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.
@bobrobertson9547 How silly. You'd rather go to a bunch of cookie cutter tourist traps where you see everything online before you get there than actually go somewhere you might see something new and catch a glimpse of a different way of life...
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].
Humans in the Middle Ages also had the same potential for intelligence that we do. Another one of those myths is that following the fall of Rome everyone suddenly became stupid.
That's a good observation, but I think the lesson to be learned here is that all individual people actually are fairly intellectually useless and it’s our ability to communicate that leads to us collectively achieving impressive intellectual outcomes. There are plenty of animal studies (and maybe they are sensationalised a bit, but still) that show certain animals can actually do all sorts of tasks on a level that is somewhat comparable to humans, or at least more comparable than what one would initially expect. However, what these animals can't do is communicate with the level of complexity that humans can with each other, and its this ability to communicate, collaborate and build off ideas that means humans achieve far more than crows and octopi and the like. So, the key point about the middle ages in Europe is that many systems of communication that had be in place before collapsed and hence communication between peoples dropped off, hence so did the collective intellectual output, giving the appearance of overall relative stupidity.
@@andrewwestcott9172 That's an interesting and well thought out hypothesis. I'd like to see more data on this idea. Certainly you make valid points regarding communication. Are you suggesting then, that with the withdrawal/fall of the Roman Empire communication ceased to be as organized and widespread? I think perhaps that's true. I'd love to read a well researched book or thesis investigating this. Any recommendations?
@Bob Robertson I only refer to a common misconception regarding the "Dark Ages", which were not "dark" nor dim in terms of human intelligence and ingenuity. As far as the use of the term "civilization" it's a broad term for any (and every) historical or anthropological society, not a moral or ethical judgment regarding they're cultural or military behavior. As to communication being a source of greater societal progress, in many ways that's true. After all, our modern access to the internet makes it easier to learn, research, share ideas and to fact check. So it's entirely plausible that a society might breakdown with the sudden termination of broad communication. And the Romans had both a network of physical travel and a postal system. So I find the hypothesis that the demise of the Roman Empire, specifically as it affected broad communication, having contributed to the concept of the "Dark Ages" worthy of further investigation.
We call it the Age of Enlightenment not because humans were less intelligent before then, but because they more than not attributed things incorrectly and thus were not logical enough to make "sound" decisions but instead more prone to emotional ones.
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.
I’m South Korean, and this is the first time I’ve heard about people eating rotten meat in the Middle Ages🤯 I’ve never learned it that way. The textbook specifically said that people liked the taste of spices.
@@bosewicht2389I’m sure that in a thousand years it’ll be a myth that we thought having microplastics in everything was healthy or something People love to view themselves as superior to their “stupid predecessors”
Pre-Industrial people had 5 ways of preserving food: drying, smoking, fermenting, salting, and pickling. This applied not only to meats but to fruits, vegetables, and dairy as well. Examples of these products are wine, yogurt, kimchee, kefir, raisins, cheese, and saur kraut. Europeans were looking to import spices from the East because spices were luxury goods.
Don't forget packing it within something that'll spoil instead no one wants to bother eating. Like keeping meat in a jar full of rendered fat. Doesn't last long but good for snacks.
@@colbyboucher6391 Confit (preserving meat in its own fat) is as a good a method as others. The trick is to cook the meat in the fat until all the water content has evaporated out so that there's no moisture to cause the meat to spoil. Doing this properly can allow you to preserve meat in pots or jars covered in fat which will last for months.
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.
Absolutely hilarious that myth of the rotten meat, because they didn't have refrigerators and were so primitive, but rotten meat is just in the middle ages, not in antiquity.... Just did the same as in antiquity. Awesome vídeo and beautifully documented 👌 blessings and success
Oh indeed I noticed that argument too. Apperently meat spoils only in Europe and nowhere else and only from 500 AD to 1800 AD. This is just "lets hate on Europe (whites actually)" thing that is very common now online
@@velvet3784 eh I remember this sort of stuff in schools before most people had internet, honestly I'd blame the Victorians much more for the pseudo history. At any given time their ancestors were simultaneously backwards mud eating primitives who needed the Romans to save them and just reverted to living in poop when the Romans fell, and also super powered pure noble savages with lost technology and magic powers and the true religion and original language and the most pure genetics etc etc. The neo-Gothic culture revival of the 1800s was largely a backlash of fans of the Middle Ages, distinct because most people assumed as they still do that they are advanced super modernists and the dead were all dumb cave people
@@Rynewulf oh I would not blame victorians but enlightenment thinkers. Victorians were fans of middle ages although yes we can say they too thought of themselves as better
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.
My grandparents in Lithuanian countryside had literal rooms full of smoked, salted, dried meat and all kinds of sausages. Also, they had a hand-dug basement under their house and two "cold rooms" to keep all sorts of meats and vegetables. It's amazing to think that people in the Middle Ages were not clever enough to think of that.
@@Rita1984 Smoke exposure is a carcinogen, but if you’re living a long enough life that cancer is how you’re going back then, then chances are you’re already pretty healthy as is.
my grandmother didn't have electricity and no-one in her city did either i asked her if they ate spoiled meat she said they just ate freshly slaughtered meat. so no they didn't eat spoiled meat they ate fresh meat and preserved meat.
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.
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...
This primarily applies to rural areas: My grandparents used to give most of their milk away to neighbours etc if they didn't have any, or no cow (usually most of it ended up being eaten by kids/grandkids). Trading was/is also a thing. Diet changes from season to season. When trees bear fruit, you tend to eat a lot of those. Rest goes into jars in various forms. Also, in terms of refrigeration, yes, they did not have the refrigerant, but most people forget why cellars were invented. Damn cold down there during the summer, ours was close to the roots of a massive tree (humidity, shade). As for fresh meat, you should always have various animals. Some of these get slaughter throughout the year, chickens, ducks etc And there is a reason why butchers existed in high quantity in "urban" areas. Meat was processed, sold and eaten in a matter of days/weeks.
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!
In Portugal the most traditional dishes for Christmas is dried salted codfish (and dishes with it are all basically omnipresent in weddings) In fact codfish preserved that way is probably one of the most common gastronomic stereotypes about Portugal (and truth is we have a ton of traditional dishes made out of codfish, and most people like them a lot here, imo).
@@Paul-A01 Yes!! I mean, I guess taste is subjective but most people like it a lot here. It is not uncommon to hear people say certain dishes that take this dried codfish are their favourites ("Bacaulhau com natas" [gratinated codfish with cream] and "Bacalhau à Brás" [shreded codfish with eggs and fries 🤤]) And while some traditional ways of preserving meat, like salted meat, are really rare to find around here today, dried codfish is super common, for real.
I think the eating rotten meat myth probably came from famine years, plague years, and sieges. In times of food scarcity people will eat just about anything.
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.
Norwegian here, can confirm. We have a lot of weird dishes by modern standard that we eat at certain times of the year, it is tradition. But it is also products of whatever way they could preserve that item at the time, either it was bleaching it, digging it down and letting it ferment, airdry, get salted etc.
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."
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.
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.
Nice to see a content creator who's frustrated by myths about the Middle Ages. I've largely stopped watching RUclips content about the Middle Ages, on account of the sheer number of myths about it that even I could debunk. The most common one I hear is that people would empty chamber pots out windows; however, we know that many if not most European cities adopted ordinances making that illegal as early as the 1200's, and they often carried very steep penalties. Legal records show it was taken seriously and often prosecuted when it happened, but that the deterrent was sufficient to keep it from happening very often.
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
It’s important to note that spices do also inhibit the growth of microbial agents. I’m sure Europeans did indeed use spices to preserve foods once they had access the spices. This is what was done in India, and since they got spices from India, it’s not a stretch to believe that they learned to do the same. However, this would obviously be done to prevent food from going bad, not to mask the smell or taste of rotten food. I’d personally never heard anyone argue that people ate rotten food in the Middle Ages. That’s so absurd.
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.
Not forgetting boiling ! People ate lot of soups or other boiled food, and you usually dropped the meat in the pot. As the pot was constantly boiling, the meat wasn't getting bad, it's nutrient were spreading to the whole content of the pot (vegetables, even dilution in the water) and you would eat more of the animal (hard parts getting softer, meat easier to remove from the bones, the content of the bone could also be eaten etc)
@@FrancisR420 Some places still do this to this day, there are places in central asia where they've been 'cooking the same stew' for decades. They just continuously add to it every single day and it never gets cold enough to spoil. However this isn't a perfect solution and I don't recommend trying it at home, even if microbes don't grow many toxins won't denature so you can very much still 'poison' yourself with this process.
@@FrancisR420 speaking from an English POV they had a thing called pottage mainly grain based that is as described above, obviously as the fire died throughout the night it wouldn't stay boiling but it was constantly on the hearth.
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. 😬
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.
never understood why anybody would think people ate rotten meat. I mean they would just keep the meat alive (as the animal) and then eat it when they wanted or just dry, smoke, ferment, use salt, or pickling. Also with much colder temperatures near the Artic, they could freeze the meat if needed.
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 was taught this as well. It's as if none of our teachers knew about alternative meat preservation techniques like potting, salting, jerking or brining. Consequence of our modern lifestyles that are so removed from food production I suppose.
It's not that far fetched either. It's not like they could just toss unfinished food into the fridge and eat it later. But would they throw it out after a few hours? Probably not either.
I was waiting for. "Sure, then they died! The people who didn't act stupidly are our parents." your answer was less cynical than mine and was well told. Thanks for this entertaining video.
I love how whenever history/geography youtubers correct each other, its always "I actually really love this channel and you should go watch their videos". very wholesome. I'm a microbiology student, and I find it fascinating how people learned to preserve foods wothout understanding why. A related thing is in the dietary restrictions laid out in the law of moses it says not to eat bats, which nowadays we know bats to be carriers of a wide range of viruses
Leaving my virology lecture : If I went back in time a few thousand years "please don't ever eat bats" would be in the top 10 advices I would give to those people then.
It’s weird how quickly we forget these things. It’s like how we think people before showers were invented never washed because we can’t conceive other ways of getting clean. That said, people in the past WERE different and did plenty of things that would disgust and shock us.
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.
In the 1500s, the French invented the butter bell. It’s a two-piece device that puts butter in one side and water in the other. When closed, the butter bell makes an airtight seal, allowing butter to be kept on the counter, pre-softened, without refrigeration!
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😊
The writer Bill Bryson made the point that the people who would have had the money for spices would have been the least likely to have to resort to eating bad food.
The idea of duck confit is really similar to the concept of potting. If you've ever heard historical accounts referring to potted beef or potted meat that's where meat is cooked, packed tightly into a vessel then coated in a thick layer of rendered fat.
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.
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
Also the fact that spices were expensive. There's no way the nobles were spending all that gold on precious spices only to waste it on gone off meat. The least they could do is use it on fresh meat they had bought.
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
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.
Same here, I'd like to know how true this was. Somehow it never made sense to me, since water is the most fundamental thing we take in to our bodies, and since hunter-gatherer people in tropical climates regularly drank stream water (though they likely still had parasites in some form)
In the Levantine we make Awerma, it is beef/lamb preserved in its own fat like the duck confit. Very famous meat preserving technique in Lebanon especially.
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 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.
The use of a larder, or a cool room for storing food, could have played a role in some circumstances; while not the same as a refrigerator, they can get quite cool from what I understand
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
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.
The whole sort of fat covering meat to preserve it has some others you may be familiar with. If you search for ‘potted’ foods you’ll find that this was the process, shipping records for sea travel will have it, usually for the upper class. Things like potted shrimp is a common one.
As an American, you should be familiar with another type of confit: carnitas, a Mexican dish of pork cooked on its own fat. The Brits have potted meat, which used to popular in America as well, until the 19th century meat packing industry created a cheap canned product and started calling it that, and its reputation became tarnished. I also heard that the reason venison poaching was such a serious crime in Medieval Europe was that besides it being theft from the lord, it was considered treason. Venison is a very lean meat, and as such, is easily dried for military rations with a reduced risk of going rancid (fat can go rancid by oxidizing and absorbing malodorous or bad tasting compounds even when dried). This venison was considered something like a living bank of a resource vital to national security, or at least the lord's security, in addition to being a staple of the upper class diet at home.
learn from my grandmother when we had more meat than what we can eat "its was rare case " they use the animals fat and fry it then hey add it to jar and add more fat to meat "animals fat +ghee they waited for hour then they add more fat so every piece of meat is completely under the fat and not exposed to air " she said it safe the meat up to month " iam Egyptian by the way
In Spanish and French we say "every pig meets his San Martin" in reference to the day of San Martín, the 11th of November. It's also a saying meaning that everyone will eventually come to die
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another ludicrous thing about this myth is that importing those spices cost a lot of money. If you could afford spices back in the day you could afford fresh meat.
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.
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.
The simplest way to preserve meat without refrigeration is to make jerky. You cut the meat into thin strips and put it a hot sun heated environment until it's dry. Then you just pack it away to keep it dry until you're ready to use it.
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...
Confits where used to preserve meat up until not long ago in containers, you would cook the meat well in copious amounts of fat (reason for which a fat pig was sought after more than a pig low in fat) and then you store it in the same fat you cooked it in, the resulting lard must seal the meat entirely in the container, this way you can preserve the cooked meat for months. You would place these containers somewhere where it was constantly cool, like a cellar or in a cool pantry, which wasn't a problem in the cool months as most pig slaughter was done before Christmas, even in the 1990s you would see this way of storing pork in Eastern Europe.
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.
To be fair, I've heard stories from as recent as the victorian Era of people baking slightly questionable meat into pies to hide that fact to customers.... It makes me wonder how much of that goes on today...
I've heard of scandals with as much as 100% of some companies minced beef products being substituted for horse meat with 0 indications. That was just over 10 years ago.
Once when I was around 20 I forgot about uncooked chicken left in the fridge for a few days. It had a questionable smell but definitely not rotten. Naive me I thought by washing it cook in spices nothing unusual would be noticeable. Wrong, the weirdness never goes away and got tossed real quick. No doubt this was known in the old days.
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
@Bob Robertson naar its nice, good fertile land, lots to see
@Bob Robertson Nobody's forcing you 🤷
@bobrobertson9547 How silly. You'd rather go to a bunch of cookie cutter tourist traps where you see everything online before you get there than actually go somewhere you might see something new and catch a glimpse of a different way of life...
@Bob Robertson basically you are very primitive and shallow if you find the only joy in comfort
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].
Humans in the Middle Ages also had the same potential for intelligence that we do. Another one of those myths is that following the fall of Rome everyone suddenly became stupid.
@Bob Robertson Fallible perhaps. People will always be subject to a certain amount of idiocracy. But they are not lacking in intelligence.
That's a good observation, but I think the lesson to be learned here is that all individual people actually are fairly intellectually useless and it’s our ability to communicate that leads to us collectively achieving impressive intellectual outcomes. There are plenty of animal studies (and maybe they are sensationalised a bit, but still) that show certain animals can actually do all sorts of tasks on a level that is somewhat comparable to humans, or at least more comparable than what one would initially expect. However, what these animals can't do is communicate with the level of complexity that humans can with each other, and its this ability to communicate, collaborate and build off ideas that means humans achieve far more than crows and octopi and the like. So, the key point about the middle ages in Europe is that many systems of communication that had be in place before collapsed and hence communication between peoples dropped off, hence so did the collective intellectual output, giving the appearance of overall relative stupidity.
@@andrewwestcott9172 That's an interesting and well thought out hypothesis. I'd like to see more data on this idea. Certainly you make valid points regarding communication. Are you suggesting then, that with the withdrawal/fall of the Roman Empire communication ceased to be as organized and widespread? I think perhaps that's true. I'd love to read a well researched book or thesis investigating this. Any recommendations?
@Bob Robertson I only refer to a common misconception regarding the "Dark Ages", which were not "dark" nor dim in terms of human intelligence and ingenuity. As far as the use of the term "civilization" it's a broad term for any (and every) historical or anthropological society, not a moral or ethical judgment regarding they're cultural or military behavior. As to communication being a source of greater societal progress, in many ways that's true. After all, our modern access to the internet makes it easier to learn, research, share ideas and to fact check. So it's entirely plausible that a society might breakdown with the sudden termination of broad communication. And the Romans had both a network of physical travel and a postal system. So I find the hypothesis that the demise of the Roman Empire, specifically as it affected broad communication, having contributed to the concept of the "Dark Ages" worthy of further investigation.
We call it the Age of Enlightenment not because humans were less intelligent before then, but because they more than not attributed things incorrectly and thus were not logical enough to make "sound" decisions but instead more prone to emotional ones.
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.
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.
Rancid IS the perfect word, but ludicrous is the perfect word to describe thinking people ate rancid meat. Great video 👍
I’m South Korean, and this is the first time I’ve heard about people eating rotten meat in the Middle Ages🤯 I’ve never learned it that way. The textbook specifically said that people liked the taste of spices.
It's basically false beliefs on the basis of "the current is superior to the primitive past".
@@forbidden-cyrillic-handlethey’ll probably make fun of us for using plastic for everything
@@bosewicht2389I’m sure that in a thousand years it’ll be a myth that we thought having microplastics in everything was healthy or something
People love to view themselves as superior to their “stupid predecessors”
I love the optimism in these replies, thinking people/civilization will still be a thing in 1,000 years. ❤
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.
Pre-Industrial people had 5 ways of preserving food: drying, smoking, fermenting, salting, and pickling. This applied not only to meats but to fruits, vegetables, and dairy as well. Examples of these products are wine, yogurt, kimchee, kefir, raisins, cheese, and saur kraut. Europeans were looking to import spices from the East because spices were luxury goods.
They brought them because they liked the taste
Don't forget packing it within something that'll spoil instead no one wants to bother eating. Like keeping meat in a jar full of rendered fat. Doesn't last long but good for snacks.
And refrigerators
There was also sealing in butter or cheese wax and the like.
@@colbyboucher6391 Confit (preserving meat in its own fat) is as a good a method as others. The trick is to cook the meat in the fat until all the water content has evaporated out so that there's no moisture to cause the meat to spoil. Doing this properly can allow you to preserve meat in pots or jars covered in fat which will last for months.
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.
Absolutely hilarious that myth of the rotten meat, because they didn't have refrigerators and were so primitive, but rotten meat is just in the middle ages, not in antiquity.... Just did the same as in antiquity. Awesome vídeo and beautifully documented 👌 blessings and success
Great point. No one ever says the Ancient Romans ate rotten meat.
@@premodernist_history Also only in europe. Food didnt spoil in the middle east or indian or china or mesoamerica
Oh indeed I noticed that argument too. Apperently meat spoils only in Europe and nowhere else and only from 500 AD to 1800 AD. This is just "lets hate on Europe (whites actually)" thing that is very common now online
@@velvet3784 eh I remember this sort of stuff in schools before most people had internet, honestly I'd blame the Victorians much more for the pseudo history. At any given time their ancestors were simultaneously backwards mud eating primitives who needed the Romans to save them and just reverted to living in poop when the Romans fell, and also super powered pure noble savages with lost technology and magic powers and the true religion and original language and the most pure genetics etc etc.
The neo-Gothic culture revival of the 1800s was largely a backlash of fans of the Middle Ages, distinct because most people assumed as they still do that they are advanced super modernists and the dead were all dumb cave people
@@Rynewulf oh I would not blame victorians but enlightenment thinkers. Victorians were fans of middle ages although yes we can say they too thought of themselves as better
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.
My grandparents in Lithuanian countryside had literal rooms full of smoked, salted, dried meat and all kinds of sausages. Also, they had a hand-dug basement under their house and two "cold rooms" to keep all sorts of meats and vegetables. It's amazing to think that people in the Middle Ages were not clever enough to think of that.
Yeah but dont smoked meats cause cancer?
@@Rita1984
Smoke exposure is a carcinogen, but if you’re living a long enough life that cancer is how you’re going back then, then chances are you’re already pretty healthy as is.
@@Rita1984cancer was just considered a natural death at the time there's no way they could of known it existed or what caused it
@@Rita1984 so does sitting
my grandmother didn't have electricity and no-one in her city did either i asked her if they ate spoiled meat she said they just ate freshly slaughtered meat. so no they didn't eat spoiled meat they ate fresh meat and preserved meat.
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 ?
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.
This primarily applies to rural areas:
My grandparents used to give most of their milk away to neighbours etc if they didn't have any, or no cow (usually most of it ended up being eaten by kids/grandkids). Trading was/is also a thing.
Diet changes from season to season. When trees bear fruit, you tend to eat a lot of those. Rest goes into jars in various forms.
Also, in terms of refrigeration, yes, they did not have the refrigerant, but most people forget why cellars were invented. Damn cold down there during the summer, ours was close to the roots of a massive tree (humidity, shade).
As for fresh meat, you should always have various animals. Some of these get slaughter throughout the year, chickens, ducks etc
And there is a reason why butchers existed in high quantity in "urban" areas. Meat was processed, sold and eaten in a matter of days/weeks.
very good point, trade
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!
In Portugal the most traditional dishes for Christmas is dried salted codfish (and dishes with it are all basically omnipresent in weddings)
In fact codfish preserved that way is probably one of the most common gastronomic stereotypes about Portugal (and truth is we have a ton of traditional dishes made out of codfish, and most people like them a lot here, imo).
Is it any good?
@@Paul-A01 Yes!! I mean, I guess taste is subjective but most people like it a lot here. It is not uncommon to hear people say certain dishes that take this dried codfish are their favourites ("Bacaulhau com natas" [gratinated codfish with cream] and "Bacalhau à Brás" [shreded codfish with eggs and fries 🤤])
And while some traditional ways of preserving meat, like salted meat, are really rare to find around here today, dried codfish is super common, for real.
@@desanipt That is also common in Latin America, especially during Lent and Good Friday.
I wouldn't be surprised if they are present in weddings because the smell of bacalao reminds them of the nether parts of the body.
Going through market in Lisbon and the first hit being of some bacalao, was not what I excepted in an open air market.
I think the eating rotten meat myth probably came from famine years, plague years, and sieges. In times of food scarcity people will eat just about anything.
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.
Norwegian here, can confirm. We have a lot of weird dishes by modern standard that we eat at certain times of the year, it is tradition. But it is also products of whatever way they could preserve that item at the time, either it was bleaching it, digging it down and letting it ferment, airdry, get salted etc.
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."
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.
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.
Let's take these incredibly expensive spices and use them to 'recover' this ridiculously cheap meat.
Nice to see a content creator who's frustrated by myths about the Middle Ages. I've largely stopped watching RUclips content about the Middle Ages, on account of the sheer number of myths about it that even I could debunk. The most common one I hear is that people would empty chamber pots out windows; however, we know that many if not most European cities adopted ordinances making that illegal as early as the 1200's, and they often carried very steep penalties. Legal records show it was taken seriously and often prosecuted when it happened, but that the deterrent was sufficient to keep it from happening very often.
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
It’s important to note that spices do also inhibit the growth of microbial agents. I’m sure Europeans did indeed use spices to preserve foods once they had access the spices. This is what was done in India, and since they got spices from India, it’s not a stretch to believe that they learned to do the same. However, this would obviously be done to prevent food from going bad, not to mask the smell or taste of rotten food. I’d personally never heard anyone argue that people ate rotten food in the Middle Ages. That’s so absurd.
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.
Not forgetting boiling ! People ate lot of soups or other boiled food, and you usually dropped the meat in the pot.
As the pot was constantly boiling, the meat wasn't getting bad, it's nutrient were spreading to the whole content of the pot (vegetables, even dilution in the water) and you would eat more of the animal (hard parts getting softer, meat easier to remove from the bones, the content of the bone could also be eaten etc)
I never heard of this. They just had communal pots that were constantly boiling for like days? weeks?
@@FrancisR420
in some inns for years.
@@FrancisR420 Some places still do this to this day, there are places in central asia where they've been 'cooking the same stew' for decades. They just continuously add to it every single day and it never gets cold enough to spoil. However this isn't a perfect solution and I don't recommend trying it at home, even if microbes don't grow many toxins won't denature so you can very much still 'poison' yourself with this process.
@@FrancisR420 speaking from an English POV they had a thing called pottage mainly grain based that is as described above, obviously as the fire died throughout the night it wouldn't stay boiling but it was constantly on the hearth.
A BIG NO!!!
You have to ask yourself, would you have ate something like that?!
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. 😬
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.
never understood why anybody would think people ate rotten meat. I mean they would just keep the meat alive (as the animal) and then eat it when they wanted or just dry, smoke, ferment, use salt, or pickling. Also with much colder temperatures near the Artic, they could freeze the meat if needed.
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 was taught this as well. It's as if none of our teachers knew about alternative meat preservation techniques like potting, salting, jerking or brining. Consequence of our modern lifestyles that are so removed from food production I suppose.
That and ignorant boomers doing boomer things.
It's not that far fetched either. It's not like they could just toss unfinished food into the fridge and eat it later. But would they throw it out after a few hours? Probably not either.
I was waiting for. "Sure, then they died! The people who didn't act stupidly are our parents."
your answer was less cynical than mine and was well told. Thanks for this entertaining video.
I love how whenever history/geography youtubers correct each other, its always "I actually really love this channel and you should go watch their videos". very wholesome.
I'm a microbiology student, and I find it fascinating how people learned to preserve foods wothout understanding why. A related thing is in the dietary restrictions laid out in the law of moses it says not to eat bats, which nowadays we know bats to be carriers of a wide range of viruses
Leaving my virology lecture : If I went back in time a few thousand years "please don't ever eat bats" would be in the top 10 advices I would give to those people then.
They didn’t understand the method of contamination but they were smart and observant.
Don’t be a John Green apologist
I really don't understand your point about the bats and the laws of Moses?
The bats didn’t cause this last outbreak it was the wuhan labs
It’s weird how quickly we forget these things. It’s like how we think people before showers were invented never washed because we can’t conceive other ways of getting clean. That said, people in the past WERE different and did plenty of things that would disgust and shock us.
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.
In the 1500s, the French invented the butter bell. It’s a two-piece device that puts butter in one side and water in the other. When closed, the butter bell makes an airtight seal, allowing butter to be kept on the counter, pre-softened, without refrigeration!
Similar to confit was "potted meat" where meat was covered in fat and sealed in a container. I think this is what it was called in the UK at least.
Townsends has a pretty good video on nit.
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😊
The writer Bill Bryson made the point that the people who would have had the money for spices would have been the least likely to have to resort to eating bad food.
The idea of duck confit is really similar to the concept of potting. If you've ever heard historical accounts referring to potted beef or potted meat that's where meat is cooked, packed tightly into a vessel then coated in a thick layer of rendered fat.
Potted beef is the predecessor of West Country delicacy which is the Pork Faggot, it uses caul fat.
This myth never made any sense to me. For one thing, if someone can afford expensive spices, surely they can afford fresh meat.
this channel is underrated
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.
Your channel is just so great. I love your editing, your voiceover, your video topics. Thanks for these great videos.
3:15 we actually eat smoked sausages and fermented stuff on easter here and i never thought much of it until now that
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
Also the fact that spices were expensive. There's no way the nobles were spending all that gold on precious spices only to waste it on gone off meat. The least they could do is use it on fresh meat they had bought.
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
People just kind of forget that rotten meat is, you know, rotten? And can kill you?
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.
There's a reason why being called worth your salt is a compliment
i remember being told that they only drank beer in the middle ages because the water was too rancid.
Same here, I'd like to know how true this was. Somehow it never made sense to me, since water is the most fundamental thing we take in to our bodies, and since hunter-gatherer people in tropical climates regularly drank stream water (though they likely still had parasites in some form)
In the Levantine we make Awerma, it is beef/lamb preserved in its own fat like the duck confit. Very famous meat preserving technique in Lebanon especially.
Having spices were like a huge flex in the Middle Ages. The rich would not spend small fortunes to flavor bad meat!
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.
Dont forget, europe already had spices. They just wanted to have more.
My grandpa (born in 1907) used to make smoked sausage confit.
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.
The use of a larder, or a cool room for storing food, could have played a role in some circumstances; while not the same as a refrigerator, they can get quite cool from what I understand
Excellent video. Just discovered the channel and I’m happy to see so much interesting content presented in an elegant way. Keep it up!
I saw Mr. Green, I clicked.
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.
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
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.
2 years later, still a good use of 10 minutes.
The whole sort of fat covering meat to preserve it has some others you may be familiar with. If you search for ‘potted’ foods you’ll find that this was the process, shipping records for sea travel will have it, usually for the upper class. Things like potted shrimp is a common one.
As an American, you should be familiar with another type of confit: carnitas, a Mexican dish of pork cooked on its own fat. The Brits have potted meat, which used to popular in America as well, until the 19th century meat packing industry created a cheap canned product and started calling it that, and its reputation became tarnished.
I also heard that the reason venison poaching was such a serious crime in Medieval Europe was that besides it being theft from the lord, it was considered treason. Venison is a very lean meat, and as such, is easily dried for military rations with a reduced risk of going rancid (fat can go rancid by oxidizing and absorbing malodorous or bad tasting compounds even when dried). This venison was considered something like a living bank of a resource vital to national security, or at least the lord's security, in addition to being a staple of the upper class diet at home.
I just discovered your channel. I'm surprised you don't have at least 10 X the number of subscribers. I just subscribed.
Thanks!
You probably don't need to hear this, but please make more content. Really enjoy your videos, and laid back style of presenting.
That makes sense. I've never thought about why, but me and my family eat smoked lamb leg for Christmas. It's of course a preservation method.
My fridge was broken but i was in denial about it and i never got sick
learn from my grandmother when we had more meat than what we can eat "its was rare case " they use the animals fat and fry it then hey add it to jar and add more fat to meat "animals fat +ghee
they waited for hour then they add more fat so every piece of meat is completely under the fat and not exposed to air " she said it safe the meat up to month " iam Egyptian by the way
In Spanish and French we say "every pig meets his San Martin" in reference to the day of San Martín, the 11th of November. It's also a saying meaning that everyone will eventually come to die
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.
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.
Covering up the taste of cheap meat with expensive spices. Ok…
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
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.
Salting, Drying.. Smoking.. I always imagined they used these methods to preserve the meat!
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.
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.
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.
I love your videos! Thanks again man!😊
Another ludicrous thing about this myth is that importing those spices cost a lot of money. If you could afford spices back in the day you could afford fresh meat.
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.
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.
The simplest way to preserve meat without refrigeration is to make jerky. You cut the meat into thin strips and put it a hot sun heated environment until it's dry. Then you just pack it away to keep it dry until you're ready to use it.
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"
Confits where used to preserve meat up until not long ago in containers, you would cook the meat well in copious amounts of fat (reason for which a fat pig was sought after more than a pig low in fat) and then you store it in the same fat you cooked it in, the resulting lard must seal the meat entirely in the container, this way you can preserve the cooked meat for months. You would place these containers somewhere where it was constantly cool, like a cellar or in a cool pantry, which wasn't a problem in the cool months as most pig slaughter was done before Christmas, even in the 1990s you would see this way of storing pork in Eastern Europe.
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.
Forget to mention: People didnt used to eat a lot of meat. We eat many many times more meat today than what people back then did.
To be fair, I've heard stories from as recent as the victorian Era of people baking slightly questionable meat into pies to hide that fact to customers.... It makes me wonder how much of that goes on today...
I've heard of scandals with as much as 100% of some companies minced beef products being substituted for horse meat with 0 indications. That was just over 10 years ago.
There is also the very old way of preserving food in peat bogs (a low oxygen, cold and acidic environment)
Once when I was around 20 I forgot about uncooked chicken left in the fridge for a few days. It had a questionable smell but definitely not rotten. Naive me I thought by washing it cook in spices nothing unusual would be noticeable. Wrong, the weirdness never goes away and got tossed real quick. No doubt this was known in the old days.