Myths and Misconceptions

Myths and Misconceptions

Myth no. 1:
Spices were used by medieval Europeans to mask putrid and spoiled foods.

Let’s face it, the people who could afford spices were precisely the ones who could throw out the rotton venison haunch. The manuals are replete with instructions on cooking meat soon after the animal is slaughtered. If the meat was hung up to age, it was for no more than a day or two, but even this depended on the season. Not that bad meat did not exist. From the specific punishments that were prescribed for unscrupulous traders, it is clear that rotten meat did make it into the kitchens of the rich and famous, but then it also does today. The advice given by cookbook author Bartolomeo Sacchi in 1480 was the same as you would give now: throw it out.

Myth no. 2:
Spices were used my premodern people because they had unrefined, barbaric tastes.

This is the subtext of much 20th century French writing on the subject. Anyone who doesn’t use spices the way the modern french do (i.e. not at all) must be a barbarian. Tell that to the Indians, Moroccans, Vietnamese and others who use way more spice than any medieval European did! Some cultures happen to like the way spicy food tastes and think that mold-covered putrefied milk (i.e. Camembert) is vile. I happen to like both.

Myth no. 3:
Spices were used to preserve food.

Not only is this an affront on common sense, it completely contradicts what’s written in the old cookbooks. Throughout human history, until the advent of refrigeration, food has been successfully preserved by one of three ways: drying, salting, and preserving in acid. Think prunes, prosciutto, and pickles. The technology of preserving food wasn’t so different in the days of Charlemagne, the Medici, or even during the truncated lifetime of Marie Antoinette, even though the cooking was entirely different in each era. What’s more old cookbooks make it clear that spices weren’t used as a preservative. They typically suggest adding spices toward the end of the cooking process where they could have no preservative effect whatsoever. In at least one renaissance Italian cookbook the author suggests that pepper might even hasten spoilage!

Myth no. 4:
Spices used to be worth their weight in gold.

Pricey perhaps but nowhere near their weight in gold. In Venice, in the early fifteenth century, when pepper hit an all-time high, you could still buy more than three hundred pounds of it for a pound of gold. And while it’s true that a pound of ginger could have bought you a sheep in medieval England, that may tell you more about the price of sheep than the value of spice. Sheep in those days were small, scrawny, plentiful, and, accordingly, cheap. You will also read that pepper was used to pay soldiers’ wages and even to pay rent. But once again, this requires a little context. Medieval Europe was desperately short of precious metals to use as currency, and if you needed to pay a relatively small amount (soldiers didn’t get paid so well in those days), there often weren’t enough small coins to go around. Thus, pepper might be used in lieu of small change. But sacks of common salt were used even more routinely as a kind of currency in the marketplace. Cloves and nutmeg were perhaps two or three times the price of pepper and ginger depending on the time and place but that still made them affordable to the more than just the royals.
The origin of this particular myth may originate with Martin Behaim’s 1492 globe. One of the annotations, no doubt hyperbolic, notes that ‘One must know that the spices from the islands in East India must pass through many hands before they come here to our land....No wonder spices for us cost their weight in gold.”

Myth no. 5:
Food was seasoned with enormous quantities of spice in the Middle Ages.

Well perhaps enormous if you are a French historian born in 1900s. Fernand Braudel once referred to the medieval fashion for spiced food as an “orgy of spice.” More likely the very wealthy in medieval and renaissance Europe used about as much spice as an average Moroccan does today. And perhaps a third or less of the typical Indian dish. Hardly an orgy.

Myth no. 6:
Cooks stopped using spices in cooking after the 1600s.

The drop off in spice use was certainly much more gradual than this, at least outside of France. You find lots of recipes in most non-French sources throughout 1700s and even 1800s that harken back to the middle ages in the way they use spice. What probably did occur after about 1700 though is the well-spiced meat and fish dishes became less and less trendy.