Dead Sexy NPCs

[Scarlet Shocker]

so there we were on a Manticore (pronounced Man-tickory) TF and I happened to be zooming through Faultline when I was... rather perturbed to see this.

 

I mean, what dead adults do in the privacy of their own home, I'm good with that. Die and let die as the saying doesn't quite go...

 

But doesn't sausage go off when left outside for too long?

[Skyhawke]

2 minutes ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

so there we were on a Manticore (pronounced Man-tickory) TF and I happened to be zooming through Faultline when I was... rather perturbed to see this.

 

I mean, what dead adults do in the privacy of their own home, I'm good with that. Die and let die as the saying doesn't quite go...

 

But doesn't sausage go off when left outside for too long?

 

 

Depending on the stitch work, it may just fall off. 

[biostem]

Would it have been better or worse if that was an embalmed abomination, (or maybe this is how they get embalmed...)?

Edited Wednesday at 09:28 PM by biostem

[Scarlet Shocker]

5 minutes ago, biostem said:

Would it have been better or worse if that was an embalmed abomination, (or maybe this is how they get embalmed...)?

 

Suck, don't blow!

 

[Apogee]

Well...ok then.

[Luminara]

2 hours ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

doesn't sausage go off when left outside for too long?

 

Actually, no.

 

Sausage-making has a long and interesting history, and is a fascinating process in and of itself, but the most fundamental aspect of it is that it relies on spices, a high fat content, and mold to prevent spoilage.

 

Traditionally, sausages are made by taking shavings and otherwise unpalatable or unusable pieces of meat, mixing them with fat and spices, stuffing the resultant mixture into the intestines of an animal (washed, of course), then hung in root cellars, caves, barn lofts or even in out-buildings, where they'd very slowly dry while a layer of mold would grow on the outside.  The mold would actually prevent bacteria from attacking the meat (you know how penicillin was discovered?  same basic idea, and many of the same species of mold) while the meat dried, and since the casing kept air out, the fat also dried without spoiling, and the spices not only flavored the meat/fat mixture, they also increased the drying action and reduced the likelihood of spoilage further.  When left undisturbed, the sausages would eventually dry to a very low moisture content and become extremely resistant to spoilage in the long term.

 

Also of note, spices weren't just to help with the preservation.  Sometimes those unpalatable pieces of meat were right on the verge of spoiling.  Other times, the meat might be too gamey, or particularly unpleasant (from what i've read, opossum tastes like a dumpster smells).  The right spices could make the difference between inedible and downright delicious.

 

Sausage-making and consumption was necessary because it wasn't until the 20th century that refrigeration became ubiquitous.  There were many places where ice couldn't be easily acquired, or saved in ice holes/ice houses/caves, so people learned to make foodstuffs which were less prone to spoiling.  Sausage, cheese, dried grains or flour, smoked meats, salted meats, cured meats, pemmican, the human species created numerous ways to preserve food when food preservation was much more difficult than "stick it in the freezer".  Learning to preserve foods allowed us to travel farther, work longer and harder, and survive better.  Food preservation is one of the cornerstones of our ability to thrive as a species.  Without it, we'd likely still be living like paleolithic people.

 

Farm-fresh eggs which haven't been washed yet can be left unrefrigerated for several months, too.  This allowed people to harvest eggs when chickens were laying frequently and save them for the months when egg production slowed or stopped (late fall through early spring), even without refrigeration of any kind.  Consequently, sausage and eggs became a very common breakfast across much of the United States and Europe (i have no idea about Asian practices, i haven't gotten that far yet), because they were always available, even in seasons when other foods weren't, and because they were resistant to spoilage, could be eaten with less risk of spending the entire day puking instead of working... or dead, which is always a bummer.  No-one likes to spend a day dead.

[Scarlet Shocker]

I am not worthy @Luminara 

 

/em does 23 cardboard salaams and tips hat backwards #bluebottle

 

I genuinely love that what I posted as a throwaway comment turned into something educational. I know about the eggs thing - I have kept chickens in my time and we do not wash our eggs in the UK so we just stick 'em in the fridge or on a shelf and they almost never go off.

 

But I have to say your description, whilst detailed, informative and yet concise left me wondering "WTF made them think that was a good idea?"

 

[Luminara]

2 minutes ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

But I have to say your description, whilst detailed, informative and yet concise left me wondering "WTF made them think that was a good idea?"

 

As I said, the history is very long, but the process of making sausage wasn't an epiphany.  No-one woke up one morning and said, "You know what, I'm going to shove some inedible meat up this dead animal's ass and eat it later!"

 

Okay, someone probably did, but that person's genes self-selected out of the pool.

 

There were a lot of discovery steps leading up to making sausage.

 

There's a condition known as protein poisoning, but it's more commonly referred to as "rabbit starvation".  That's because rabbits are very low in fat content, and while you might be able to feed yourself indefinitely on nothing but rabbits, you'd eventually die with a full stomach due to the lack of fat intake.

 

Interestingly, when the human body is approaching the point of rabbit starvation, the brain reacts by telling the body that it wants fats.  And most of the commonly hunted animals in that period had plenty of fat.  There are also cultures in which fats are considered delicacies, which may have come about from primitive people craving fats to balance their diets.  Regardless of how, or even why, early humans came to the conclusion that they needed fat, they started taking the fat as well as the meat when they butchered their kills.  No longer were they just carving off the good bits, they were starting to take as much as they could, including the not-as-good bits.

 

Now the human species has fat with their meat.  That's good, but the meat's still spoiling pretty quickly, and while some very basic preservation methods would've been available to paleolithic people (smoking in wet climates, air-drying in dry climates), they're not going to preserve it for a long time.  Even dried meat will start to spoil as it absorbs moisture, and smoked meat would have to be smoked again and again as pieces were removed, because the smoke curing process doesn't penetrate very far.  Plus, primitive humans weren't building smokehouses, they were getting lucky when they left meat next to a fire, so that was unreliable.

 

But some bright pennies did notice that fats were more resistant to spoilage than raw, or even cooked, or even smoked or dried meat.  And that the fats congealed into a mass if they were captured in something and cooled... say, a rudimentary bowl.  So someone leaves some cooked, fatty meat in a shell or a concave rock or a skull, the fat congeals, and they forget about it until a week later, rediscover their forgotten morsel and find that it doesn't smell rotten.  If it happens often enough, they start making an intellectual connection between "white stuff on top" and "not spending today dead".  They wouldn't have rationalized their observation as an understanding that the fat created an anaerobic environment which was hostile to most bacteria, but they got the important bits of it without the lingo being necessary.  Fat-covered meat didn't spoil nearly as quickly.  Bam, pemmican (which traditionally has other things mixed in, like nuts and berries, but we're just concentrating on sausage here).  This is a simple enough progression that even primitive people can figure it out, as they obviously did.

 

So now our species has achieved the precursor to sausage, fat-covered meat.  Problem was, there were no handy dandy cardboard boxes, or shopping bags, or Saran Wrap, or Ziploc bags or anything else to make it easy to carry the meat.  And skulls get heavy.  So do rocks.  They could throw it into a skin and carry it that way, but sooner or later, the layer of fat protecting the meat would break after being jostled about so much.  But early humans were hunters, and more than that, they were adaptable and intelligent and increasingly driven toward efficiency.  They were changing their methods to use as many parts of game as they could, because the more food they could bring back to the main site, and the longer it lasted, the less they had to work.  There weren't a lot of uses for intestines... but they could carry water... and food.

 

Most cuts would've been too large to stuff into those butt tubes, as would the offal, but the thin slivers that they were cutting off of the bones, the bits they scraped off of the ribs, those went into the intestines that they cleaned in the cold, clear streams.  Coincidentally, it also protected the meat for even longer, something they'd discover through experimentation and experience, which would eventually lead to using them to store meat long-term because it wasn't just more portable and a more efficient way to recover meat from an animal, it also helped the meat last longer.

 

The mold part... that had to be an act of desperation.  We're instinctively repulsed by moldy food.  That shit'll kill you, right?  As we discovered much, much, much later, not all molds are bad.  Someone got so hungry that he/she scraped the mold off of that proto-sausage that he/she'd left sitting in the cave eight or nine months ago and bit into it... and found that it was not only still good, the flavor had changed!  That had to have been something new and exciting, as revolutionary to them as cooking.  Primitive people have finally progressed from gnawing on carcasses to storing food for the winter, and having a bonus new flavor on top of it.

 

That's when we started making sausage.  It took tens of thousands of years to get there, but once we were there, we started really focusing on it.  It became more than just a convenient way to preserve food, it helped us make more efficient and thorough use of the animals we killed, it provided better food security, it increased our lifespans and allowed us to spread out more rapidly and into areas where finding food may have been more difficult.  And that last part is probably why we started using spices.  When you're traveling and have only the food you can carry with you, or what you hunt/gather along the way, you can start to lose your appetite.  Spices, though... that changed the game entirely.  Suddenly the meat wasn't just edible, it was bursting with flavor, and in the form of sausage, you could carry a lot of different flavors.

 

Sausage-making goes at least as far back as Mesopotamia.  It's likely that the proto-civilization preceding that was making sausage.  But it took around 35,000-40,000 years and a lot of unexpected discoveries before we became sausage gourmands.  And I'm not going to cover Mesopotamia to now, you can Google that.

[houtex]

5 hours ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

so there we were on a Manticore (pronounced Man-tickory) TF...

 

You know it's pronounced 'mawn teh CORE ay', c'mon.

[Clave Dark 5]

7 hours ago, biostem said:

Would it have been better or worse if that was an embalmed abomination, (or maybe this is how they get embalmed...)?

"Look out, it's gonna blow!"

[Scarlet Shocker]

7 hours ago, Luminara said:

 

As I said, the history is very long, but the process of making sausage wasn't an epiphany.  No-one woke up one morning and said, "You know what, I'm going to shove some inedible meat up this dead animal's ass and eat it later!"

 

Okay, someone probably did, but that person's genes self-selected out of the pool.

 

There were a lot of discovery steps leading up to making sausage.

 

There's a condition known as protein poisoning, but it's more commonly referred to as "rabbit starvation".  That's because rabbits are very low in fat content, and while you might be able to feed yourself indefinitely on nothing but rabbits, you'd eventually die with a full stomach due to the lack of fat intake.

 

Interestingly, when the human body is approaching the point of rabbit starvation, the brain reacts by telling the body that it wants fats.  And most of the commonly hunted animals in that period had plenty of fat.  There are also cultures in which fats are considered delicacies, which may have come about from primitive people craving fats to balance their diets.  Regardless of how, or even why, early humans came to the conclusion that they needed fat, they started taking the fat as well as the meat when they butchered their kills.  No longer were they just carving off the good bits, they were starting to take as much as they could, including the not-as-good bits.

 

Now the human species has fat with their meat.  That's good, but the meat's still spoiling pretty quickly, and while some very basic preservation methods would've been available to paleolithic people (smoking in wet climates, air-drying in dry climates), they're not going to preserve it for a long time.  Even dried meat will start to spoil as it absorbs moisture, and smoked meat would have to be smoked again and again as pieces were removed, because the smoke curing process doesn't penetrate very far.  Plus, primitive humans weren't building smokehouses, they were getting lucky when they left meat next to a fire, so that was unreliable.

 

But some bright pennies did notice that fats were more resistant to spoilage than raw, or even cooked, or even smoked or dried meat.  And that the fats congealed into a mass if they were captured in something and cooled... say, a rudimentary bowl.  So someone leaves some cooked, fatty meat in a shell or a concave rock or a skull, the fat congeals, and they forget about it until a week later, rediscover their forgotten morsel and find that it doesn't smell rotten.  If it happens often enough, they start making an intellectual connection between "white stuff on top" and "not spending today dead".  They wouldn't have rationalized their observation as an understanding that the fat created an anaerobic environment which was hostile to most bacteria, but they got the important bits of it without the lingo being necessary.  Fat-covered meat didn't spoil nearly as quickly.  Bam, pemmican (which traditionally has other things mixed in, like nuts and berries, but we're just concentrating on sausage here).  This is a simple enough progression that even primitive people can figure it out, as they obviously did.

 

So now our species has achieved the precursor to sausage, fat-covered meat.  Problem was, there were no handy dandy cardboard boxes, or shopping bags, or Saran Wrap, or Ziploc bags or anything else to make it easy to carry the meat.  And skulls get heavy.  So do rocks.  They could throw it into a skin and carry it that way, but sooner or later, the layer of fat protecting the meat would break after being jostled about so much.  But early humans were hunters, and more than that, they were adaptable and intelligent and increasingly driven toward efficiency.  They were changing their methods to use as many parts of game as they could, because the more food they could bring back to the main site, and the longer it lasted, the less they had to work.  There weren't a lot of uses for intestines... but they could carry water... and food.

 

Most cuts would've been too large to stuff into those butt tubes, as would the offal, but the thin slivers that they were cutting off of the bones, the bits they scraped off of the ribs, those went into the intestines that they cleaned in the cold, clear streams.  Coincidentally, it also protected the meat for even longer, something they'd discover through experimentation and experience, which would eventually lead to using them to store meat long-term because it wasn't just more portable and a more efficient way to recover meat from an animal, it also helped the meat last longer.

 

The mold part... that had to be an act of desperation.  We're instinctively repulsed by moldy food.  That shit'll kill you, right?  As we discovered much, much, much later, not all molds are bad.  Someone got so hungry that he/she scraped the mold off of that proto-sausage that he/she'd left sitting in the cave eight or nine months ago and bit into it... and found that it was not only still good, the flavor had changed!  That had to have been something new and exciting, as revolutionary to them as cooking.  Primitive people have finally progressed from gnawing on carcasses to storing food for the winter, and having a bonus new flavor on top of it.

 

That's when we started making sausage.  It took tens of thousands of years to get there, but once we were there, we started really focusing on it.  It became more than just a convenient way to preserve food, it helped us make more efficient and thorough use of the animals we killed, it provided better food security, it increased our lifespans and allowed us to spread out more rapidly and into areas where finding food may have been more difficult.  And that last part is probably why we started using spices.  When you're traveling and have only the food you can carry with you, or what you hunt/gather along the way, you can start to lose your appetite.  Spices, though... that changed the game entirely.  Suddenly the meat wasn't just edible, it was bursting with flavor, and in the form of sausage, you could carry a lot of different flavors.

 

Sausage-making goes at least as far back as Mesopotamia.  It's likely that the proto-civilization preceding that was making sausage.  But it took around 35,000-40,000 years and a lot of unexpected discoveries before we became sausage gourmands.  And I'm not going to cover Mesopotamia to now, you can Google that.

 

I'm genuinely better informed now. Serious thanks forthcoming.

 

I knew about the rabbit thing, interestingly due to Sir Stephen Fry and QI - but not about the culinary evolution of the sausage but it makes a lot of sense and many many cultures still have a huge reliance on saucisse as part of their culinary culture.

[Marine X]

The one that always gets me is Cottage Cheese. I love it but I have accidently nearly created it when a Milk jug got buried in the back of the fridge. Would I put that in my mouth? Nope.

Someone was really hungry the day that was created.

[Mopery]

Sounds like it's Empalmed.

[High_Beam]

I do like sausage.

[KC4800]

1 hour ago, Marine X said:

The one that always gets me is Cottage Cheese. I love it but I have accidently nearly created it when a Milk jug got buried in the back of the fridge. Would I put that in my mouth? Nope.

Someone was really hungry the day that was created.

You know, my brother loved cottage cheese, but he hated sour cream. I could never figure that out about him. What do you put on your tacos, Joe?

[Skyhawke]

8 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

"Look out, it's gonna blow!"

 

 

[Andreah]

1 hour ago, Marine X said:

The one that always gets me is Cottage Cheese. I love it but I have accidently nearly created it when a Milk jug got buried in the back of the fridge. Would I put that in my mouth? Nope.

When people are truly hungry, starvation level, they'll try to eat surprising things. The body is basically saying "We're gonna die otherwise. What's the worst that could happen?"

[srmalloy]

12 hours ago, Luminara said:

So now our species has achieved the precursor to sausage, fat-covered meat.  Problem was, there were no handy dandy cardboard boxes, or shopping bags, or Saran Wrap, or Ziploc bags or anything else to make it easy to carry the meat. 

This was addressed once pottery was developed (appropriately-shaped stone containers were difficult to make until much later) with the invention of "potted meat", where cooked meat is tightly packed into a jar to remove air pockets, then has melted fat poured over the top to solidify and make an airtight seal.

 

Mold on sausage was an accidental discovery from the practice of hanging meat/sausage to dry-cure (often after being smoked for additional preservation), and required careful choice of the environment to store the meat in to encourage the 'right' strains of mold to grow on the meat.

[Luminara]

2 hours ago, Marine X said:

The one that always gets me is Cottage Cheese. I love it but I have accidently nearly created it when a Milk jug got buried in the back of the fridge. Would I put that in my mouth? Nope.

Someone was really hungry the day that was created.

 

Cottage cheese was the result of attempts to strain the cream skimmed off of the milk.

 

When an animal is milked, the constituent components of milk come out all mixed up, the proteins and fats very evenly distributed throughout the liquid.  The fats, what we refer to as the cream, are the most useful and desirable part, and we obtain them by allowing them to float to the top over time.  We then use the cream to make butter or cheese.

 

The problem is that... well, most animals are fucking filthy.  Especially on their undersides, where their bodies touch the ground when they lie down (most ungulates sleep on their stomachs).  They frequently have dirt and manure on their udders, so the milk has to be strained.  No-one enjoys a mouthful of fur or straw bits or shit floating in their milk.  There are better ways to get fiber in our diets.  But straining it before the cream has separated not only means you have to wait longer to get the cream, you're also removing some of the lipids when trying to get the gunk out.  So you let the whole thing settle first, then skim it, then put the cream into cheesecloth to strain that, then strain the rest of the milk.

 

If you use too many layers of cheesecloth, it doesn't strain, it pools.  The least fatty liquid drips out while the heavier, creamier part stays in the cheesecloth, and even at room temperature, the fats begin to coagulate into curds.  Normal cheese-making requires scalding the milk (bringing the temp up to just under boiling), then adding rennet (Google it) or an acid (which is a shortcut), but cottage cheese, or farmer's cheese, as it's also called, relies on bacteria and yeast from the environment and takes place naturally.

 

That jug of spoiled milk in your refrigerator isn't cheese, it's just spoiled milk.  The lactobacilli went into over-production, the whey has completely separated and the gunky stuff stuck to the sides of the jug and floating on top are bacteria poop.  You can make cheese with spoiling milk, or even recently spoiled milk, and there are a few that are made specifically that way, but once the process has gone too far, it becomes toxic.  Cheese isn't bacteria poop, it's the result of the acids released by bacteria, or acids you add to the scalded milk, causing the fat molecule chains to unravel and recombine in a different, tighter configuration, what we have come to call curds.

 

Yes, I make cheese, too.  Cheese-making is a process as old as sausage-making, and just as fascinating.  Acid cheese are really easy and fast, rennet cheeses only slightly more complicated and a bit more time-consuming, but superior for texture and flavor.  Basic homespun cheeses like cottage cheese require almost no attention or time, but I've always felt like they were a waste of good cream.  I like cottage cheese, but not enough to make it instead of a solid cheese.

[Luminara]

1 hour ago, Andreah said:

When people are truly hungry, starvation level, they'll try to eat surprising things. The body is basically saying "We're gonna die otherwise. What's the worst that could happen?"

 

There was a guy who survived a shipwreck, talked about slowly starving to death in some television show I watched a long time ago.  He was surviving on fish he caught, but gradually succumbing to rabbit starvation, and suddenly found himself craving the eyes, brains and skins of the fish (the fat storage areas).  I remember gagging when I listened to him describing how hungrily he gulped down those bits, but having been close to that stage later in life, it seems a lot less repulsive now.  There have been a few times in the last 8 years when I've seen roadkill and seriously considered bringing it back to the cabin.

[Healix]

[Skyhawke]

1 hour ago, Healix said:

 

 

[American Decoy]

17 hours ago, Luminara said:

Sausage, cheese, dried grains or flour, smoked meats, salted meats, cured meats, pemmican, the human species created numerous ways to preserve food when food preservation was much more difficult than "stick it in the freezer".

 

People fought each other for food preservation resources.  The Pemmican War is an interesting example of the need to preserve food, a method of preservation, and the extreme measures to acquire those resources.

[Scarlet Shocker]

7 hours ago, Marine X said:

The one that always gets me is Cottage Cheese. I love it but I have accidently nearly created it when a Milk jug got buried in the back of the fridge. Would I put that in my mouth? Nope.

Someone was really hungry the day that was created.

 

I never knew you could get cheese from cottaging!

 

 

[srmalloy]

1 hour ago, American Decoy said:

People fought each other for food preservation resources. 

And wars over salt -- the earliest recorded war over access to a supply of salt was over a salt lake in China in 3000 BC. There were others, in 1304, 1482, 1540, 1556, 1680, and 1877, among others.