In Cooking, Good Ingredients Gone ‘Bad’ Can Still Be Delicious

For most of human history, 
the use of spoiling ingredients wasn’t viewed as sordid....
 On any bright morning between roughly 400 A.D. (when the “Apicius” 
of antiquity included instruction for “spoiled honey made good”) 
and the middle of last century, any thoughtful cook, 
stained recipe page before her, might have set about whisking 
batter for sour-beer pancakes, or gathering slightly moldy vegetables 
for weeknight soup, or resolving to make a sour-milk cake, 
and her actions would have been seen as properly belonging 
to the branch of human activity called cooking. 
The usefulness of an ingredient existed on a temporal spectrum, 
with differing but comparable values at both ends; this was intrinsic 
kitchen knowledge, guided by recipes in cookbooks like 
Lydia Maria Francis Child’s 
“The American Frugal Housewife” (1832), or Marion Harland’s 
“Common Sense in the Household” (1871), or Fannie Farmer’s 
“Boston Cooking-School Cook Book” (1896)....
Those old ways have fallen out of fashion. The life-preserving discoveries of microbiology in the late 19th century are partly responsible; once Louis Pasteur proved spoilage to be caused by tiny organisms, i.e., interlopers, it was difficult to ever think of aging food in quite the same way again. New technologies came along to help keep our beer and milk fresh, our vegetables bright. Where an earlier cook knew potatoes and milk to change over time, and made her culinary plans accordingly, today an ingredient’s life is thought to have ended once time has altered it in any way.
But ingredients still do have uses past their first flush, and we should continue to make room for them in our minds and in our cookbooks. There are some truly wonderful dishes that rely on them. Like chilaquiles, made from stale tortillas — for which I’ve included a very basic recipe. And ribollita, a stale-bread-and-bean soup, and pappa al pomodoro, a similar thing, thick with olive oil and tomatoes. Sour milk, beyond improving cakes and corn breads, makes traditional cottage cheese. The rather magical Catalan pa amb tomàquet wants tomatoes that are nearly rotten....[....]nytimes.com