it at cellar temperatures. I'm guessing everyone made as much sausage as they had fat for. Pigs would've been the main source of fat, other animals are too lean.
Also, you know pemmican? It's just sausage. Pemmican is sausage.
Source?
This seems sus as hell man, ngl
mmm, pemmican has other things in it, like berries, and lots of fat…. it’s made differently…. and it’s very dense and hard…
@@PRH123 It's similar to sausage though. Fat preserving meat. There's also berries, but yeah.
There's a reason why being called worth your salt is a compliment
People will accept anything they are told since they don't have the means to refute what they hear and read. That's why you might hate people from other nations, religions,...etc that you never even met before just because you saw them being portrayed in a negative and unrealistic way in some movies and news outlets.
Myths about middle ages were invented by enlightenment thinkers to feel good about themselves
Disagree
@@joeswarson4580 ...how? It's a pretty basic statement.
It's not just tradition that keeps these techniques around, but also because often it makes food better. Smoking meat adds flavor. Dry aging beef is amazing for steaks. Bacon is a kind of salt cured pork. That sort of thing. Also the techniques are ancient. We have records of meat and fish being dried and salted from around 3000 BC in Mesopotamia.
Sure, it’s well known for example how Native Americans dried fish, made venison jerky, and pemmican…
I agree with one caveat. Even today traditional rural markets, as I see in Mexico for instance, have fresh meat but unrefrigerated. Like a pickup truck filled with plucked dead chocked sitting in the hot Sun. But you can eat this stuff, which definitely does not pass FDA standards. Looking at ethnic cuisine, one immediately notices that most recipes are for what we would call stews. Basically spiced liquid used to boil meat. For hours. Essentially sterilizing the meat. Poultry, also at risk can be stewed or roasted, their frames conducive to circulating hot air. Cooking kills the vast majority of bacterial or fungal decay. So, I don’t think they ate ROTTEN meat. But surely spoiled in the modern sense.
Aged meat also is a decaying meat. Stored in a salt cellar ( not refrigerated) the meat gets moldy-which kills bacteria. The moldy parts are then cut away when ready to consume. The FDA permits such meat to be eaten rare. While refrigerated today, it wasn’t years ago, though the cellars were naturally cool.
PS, my brother-in-law tells me that the secret of a restaurant’s famous chicken fricassee dish was…letting it tot before preparing. There is an art to these processes, and again, cooking fixes a lot of issues!
Pagpag is a term for leftover food scavenged from garbage sites and dumps in Philippines, they often mask the bad taste by cooking it with a lot of spices. So the idea of using spices to make expired food palatable is not completely bunk.
Of course, I don't think medieval people with the means to afford spices would be eating expired to meat.
First, you have to define what "spoiled" is. Newspapers in the 18th and 19th century have recipes about making meat that had become spoiled to some degree safe and palatable to eat.
I heard of a study of why some cultures eat spicy food and others don't. They found that usually cultures in hot and humid climates eat spicy food because it was a way to preserve the meat.
A good rule to keep in mind is that if you're ever studying history and think to yourself "Wow! People back then sure were stupid!" You're probably misunderstanding something or missing context.
Are you implying people are not stupid & cruel in all ages? Research Nongqawuse - they slaughtered their cattle and starved themselves. Or FGM.
- Adûnâi
@angamaitesangahyando685 No, he is implying that modern men tend to look upon their progenitors with great narcissism, and great contempt, which ironically does serve to reveal our ongoing stupidity, as you've pointed out.
LOL, no. Not really. While you can miss context and the like, people were in fact stupid back then.
There is also the very old way of preserving food in peat bogs (a low oxygen, cold and acidic environment)
Ok, so I'm going to take a stab at why this myth is so enduring.
Hung game meat. When I 1st told my then-young wife about hung pheasant she mouth vomited. People just assume that an undressed animal hung outside is going to be a rotten maggot infested mass after a week but in reality, if you hang a bird for a week in the proper weather it stays in good shape. We use to hang pheasant and game birds for a few days, it made them easier to pluck and dialed back the gaminess. Even the offals would be in good shape assuming they were not shot through.
I believe that the motivation behind the spice trade revolved more around the introduction of sugar than its use for meat. Pepper was the main spice used for meat, but that had been common since the Roman Empire. The spices that motivated the later exploration were spices like nutmeg, cinnamon, or cloves which were used more for desserts and even different varieties of gruel like oatmeal or arroz con leche.
Another point is that people used to have, on average, large families and often multigenerational in homes. And Animals were generally smaller. So you often could slaughter a duck, goose or even a sheep or goat and eat most of it in one setting. Or at least have it as the basis for a stew that you kept slow cooking for days.
This was very informative. I would add the obvious that in Asia many of the markets have live animals because there isn't a refrigerator big enough to hold everything and keeping the animals alive for as long as possible is a great way to keep meat from going bad :)
Grew up in a Deli/Butchery as a kid, when I heard this for the first time it always sounded so.. like.. "What?!"
I imagine that this came about because meat starts to smell bad, much before it has gone bad, due to oxidation. You can't actually smell bacterial growth.
This UA-cam channel is a gem
Hey man you gotta make more videos. You have a gift.
You're wrong though, it wasn't the reason European looked for Spices but they did eat rotten meat to an extent. And I'm not talking of do or die situations like famines or wars.
English doesn't seem to have a word for it but French literally has a word for the process of letting meat spoil to improve its taste and texture : "faisander" which come from the the french word for pheasant as that bird was often left to hung by the neck, whole, in the attic for up to a month before being eaten, "til the neck gives" according to some traditions.
And it's not just a French thing, the romans did it to (we have text from Ciceron attesting of it), the Inuits are also quite food of spoiled meat, as do a lot of other peoples throughout the world.
Crash Course is honestly the WatchMojo of educational channels.
As a person from one of several non-Mongolian nations that still managed to conquer Siberia in the winter, I agree. (Just without using google, SIberia was conquered in winter, besides Mongols, by Evanks, Kipchaks, Cumans, Russians and Czechoslovaks).
Frankly, Crash Course is way worse than that. WatchMojo are just annoying because they're click-baity and normie; Crash Course is actively malicious in how they intentionally spread bad misinformation about history and different cultures and beliefs.
Courses with an emphasis on the Crash, best viewed as a teen/young adult living in the 2010s (so many dated references)
@@haughtygarbage5848I thought it covers America AP history course, that’s why.
People use spices because they taste good. Another reason for spices is as a sartorial expenditure, cover that food in spices to demonstrate your wealth.
I saw Mr. Green, I clicked.
I think it's really an over exaggeration. When they say people in the Middle Ages were eating rotten meat, it was more like they were eating slightly spoiled meat, and sometimes they would get sick, just like we do.
A typical preservation method from the Middle Ages is, for example, matjes. Herring is placed in oak barrels in a brine for 5 days and begins to ferment slightly. Matjes is incredibly tasty. And there is also Bismarck herring, which is pickled with salt and vinegar to mature and preserve it. Both are still an absolute delicacy today. If you're ever on a northern coast in Central Europe, you absolutely have to try matjes fillet housewife style or a herring fish roll ;)
In sweden we call fermented/pickled herring ”sill”. Matjessill is one type of a huge variety of pickled herrings available in Sweden. (Although swedish matjessill is very different from durch matjeshering.) Many households have their own special variety aswell. In my family we make our own senapssill, mustard sill.
In more rural/ traditional households, mustard is a really big thing. I got told it's because the antibacterial nature of it helped with meat, that tasted a little funky (but not rotten !)
There are a lot of myths relating to the middle ages. Like for example this idea that the Norse were these psychotic barbarians who were all obsessed with war. War may have been a central part of their culture, but it was of pretty much every culture. There were also plenty of people who just wanted to get by, had no interest in violence. There were even multiple gods for different purposes, not every god was a god of war. Odin was likely more popular with the ruling classes but the majority of people would have been farmers and labourers who would have focussed their worship on gods that tended to those things. Not everyone wanted to die in battle. The Norse could be pretty cultured too, they may have not had as much masonry as the Romans did but they still had infrastructure and a working economy.
My dad, who grew up in Northern Minnesota during the Depression and WWII, recounts that bales of dried cod were delivered by train (specifically dropped onto the platform where they were ... attended ... by the local dogs until they were picked up). The cod was then reconstituted in lye, which results in a sort of jellied fish. Much like boiled cabbage, it generally makes the house in which it's being prepared smell horrible.
Like a lot of food preserved for long periods and food made from disfavored parts of animals, lutefisk is poor folks' food. (Rich folks can afford fresh foods much more easily.) And like a lot of poor folks' food, it's an acquired taste and can definitely become comfort food for those who grow up with it. And as others have noted, lutefisk is considered a delicacy by some people.
My family always celebrates Easter and Christmas with a couple pounds of Bockwurst. So good.
I'm also super annoyed by the modern and (I would call it tone-deaf) perception that before the ipad, basically everyone was a dirty idiot that didn't know how to do anything. This is said almost exclusively by people who would die if you put them in the wilderness and said "you're here for 3 weeks, rely on your own wits".
I think about this sort of thing often, and I think it has to stem from a new cultural attitude that this era is the "era of science", that we have a personal generational monopoly over knowledge, and that before now basically nobody ever thought about anything ever. This is the only era to have intellectuals. People from the past were stupid and dirty and ugly, haven't you ever watched Game of Thrones? Everyone in the middle ages was a dumb ugly guy covered in mud and plague boils, and you know they burned witches every Tuesday!
You have to figure that with even our most distant ancestors, let's go beyond history and say even pre-homo sapiens, it's obvious that we've always been *extremely* intelligent both emotionally and mentally. Reading about the ways even prehistorical people learned to preserve food, make tools, forge metal, build wind and water powered contraptions, make beautiful art, work stone and wood, build structures, survive AND thrive in their harsh environments simply makes your head spin. You could give me centuries and I'd never figure out what they figured out just from their sheer intuitiveness. Everyone was a craftsman in their own right.
There's been geniuses for thousands and thousands of years, no less thriving during times where oral tradition was the only means of communicating information. People just like to look down on their own forefathers rather than revere them. I guess they think, "what have all those dumb ancient people done anyway", well, besides build and invent all of everything forever.
Not even half of what you said was true
Calculated at 32% correct actually 😅
@@EverylastGAZANshouldDIE Yeah, people in the past used to burn children alive in tophets, they had slavery, and smallpox was so commonplace, not having scars of it in the 18th century France was considered worthwhile to mention. Yes, people survived, but it was a brutal and measly existence - something akin to ISIS. (Although they did have sex, something I will never have.) - Adûnâi
@angamaitesangahyando685 yea I was just screwing around. You'll have sex someday if you want it though
🤢 "This meat is rotten. Could you pass me the cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, cloves & pepper please?" 😂
Someone from Norway here. Lutefisk is nowadays considered an acquired taste to most of us. We'd rather want the "luxury" and convenience of just... popping in a frozen pizza and have that instead. In fact, we recoil at our own so called delicacies of the past. Treat them as a bad joke even.
But if there's one tradition that guarantees an eternal place in our hearts, it's having a steaming pile of cured lamb ribs for Christmas and Easter. May we never tire from the smoky goodness of pinnekjøtt.
Tørrfisk is the shit tho
we used to have in Romania and still have in rural or for tradition sake pig meat preserved in pig fat usually in a special conical vessel,the meat was boiled or fried and covered with hot rendered fat
Great video. However, small correction: unless I’m mistaken, lutefisk is heavily dried for preservation. The lye/water is only used right before eating as part of the reconstitution process (to break down the tough leathery flesh)
Here's the thing, refrigerators did exist (sort of) in the middle ages. Even in desert environments like Iran there were "ice houses" that were kept cold even in the summer
There is a 4th way to save your meat. Seal it with fat to keep the air away from it. They would place it in a crock then cover it with rendered fat . It was kinda like an old fashioned short term canning. It will keep for a week or two. Sometimes longer.
Lutfisk is delicious, esp with mustard, these days you can get it pre-moisturized and de-luted so you don't have to go through the process yourself.
I love people calling out the massively misleading content the Greens put out
What I was taught was that preservation methods (drying, smoking, or salting) went from edible to tasty with the addition of spices.
I have enjoyed this channel if for no other reason than just reminding myself that people were still people. Everything we learned growing up made it seem like after Rome fell, we went through a period where it seemed like aliens roamed Europe until the Renaissance
"The thing about the Middle Ages is that it was human beings -- it was Homo sapiens." Amazing.
This reminds me of the time one of my old coworkers tried (unsuccessfully) to explain something very similar to me lol. I’m aware the previous sentence sounds extremely vague but I’ll explain. To preface, my entire family is originally from Mexico although I was born and raised in the US. My coworker’s family was originally from Argentina but much like myself he was also born and raised in the US.
We were hanging out after work one day at his house when the topic of Latin American food/culture came up. I commented on the fact that many non-Hispanic/non-Latino people assume that all Latin American food is spicy when in reality it’s really only Mexican food for the most part that’s spicy. He agrees then immediately asks me quite smugly “Do you know the reason why Mexican food is spicy?”. Before I can respond he continues, “The reason Mexican food is spicy is because you guys need a way to mask all of the off-flavors from the many terrible quality ingredients you all use. In Argentina our meat and produce are of such high quality we don’t need to cover anything up we only really need some salt and MAYBE a little pepper. But that’s it!”
I was honestly taken aback for a moment. I was just about to lay into him for how ridiculous his “hot take” was before his sister beat me to it and yelled at him for being so “dumb” and disrespectful to me. She managed to convince him that his theory was flawed before I even managed to say anything in return.
Ummm... Spices often have been utilized to mask unfavorable taste. The dude was being rude though, one might say a lil spicy lol. People can be so easily insulted... We are all kinda dumb.
im noticing throughout your channel a running theme of "____ were human beings", and i think thats a great take away for so many topics. often times history is treated like the news and its sensationalized and oversimplified or blown out of proportion. in the process, the people of that time are dehumanized. they did live in a different world, but not THAT different. if we switched places, we each would do just fine in each other's time periods