Back in the days of yore when meats were often covered with sauces to disguise the fact they were more than a bit 'off', folks chewed mint leaves to help with the inevitable gastric revolt that followed.
Sorry, but that isn't the case at all. Modern people, unused to eating spiced sauces on meats (about the only remnant is the cloves on hams) have invented the "hide the taste" theory because the use of such spices seems so odd to them, without realizing that in the medieval period people just didn't try to keep fresh meat around for very long.
If you were of a class that ate meat regularly, like the nobility, most of your meat came from market on its own two/four feet. It was killed on-site and cooked immediately. Wild game was also fresh-killed. Most meat recipes of the time say "Take fayre fressh beef" or something similar. Similarly, sauces
were highly spiced, but
NOT as a way to hide off tastes. Most of the spices that are common now -- cinnamon, pepper, cloves, etc. -- were quite literally worth their weight in gold, because they came from so far away. If you wanted a pound of peppercorns, the merchant put it on his balance scale and you put on gold coins until the scales balanced. Spiced sauces and meats were a form of "conspicuous consumption" -- "I, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, can afford for my meat pies to have cinnamon AND cloves AND pepper." No cook worth his salt would try to feed his lord on rotting meats, with the taste hidden under spices!
If you were lower on the scale, a middle-class merchant, for instance, you bought your meat at the butcher shop, where again it had been killed only a few hours ago. And you took it home and cooked it that day. Your meat was seasoned with salt and fresh garden herbs, rather than expensive spices. You didn't eat meat every day. Leftover meats were repurposed into meat pies and soups; keeping a soup simmering on the hearth was easier than trying to keep leftover meats cold!
If you were a farmer, you rarely tasted fresh meat. Only in the autumn, when animals like steers and pigs were slaughtered, did you get fresh red meat, and that only for one or two meals. The rest of the meat was salted down and/or cured and /or smoked and/or dried, to be eaten later. A number of extant period recipes start off by telling you to soak or boil your dried, salted meat in water, then throw the now-salty water away.
Even poultry was too valuable to poorer people to slaughter often for meat. As Tevye says, "If a poor man eats a chicken, one of them is sick!"
For more on medieval and Renaissance cookery, see
http://www.godecookery.com/
