Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know. I'm not sure the historians fully know. This concept might even be apocryphal to an extent. What I have learned is that the concept evolved (like so much cooking does) from what I described into a "it's actually now a recipe that people prepare once." Something else I learned is that back in the day, people had different expectations for food quality. We would regularly eat rancid meat (many BBQ sauces…
>...We would regularly eat rancid meat (many BBQ sauces were specifically built to hide/safen up rancid meat) I think the idea that spices were used to cover the taste of rancid meat is generally considered to be a myth. >...One myth needs busting here. Contrary to what you may have read, sauces were not invented to cover the smell and taste of spoiled meat. Spoiled meat tends to make people sick or dead, so, althoug…
I'm not defending the sauces and spices hypothesis, but in times of scarcity (how most of our ancestors lived most of the time), starvation kills more people than spoiled food, and people ate a lot of spoiled food. Who knows how many it killed, but the survivors were the ones that ate it and made it.
Cheese, after all, is spoiled milk.