It's Your First Day As A Medieval Chef. Time To Learn To Use Spices To Mask The Taste of Rotting Meat

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Medieval chef: Wilcume and wes hāl!

Medieval assistant: Gōd morgen sīe þē!

Medieval chef: This is the big kitchen, obviously…Matilda tells me you know your way around pretty well already, but I just wanted to point out a few things first: The flour bin is in the southwest corner. The boy who holds up the turkey leg to keep the turnspit dog running is named Rom; he usually takes his ten in the midmorning…can you cover for him then?

Medieval assistant: Ic beliefan so.

Medieval chef: It’s pretty eáþe. You just stand in front of the dog and hold the turkey leg up at eye level so he keeps running, which powers the wheel that turns the meat so it roasts evenly. The dog’s eye level, I should say, not yours. And we keep the onions and the potatoes down in the cellar, stairs are on your steorbord.

Medieval assistant: Sounds good.

Medieval chef: Really what I need you working on today is smearing, like a year’s rent worth of cardamom on all this rotten meat.

Medieval assistant: This rotten meat here?

Medieval chef: Yes, that visibly putrid meat there. Our thinking is, everyone alive today is so unbelievably stupid they can be tricked into eating rancid meat if you rub some cloves and ginger on it.

Medieval assistant: Oh, is that what all the spices are for?

Medieval chef: Yes, you might think it’s because we enjoy the way spices can enhance the flavor of a meal, but it’s actually because living in the eleventh century makes you dumber than an animal. We’ve never bothered to develop reliable food preservation methods like smoking, salting, drying, pickling, or fermenting. We just slaughter our livestock at the height of midsummer and then leave it out raw, in the sun, for as long as we feel like it.

Medieval assistant: Of course.

Medieval chef: Then, once the meat starts attracting flies and maggots, we go to great trouble and expense to procure rare, costly Eastern spices, via our connections with an extensive global trade network, merely to throw good money after bad.

Medieval assistant: I see.

Medieval chef: The important thing is to waste not only as much money as we can, but also our own time. Because even if cinnamon did effectively cover up the stench of meat-rot, which of course it doesn’t —

Medieval assistant: Which of course it doesn’t!

Medieval chef: — You would still get sick as a dog if you ate it. Would vomit immediately, probably more than once, and if you lived would be unable to eat for days afterwards. So even if covering up the taste of rotten meat with spices did work at first, it would be the stupidest fucking idea anybody ever had.

Medieval assistant: Oh, of course!

Medieval chef: Because we — and I am speaking broadly here, of all people living during the medieval period — are so incredibly stupid, that we do this all the time. We are not smart enough to preserve meat, or even to make sure to slaughter livestock during, say, the winter, when Europe gets nice and cold, but we are vain and wealthy enough to buy a lot of spices to throw over our terrible, pustulating, stomach-hot old rotten meat, and to pretend that is just as good. We couldn’t just buy spices because they taste nice.

Medieval assistant: I do the same thing at home. For example, my mother died last year, and rather than bury her, my father just sprinkled some pepper over her head, and we carried on like nothing was wrong for months before anyone noticed.

Medieval chef: I would literally eat shit if someone didn’t stop me.

Medieval assistant: And worse!

Medieval chef: Oh, absolutely. Sometimes I let the meat go bad on purpose just for an excuse to spend all my money on saffron.

Medieval assistant: I do have one question.

Medieval chef: Ask away!

Medieval assistant: If you have so much money to spend on spices, wouldn’t you also have enough money to buy fresh meat?

Medieval chef: Sorry, I don’t understand.

Medieval assistant: I mean, if you’re rich enough to buy all of these incredibly expensive spices, if you saw that your meat had gone bad, wouldn’t you just pay someone to slaughter you a fresh pig and throw out the old one? Since a pound of spice costs as much as a whole pig, if you can afford one, why not pay for the other?

Medieval chef: I’m so sorry. Is English not your first language? I just can’t follow whatever you’re trying to say at all.

Medieval assistant: No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It was a stupid question, and I’m ashamed of myself for asking it.

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