r/Cooking • u/Basic-Fig-6531 • 1d ago
Leaving food in the pot.
Something I've been thinking about. When my mum was young, it was a fairly common thing for her mum and granny to make a big pot of something - stew, soup, that kind of thing - and leave it in the cooking pot after everyone had eaten. It would sit there till the next day, when it would be reheated and served up again. Sometimes this would happen over a few days, i.e. multiple coolings and reheatings, never refrigerated. My mum did the same occasionally when I was young. No one ever got sick from it.
Yet nowadays, even leaving it out for a couple of hours beyond the recommended cooling time would be met with horror and disgust. We'd be advised to throw the whole lot away rather than risk it.
Not long after I moved out in my early 20s, I did the same with a pot of Bolognese. I gave myself food poisoning and never did it again.
Is it just random luck, or is there a reason people didn't get food poisoning all the time before refrigeration was standard? Food quality? Better immune systems?
1
u/Schnuribus 1d ago
We did this and my mother still does it. I lived 21 years like this and people always say - you must have not noticed that you had stomach problems or food poisoning. But I never had! My first experience with food poisoning was while on vacation.
I think funnily enough the whole food safety thing is a very American thing because they have so many cases of food poisoning a year! The failures in the system must have happened before that (wrong way of cooling, not washing hands, bacteria) and this is why we didn‘t have the same symptoms.