Did people eat spoiled meat in the Middle Ages?

[@mg4361]

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.

[@manchagojohnsonmanchago6367]

Keep your winter apples in the apple cupboard

[@bobrobertson9547]

I’m glad you told me that. The Balkans is off my holiday destination. It all sounds very primitive.

[@manchagojohnsonmanchago6367]

@@bobrobertson9547 naar its nice, good fertile land, lots to see

[@mg4361]

@@bobrobertson9547 Nobody's forcing you 🤷

[@bobrobertson9547]

@@mg4361 Awe …. Didums.

[@sariahmarier42]

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.

[@bobrobertson9547]

I think people were stupid long before that. When were they ever intelligent?

[@sariahmarier42]

@@bobrobertson9547 Fallible perhaps. People will always be subject to a certain amount of idiocracy. But they are not lacking in intelligence.

[@andrewwestcott9172]

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.

[@bobrobertson9547]

@@andrewwestcott9172 I tend to agree with you, to a point. Intelligence and intellectual events still happened, they just didn’t make it as you say for a number of reasons in terms of social constraints. But, an important point here is that, like the Octopi you referred to, is that, as solitary animals, Octopi are extremely successful and we have to be honest here and admit that we really don’t know how they communicate with one another to any great degree, but they appear to. Different framework, different processes. Many ideas existed in isolation and came to the fore must later, like the work of Martin Luther for example in the early 1500’s which led to the reformation That work didn’t happen over night and he sat on it for a very long time before the public ‘en masses’ got their hands on it.

[@sariahmarier42]

@@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?

[@tamascsomor]

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).

[@premodernist_history]

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!

[@beepbop6542]

Szia! Jo latni mas magyart az interneten!

[@tamascsomor]

@@beepbop6542 Szia! Igen, vagyunk egy páran :)

[@enysuntra1347]

@@tamascsomor Could you give some pronounciation guides?

[@tamascsomor]

@@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].

[@luis.m.yrisson]

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.

[@obsidianjane4413]

You don't get a whole pig for free. You get your pig back at a rate that you can consume without wasting it.

[@Croatlik]

@@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]

Perfect system that also enhances societal bonding.

[@obsidianjane4413]

@@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".

[@utubinator]

​@@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.

[@claraelizabeth]

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.

[@Poodleinacan]

It's basically false beliefs on the basis of "the current is superior to the primitive past".

[@bosewicht2389]

@@forbidden-cyrillic-handlethey’ll probably make fun of us for using plastic for everything

[@LucDeTruc]

@@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”

[@WalterBurton]

I love the optimism in these replies, thinking people/civilization will still be a thing in 1,000 years. ❤

[@DLYChicago]

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.

[@Trebor74]

They brought them because they liked the taste

[@colbyboucher6391]

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.

[@DrDOOM-xs8jm]

And refrigerators

[@Fastlan3]

There was also sealing in butter or cheese wax and the like.

[@sariahmarier42]

@@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.

[@erikasigurdson312]

Love this! Especially the explicit discussion of these ridiculous myths that rely on us not really seeing people from the past as fully human.

[@sakesaurus]

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

[@user-et6pj4db9s]

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.

[@Aaron-n8o2g]

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.

[@user-et6pj4db9s]

@@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.

[@Narokkurai]

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.

[@GrandPrixDecals]

Rancid IS the perfect word, but ludicrous is the perfect word to describe thinking people ate rancid meat. Great video 👍

[@kartaiss]

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]

Yeah but dont smoked meats cause cancer?

[@Insanonaga]

@@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.

[@olddirtybasterd-ex2vb]

@@Rita1984cancer was just considered a natural death at the time there's no way they could of known it existed or what caused it

[@kiwanozukai1180]

@@Rita1984 so does sitting

[@Araanor]

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.

[@Thesandchief]

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.

[@aussieknuckles]

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.

[@poopy-333]

People definitely didn't eat rotten meat thats wild lol but things were a bit unhygienic. He says so in his new video

[@koenraijer7596]

This is a false dichotomy. We are society and society is us.

[@harpintn]

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.

[@Fastlan3]

You forgot sealing meats, such as in butter or cheese wax and the like.

[@harpintn]

@@Fastlan3 Those are methods I haven't use as much. Although my mother would put wax on top of jelly when she canned it.

[@Fastlan3]

@@harpintn if kept in cold, sealing the meat can potentially last 6+months.

[@harpintn]

@@Fastlan3 That is good to know, and it the way things are going now it could save my life.

[@jessh4016]

@@harpintn ?

[@neferneferuaten2243]

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!

[@SofaKingShit]

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.

[@cobramcjingleballs]

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.

[@rileywebb4178]

@@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...

[@bigalkool2897]

Btw you can look up how to castrate a goat on youtube should you ever get one

[@X_TheHuntsman_X]

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.

[@cobramcjingleballs]

@@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.

[@robertfaucher3750]

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.

[@SobeCrunkMonster]

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.

[@amygodward4472]

Exactly! If they can afford all those luxury spices, they could just buy fresh meat to begin with...

[@valerietaylor9615]

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.) 🌶️

[@lightbeingform]

kids are all born with intact bs monitors then the world demands we accept bs to get along

[@GarfieldRex]

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

[@premodernist_history]

Great point. No one ever says the Ancient Romans ate rotten meat.

[@andreascovano7742]

@@premodernist_history Also only in europe. Food didnt spoil in the middle east or indian or china or mesoamerica

[@velvet3784]

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

[@Rynewulf]

@@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

[@velvet3784]

@@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

[@robertsaget6918]

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.

[@liquidl5380]

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 😬😭😱

[@Ekergaard]

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.

[@darklazerx7913]

Do you guys eat graved salmon and pickled herring too?

[@joejohnson6327]

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.

[@Ken-fh4jc]

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.

[@desanipt]

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]

Is it any good?

[@desanipt]

@@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.

[@spacemanapeinc7202]

@@desanipt That is also common in Latin America, especially during Lent and Good Friday.

[@treehugger3615]

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.

[@DanielLopez-up6os]

Going through market in Lisbon and the first hit being of some bacalao, was not what I excepted in an open air market.

[@chirsbom337]

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.

[@notloki3140]

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.

[@liamthompson9342]

very good point, trade

[@bobrobertson9547]

And that is all about to change as we begin the Agro revolution that is already underway. The next fifty years will see bigger changes than the industrial revolution and the more recent IT revolution. Bring it on I say.

[@lukenardoni2454]

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.

[@fh1498]

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...

[@raa836]

Exactly. Not sure why so many people in the comments are missing that point.

[@michaelcutler5538]

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

[@oktopussy9628]

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.

[@rollotomasislawyer3405]

They didn’t understand the method of contamination but they were smart and observant.

[@shacka95]

Don’t be a John Green apologist

[@Fastlan3]

I really don't understand your point about the bats and the laws of Moses?

[@SunDogGod]

The bats didn’t cause this last outbreak it was the wuhan labs

[@kayallen7603]

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.

[@bookaufman9643]

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.

[@CryMyName100]

best channel I've discovered recently. please continue with your work sir.

[@milo8425]

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.

[@amh9494]

That and ignorant boomers doing boomer things.

[@treehugger3615]

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.

[@dewilew2137]

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.

[@jonmclaughlin4128]

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.

[@azureprophet]

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."

[@BR-lx7py]

My grandpa (born in 1907) used to make smoked sausage confit.

[@mercster]

Not only did he say people ate rotten meat, he said "most of it" was. Gotta love youtube.

[@petrmaly9087]

Yeah, the production budget was spent on animation, there was nothing left for actual research. His most famous claim is that only the Mongols conquered Siberia in Winter. I know about some Evanks, Kipchaks, Cumans, Russians and Czechoslovaks who would disagree with that nonsense.

[@Hassan-zw9tb]

i remember being told that they only drank beer in the middle ages because the water was too rancid.

[@aaronmarks9366]

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)

[@be.A.b]

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. 😬

[@hucklebucklin]

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

[@thenecromancer01]

Nice to see a content creator who's frustrated by myths about the Middle Ages. I've largely stopped watching KZbin 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.

[@schirmed]

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.

[@colbyboucher6391]

Townsends has a pretty good video on nit.

[@hspatel1799]

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.

[@heretustay]

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

[@ItsJoeyG]

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.

[@premodernist_history]

It's sad that French is disappearing in South Louisiana.

[@DarkBloa]

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]

I never heard of this. They just had communal pots that were constantly boiling for like days? weeks?

[@kaanozkuscu5079]

@@FrancisR420 in some inns for years.

[@Outwardpd]

@@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.

[@amh9494]

@@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.

[@flyingfox707b]

A BIG NO!!! You have to ask yourself, would you have ate something like that?!

[@chubbz82]

Having spices were like a huge flex in the Middle Ages. The rich would not spend small fortunes to flavor bad meat!

[@SeanMahoneyfitnessandart]

I'm so glad I happened across your channel today. As a physiology major myself, I loved this! I found it hilarious. Of course you're 💯 % correct. I like your presentation style, there are a lot of history channels out here, and you are one of the sensible ones. Looking forward to watching more.

[@mohmedelsayd6071]

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

[@TheYuccaPlant]

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.

[@Ken-fh4jc]

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.

[@ogabrielcasanova]

Your channel is just so great. I love your editing, your voiceover, your video topics. Thanks for these great videos.

[@gildedpeahen876]

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.

[@Saiku]

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.

[@diegobeccaris4270]

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😊

[@Tom_Tom_Klondike]

I love your videos! Thanks again man!😊

[@husseinbergthesalafi4488]

this channel is underrated

[@herscher1297]

Dont forget, europe already had spices. They just wanted to have more.

[@phosistkar6425]

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.

[@motorola9956]

Potted beef is the predecessor of West Country delicacy which is the Pork Faggot, it uses caul fat.

[@rollomaughfling380]

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.

[@user-jd9sj1mq2b]

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.

[@revdarian]

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...

[@revdarian]

*for conservation not "for fermentation"

[@user-bk2yn7uz7b]

finally a guy that actually resonates with me! great personality antics and knowledge

[@jsfaulkner]

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.

[@guitarslim56]

Yes. That's never been done before. You should do a channel "Mythbreakers" or "Mythblasters," something like that.

[@rais1953]

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.

[@heimirjosefsson510]

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.

[@anthonyrandazzo8836]

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!

[@RobinMarks1313]

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.

[@premodernist_history]

That must have been the origin of the myth.

[@skyworm8006]

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.

[@Neion8]

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.

[@RobinMarks1313]

@@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.

[@Neion8]

@@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.

[@deborahberger5816]

This myth never made any sense to me. For one thing, if someone can afford expensive spices, surely they can afford fresh meat.

[@kurrizzle]

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

[@osakablinladen]

3:15 we actually eat smoked sausages and fermented stuff on easter here and i never thought much of it until now that

[@roelant8069]

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.

[@michelhv]

Next myth you should address: beer as liquid bread for fasting Belgian monks. If they’d really do that they would die of alcohol poisoning and dehydration!

[@MjIaCcHkAsEoLn1958]

Excellent video. Just discovered the channel and I’m happy to see so much interesting content presented in an elegant way. Keep it up!

[@pelmel1990]

I LOVE that you say "raises the question" and not "begs the question". Great video

[@gregorydaines]

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.

[@UnbornApple]

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.

[@samaraisnt]

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!

[@premodernist_history]

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?

[@edgarburlyman738]

Haggis and escargot are both delicious. But I'd eat lutefisk before I eat tripe.

[@mejsjalv]

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.

[@tesseract5421]

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

[@lemmypop1300]

@@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.

[@rumourhats]

You probably don't need to hear this, but please make more content. Really enjoy your videos, and laid back style of presenting.

[@neonaofumi5572]

I'd imagine it's the same reason why certain racist people like to talk about foreign cultures. They want to sell this story about weird activities and traditions to people from normal society as shallow entertainment. I don't think they even realize how dehumanizing it is.

[@crazychameleon123]

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.

[@ascentofmountcarmel438]

I just discovered your channel. I'm surprised you don't have at least 10 X the number of subscribers. I just subscribed.

[@premodernist_history]

Thanks!

[@Munchausenification]

the best part about these preservation methods is that most of it is also delicious.

[@rifter0x0000]

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.

[@guitarslim56]

The myth was started by spice merchants.

[@carny666]

Great video, your voice is so soothing. I was glued to my chair.

[@soilmanted]

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.

[@guitarslim56]

Hops were used to preserve beer on long sea voyages.

[@mrmu7ammed1]

I remember something maybe KZbin 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.

[@danmartin313]

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.

[@umadbra]

Your grocery stores are doing the same thing. Take the expired protein and put marinade on it to "reset" the timer.

[@openavondkaraoke8923]

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.

[@DionysianLovecraftian]

I never heard of this myth before and I also wasn't taught this myth (thankfully) back in school.

[@ApertureAce]

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.

[@michelhv]

We also forget that dried/cured/salted/smoked meat could be cooked with other ingredients, even though today we’re eating our saucisson raw. I bought some sichuan dried sausages the other day and the package instructions were clear: steam cook before eating. That way you reduce salt intake and you stretch the taste into a stew or another kind of dish.

[@ingloriousMachina]

Crash Course is honestly the WatchMojo of educational channels.

[@petrmaly9087]

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).

[@EndOfSmallSanctuary97]

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.

[@haughtygarbage5848]

Courses with an emphasis on the Crash, best viewed as a teen/young adult living in the 2010s (so many dated references)

[@lc9245]

@@haughtygarbage5848I thought it covers America AP history course, that’s why.

[@SashaFilmsUnlimited]

Your channel is fantastic. Do you do the editing as well? I'm impressed by the cut aways and the sparing use of them.

[@jackdelane]

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...

[@johndeaux8815]

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.

[@oceanelf2512]

I'm glad you debunked this gross myth, because as you've said, others spread it, and I cannot believe people would eat spoiled meat willingly.

[@Kuipoa]

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.

[@Uarehere]

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. 😆

[@82dorrin]

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.

[@angamaitesangahyando685]

Are you implying people are not stupid & cruel in all ages? Research Nongqawuse - they slaughtered their cattle and starved themselves. Or FGM. - Adûnâi

[@dictatrey591]

​@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.

[@spankyjeffro5320]

LOL, no. Not really. While you can miss context and the like, people were in fact stupid back then.

[@BrvtusVG]

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.

[@MrWednesday3]

The number of times GRRM alone mentions salted dried meats should have killed this myth.

[@monahasan1990]

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.