5 ms·

Perhaps i'm geeking this out too much, but I guess it depends on ingress-vs-egress and drawdown....but...doesn't including nearly spoiling food risk the whole s

Perhaps i'm geeking this out too much, but I guess it depends on ingress-vs-egress and drawdown....but...doesn't including nearly spoiling food risk the whole stew going bad in a few days? Or do the constant simmer prevent that?

Waterluvian 4y ago
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 were specifically built to hide/safen up rancid meat). And maybe while the concept was "it's always going", there were practical things we like to exclude from oral/written tradition, such as "well... actually we purge it once a week otherwise it goes completely bad." Who knows!
- inetknght 4y ago
  > well... actually we purge it once a week otherwise it goes completely bad I know that when I cook stews I often end up with a lot of food bits stuck and eventually burned at the bottom and sides of the pot. I can imagine keeping it going by pouring the stew contents to another pot so that I could clean the first pot though. Without doing that... those stuck & burned bits will certainly add "flavor" to the stew.
  - yourapostasy 4y ago
    > ...those stuck & burned bits will certainly add "flavor" to the stew. Cooking fuel from wood was expensive to procure, so if I were making such a stew I'd cook it low and slow to conserve precious wood, so maybe they "cooked" over coals back then. If I were to do this today, I'd top off with lots of water before bedtime so there won't be burnt bits in the morning. Maybe try to seal the lid edge with dough that can be used as bread in the morning to sop up the stew (might need to do 2-3 batches of such bread to make the supply of it last through the day). I'd also likely use a rocket stove, a pot heat exchanger [1], and hot water pipes on the inside and outside of the rocket stove exhaust port to extract out as much working heat as possible. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1j1RI3D7Zk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1j1RI3D7Zk
  - dekhn 4y ago
    This stuff is known as "fond" and it's commonly used to make flavorful liquids (stock/broth).
    - vram22 4y ago
      Wonder if the word fondue is related to fond. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fondue https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fondue I first read about fondue in Asterix in Switzerland (IIRC). Good fon(due)! #PunIntended
    - boomerango 4y ago
      There is fond (which can also burn) and then there is charred debris. The former adds umami, the latter tastes like cigar ash.
  - kadoban 4y ago
    > Without doing that... those stuck & burned bits will certainly add "flavor" to the stew. Pretty sure you're joking, but very likely they will. A limited amount of little charred bits taste quite good, and unless there's serious issues with heating or composition, it's not like it's going to overwhelm the rest of the flavors.
- robbie-c 4y ago
  > This concept might even be apocryphal to an extent. I've been to a pub in rural Cambridgeshire that had this on the menu. I made them laugh by asking what was in it and was it vegetarian. I don't know if they were legally allowed to have it, but they did have it.
- opo 4y ago
  >...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, although covering it with a sauce might make it more palatable, people who used this strategy probably tried it only once. https://amazingribs.com/barbecue-history-and-culture/barbecue-sauce-history/ https://amazingribs.com/barbecue-history-and-culture/barbecu... An influential source that promoted this idea was a 1939 book by J.C. Drummond. Those as this review of the book shows, Drummond provided little evidence for his assertions and made errors like misinterpreting the meaning of words like “greene”: http://www.medievalcookery.com/notes/drummond.pdf http://www.medievalcookery.com/notes/drummond.pdf
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    > Spoiled meat tends to make people sick or dead 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.
SatvikBeri 4y ago
Almost all dangerous bacteria develops in temperatures between 40 and 140 degrees, so as long as you keep the stew hot enough it's likely to be fine: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and-preparation/food-safety-basics/danger-zone-40f-140f https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and...
- malfist 4y ago
  To add to this, the ones that survive outside that range are typically anaerobic and can't survive being exposed to air, so that makes it even less likely to be a vector for food poisoning
  - GenerocUsername 4y ago
    2 ways bacteria/fungi hurt people: excreting toxins or by colonizing us. The 140 degree rule basically stops all colonizers since anything that lives in those temps probably isn't planning to infect us. But some extremophile that takes hold in the hot soup could still excrete toxins that build up over time
    - kadoban 4y ago
      I'm not sure there's anything in the intersection of: "grows in boiling water" , "exists outside of the deep sea or other exotic places" , "hurts humans" and "is at _all_ common". If there is, it has to be a really short list.
zarzavat 4y ago
Food goes bad when either there are microbes growing in it (you get sick from infection), or there have been microbes growing and those microbes have left behind toxins (you get poisoned). Nothing can remain alive in a boiling pot of stew, the few things that can survive have very specialized habitats. So the only things you have to worry about are non-living poisons: toxins and prions. Since these by definition cannot reproduce, it’s only a problem if the food was spoiled before it went in the stew. The chance of encountering a toxin goes to 100% as more and more food is added, but it will be dilute, no different to consuming food just before it goes bad.
- pazimzadeh 4y ago
  Spores will survive boiling, that's why autoclaves (pressure cookers) are used in medical research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoclave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoclave. But spores are in a state of dormancy, so if you never stop boiling the broth, then spores never grow into anything. The most dangerous thing would probably be to boil the broth in stops in starts
  - mgc_mgc 4y ago
    Depending on the circumstances, boiling in stops and starts may not be too bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndallization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndallization
    - pazimzadeh 4y ago
      That is amazing! So basically you trick the bacteria into exiting their spore/dormant phase before you hit them again with another boil. It seems risky because if you ever let the spores divide at all then you introduce further variation and a selection process into the mix, which could be disastrous. But that reminds me of the "shock and kill" strategy used to get HIV out of its latent state before killing the virions: https://clinicalinfo.hiv.gov/en/glossary/shock-and-kill-strategy https://clinicalinfo.hiv.gov/en/glossary/shock-and-kill-stra... And I guess this effect is also why chemotherapy drugs work best on fast-growing tumors.
    - 4y ago
jacquesm 4y ago
Before refrigeration people were a lot less picky about what was considered spoiled food. One of my grandmothers would never look at the dates, but just trusted her eyes, nose and tongue as to whether something was fit for consumption or not, regardless of how much it was past the 'best before' date.
- bitdivision 4y ago
  Best before not bad after
  - ben_w 4y ago
    The labels include "best before", "sell by", and "use by", and they don't mean the same thing.
    - TuringNYC 4y ago
      This is a great listen/read: https://www.npr.org/2022/07/28/1114335397/expiration-dates-lead-to-lots-of-food-waste-though-these-dates-vary-widely-by-st https://www.npr.org/2022/07/28/1114335397/expiration-dates-l... NPR Expiration dates lead to lots of food waste, though these dates vary widely by state July 28, 20225:14 PM ET Heard on All Things Considered
- abyssin 4y ago
  Back in my dumpster diving days, I discovered how useful the sense of smell can be. Surprisingly, using it to detect bad food also changed the way I enjoyed good food. It became very pleasurable to eat fresh food!
- HarryHirsch 4y ago
  It works most of the time, but not always, traditions around food are important. Rice is particularly insidious, rice grains carry Bacillus cereus spores that germinate after cooking. The trouble is that that particular bug grows at fridge temperatures and generates a heat-stable exotoxin. Any prepared rice older than 24 hours has the potential to give you really roaring diarrhea, even if it doesn't taste off.

Waterluvian 4y ago

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 were specifically built to hide/safen up rancid meat). And maybe while the concept was "it's always going", there were practical things we like to exclude from oral/written tradition, such as "well... actually we purge it once a week otherwise it goes completely bad." Who knows!

inetknght 4y ago
> well... actually we purge it once a week otherwise it goes completely bad I know that when I cook stews I often end up with a lot of food bits stuck and eventually burned at the bottom and sides of the pot. I can imagine keeping it going by pouring the stew contents to another pot so that I could clean the first pot though. Without doing that... those stuck & burned bits will certainly add "flavor" to the stew.
- yourapostasy 4y ago
  > ...those stuck & burned bits will certainly add "flavor" to the stew. Cooking fuel from wood was expensive to procure, so if I were making such a stew I'd cook it low and slow to conserve precious wood, so maybe they "cooked" over coals back then. If I were to do this today, I'd top off with lots of water before bedtime so there won't be burnt bits in the morning. Maybe try to seal the lid edge with dough that can be used as bread in the morning to sop up the stew (might need to do 2-3 batches of such bread to make the supply of it last through the day). I'd also likely use a rocket stove, a pot heat exchanger [1], and hot water pipes on the inside and outside of the rocket stove exhaust port to extract out as much working heat as possible. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1j1RI3D7Zk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1j1RI3D7Zk
- dekhn 4y ago
  This stuff is known as "fond" and it's commonly used to make flavorful liquids (stock/broth).
  - vram22 4y ago
    Wonder if the word fondue is related to fond. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fondue https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fondue I first read about fondue in Asterix in Switzerland (IIRC). Good fon(due)! #PunIntended
  - boomerango 4y ago
    There is fond (which can also burn) and then there is charred debris. The former adds umami, the latter tastes like cigar ash.
- kadoban 4y ago
  > Without doing that... those stuck & burned bits will certainly add "flavor" to the stew. Pretty sure you're joking, but very likely they will. A limited amount of little charred bits taste quite good, and unless there's serious issues with heating or composition, it's not like it's going to overwhelm the rest of the flavors.
robbie-c 4y ago
> This concept might even be apocryphal to an extent. I've been to a pub in rural Cambridgeshire that had this on the menu. I made them laugh by asking what was in it and was it vegetarian. I don't know if they were legally allowed to have it, but they did have it.
opo 4y ago
>...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, although covering it with a sauce might make it more palatable, people who used this strategy probably tried it only once. https://amazingribs.com/barbecue-history-and-culture/barbecue-sauce-history/ https://amazingribs.com/barbecue-history-and-culture/barbecu... An influential source that promoted this idea was a 1939 book by J.C. Drummond. Those as this review of the book shows, Drummond provided little evidence for his assertions and made errors like misinterpreting the meaning of words like “greene”: http://www.medievalcookery.com/notes/drummond.pdf http://www.medievalcookery.com/notes/drummond.pdf
- fsckboy 4y ago
  > Spoiled meat tends to make people sick or dead 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.

SatvikBeri 4y ago

Almost all dangerous bacteria develops in temperatures between 40 and 140 degrees, so as long as you keep the stew hot enough it's likely to be fine: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and-preparation/food-safety-basics/danger-zone-40f-140f https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and...

malfist 4y ago
To add to this, the ones that survive outside that range are typically anaerobic and can't survive being exposed to air, so that makes it even less likely to be a vector for food poisoning
- GenerocUsername 4y ago
  2 ways bacteria/fungi hurt people: excreting toxins or by colonizing us. The 140 degree rule basically stops all colonizers since anything that lives in those temps probably isn't planning to infect us. But some extremophile that takes hold in the hot soup could still excrete toxins that build up over time
  - kadoban 4y ago
    I'm not sure there's anything in the intersection of: "grows in boiling water" , "exists outside of the deep sea or other exotic places" , "hurts humans" and "is at _all_ common". If there is, it has to be a really short list.

zarzavat 4y ago

Food goes bad when either there are microbes growing in it (you get sick from infection), or there have been microbes growing and those microbes have left behind toxins (you get poisoned). Nothing can remain alive in a boiling pot of stew, the few things that can survive have very specialized habitats. So the only things you have to worry about are non-living poisons: toxins and prions. Since these by definition cannot reproduce, it’s only a problem if the food was spoiled before it went in the stew. The chance of encountering a toxin goes to 100% as more and more food is added, but it will be dilute, no different to consuming food just before it goes bad.

pazimzadeh 4y ago
Spores will survive boiling, that's why autoclaves (pressure cookers) are used in medical research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoclave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoclave. But spores are in a state of dormancy, so if you never stop boiling the broth, then spores never grow into anything. The most dangerous thing would probably be to boil the broth in stops in starts
- mgc_mgc 4y ago
  Depending on the circumstances, boiling in stops and starts may not be too bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndallization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndallization
  - pazimzadeh 4y ago
    That is amazing! So basically you trick the bacteria into exiting their spore/dormant phase before you hit them again with another boil. It seems risky because if you ever let the spores divide at all then you introduce further variation and a selection process into the mix, which could be disastrous. But that reminds me of the "shock and kill" strategy used to get HIV out of its latent state before killing the virions: https://clinicalinfo.hiv.gov/en/glossary/shock-and-kill-strategy https://clinicalinfo.hiv.gov/en/glossary/shock-and-kill-stra... And I guess this effect is also why chemotherapy drugs work best on fast-growing tumors.
  - 4y ago

jacquesm 4y ago

Before refrigeration people were a lot less picky about what was considered spoiled food. One of my grandmothers would never look at the dates, but just trusted her eyes, nose and tongue as to whether something was fit for consumption or not, regardless of how much it was past the 'best before' date.

bitdivision 4y ago
Best before not bad after
- ben_w 4y ago
  The labels include "best before", "sell by", and "use by", and they don't mean the same thing.
  - TuringNYC 4y ago
    This is a great listen/read: https://www.npr.org/2022/07/28/1114335397/expiration-dates-lead-to-lots-of-food-waste-though-these-dates-vary-widely-by-st https://www.npr.org/2022/07/28/1114335397/expiration-dates-l... NPR Expiration dates lead to lots of food waste, though these dates vary widely by state July 28, 20225:14 PM ET Heard on All Things Considered
abyssin 4y ago
Back in my dumpster diving days, I discovered how useful the sense of smell can be. Surprisingly, using it to detect bad food also changed the way I enjoyed good food. It became very pleasurable to eat fresh food!
HarryHirsch 4y ago
It works most of the time, but not always, traditions around food are important. Rice is particularly insidious, rice grains carry Bacillus cereus spores that germinate after cooking. The trouble is that that particular bug grows at fridge temperatures and generates a heat-stable exotoxin. Any prepared rice older than 24 hours has the potential to give you really roaring diarrhea, even if it doesn't taste off.