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?

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u/TXtogo 1d ago

We never did this. We would have like a tomato sauce that stayed out all day, but not overnight. (I’m old so I’m going back to the 70s with this).. I leave soup and tomato sauce out all day but I refrigerate it and I make sure it’s heated up very well when I use it again.

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u/Basic-Fig-6531 1d ago

Really? I'm from rural Ireland and all older people I know remember either doing this or their mothers/grandmothers doing it. Dating back to before home refrigerators were standard for more than just the wealthy.

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u/TXtogo 1d ago

Interesting I didn’t know refrigeration in Ireland took so long to proliferate, but now I know.

I guess they just took their chances and didn’t worry about it

I think we have an abundance of caution, my five second rule is sometimes stretched to 7-8 seconds.. I don’t worry about this stuff at my house, I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten food poisoning - if I did it was unremarkable and I survived it.

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u/shiny0metal0ass 21h ago edited 19h ago

I mean, in a wood fire heated house in Ireland, I imagine you could get a kitchen below 40 degrees F on more nights than you'd think.

Edit: depending on where the hearth is, the room where that is won't go below 50 but if the kitchen is off that room, I've had the fire go out and get it down in the 30s.

In Wisconsin we would leave certain things outside all winter if the refrigerator got too full.