In the comments, Patrik links to a fascinating post about “hanging game birds” — that is, hanging them at low temperatures (such as 50 degrees) for several days to improve their flavor. I especially liked this quote from Brillat-Savarin:
The peak is reached when the pheasant begins to decompose; its aroma develops, and mixes with an oil which in order to form must undergo a certain amount of fermentation.
Yet another example of more bacteria, better flavor. I can’t find my copy of Brillat-Savarin but in Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking I found this (p. 144):
Despite the contribution that aging can make to meat quality, the modern meat industry generally avoids it, since it means tying up its assets in cold storage and losing about 20% of the meat’s weight to evaporation and laborious trimming of the dried, rancid, sometimes moldy surface.
Okay, I am taking those short ribs I bought today out of the freezer. If people knew that well-aged beef is healthier, as I believe, this meat-industry practice might change. There should be a recommended daily allowance of bacteria. A few billion, perhaps? Bacteria count would be included in the nutrition label. Because the numbers would be so large, everyone would learn scientific notation.
Jeffrey Steingarten, who has written a food column for Vogue magazine for years, wrote a column about aged beef that was quite interesting. I believe it’s in one of his collections of columns (“The Man Who Ate Everything” or “It Must’ve Been Something I Ate”, not sure which). He ends up aging beef in his refrigerator, and though people around him warn of certain death from bacteria, if I recall correctly he was pretty happy with the results.
Don’t eat it if it doesn’t have a beard. I heard something like that once about aged beef.
KenF, what does “don’t eat it if it doesn’t have a beard” mean?
Peter, thanks for the reference. I will now put those short ribs in my fridge.
There is a scene in the book/movie Shogun, which centers on hanging a pheasant outside for several days, so it develops a “gamey flavor”. Supposedly hung by its tail, until it falls on its own (due to the decomposition). It doesnt end well for the Japanese servant who moves the bird because they don’t like the smell.
Obviously a fictional account, but the author thought it was a plausible action anyway.
Here is a magazine article talking about the practice of hanging game birds for a few days outside (or weeks in the winter)
https://www.tpwmagazine.com/archive/2005/nov/ed_3/
I assume the “beard” is mold?
Yeah. I couldn’t find a reference online. I think it might have been a radio report I heard. This was a while ago, several years I believe. Anyway, they were talking about some steakhouse and how they aged their meat, and the beard was the mold that grew on the meat that they had to cut off. That is what made it taste good. But it wasn’t ready until it had a beard.
Could beef today have different bacteria though (ie greater presence of E. Coli)? I’d be surprised if beef slaughtered by hand in 1900 and beef slaughtered in an industrial facility in 2008 have exactly the same bacterial content. Maybe not true, but something to think about.
@Drew
You are making two comparisons here, not one:
1900 vs. 2008
Hand-slaughtered vs. industrial facility
My guess, on a per capita basis, in industrial facilities, there is less e. coli today, than in 1900.
Remember, it was Sinclair’s “The Jungle” (1906) that prompted much of today’s food safety regulation.
According to Sinclair, he originally intended to expose “the inferno of exploitation [of the typical American factory worker at the turn of the 20th Century],”[3] but the reading public instead fixated on food safety as the novel’s most pressing issue. In fact, Sinclair bitterly admitted his celebrity rose, “not because the public cared anything about the workers, but simply because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef“[3]. Sinclair’s account of workers’ falling into rendering tanks and being ground, along with animal parts, into “Durham’s Pure Beef Lard”, gripped public attention. The morbidity of the working conditions, as well as the exploitation of children and women alike that Sinclair exposed showed the corruption taking place inside the meat packing factories. Foreign sales of American meat fell by one-half. In order to calm public outrage and demonstrate the cleanliness of their meat, the major meat packers lobbied the Federal government to pass legislation paying for additional inspection and certification of meat packaged in the United States. [4] Their efforts, coupled with the public outcry, led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which established the Food and Drug Administration.