In article >,
(NCHFP) wrote:

> > My family does historical recreation (SCA), and one issue is how to keep
> > meat at a week long camping event without a (modern, inconvenient)
> > cooler. Currently we have one solution that involves preserving meat in
> > spices and vinegar, from a roughly 13th c. source. Other than that we
> > use beans, eggs, cheese, etc., which don't have such a serious spoilage
> > problem.
> >
> > Historically, smoking was used to preserve food--but as far as I can
> > tell, the smoked foods currently available in the supermarket use it for
> > flavor, and require, or say they require, refrigeration. I was wondering
> > if people here could point me at sources for smoked meat that would keep
> > without refrigeration, or suggest other solutions to the problem,
> > preferably ones that don't involve too large an investment of time and
> > effort.
>
> Please use caution in replicating preservation mechanisms from the
> centuries past. You may find that you life expectency will match
> theirs.

I doubt that food poisoning was a significant source of low life
expectancy in the 12th century. As a general rule, my impression is that
people in pre-modern societies, although they didn't know lots of things
we do, did have a pretty good idea of how to function with the
technology they had--with the result that they only rarely did things
that were unnecessarily hazardous.

In the case of the Lord's Salt, which is the method I have used, we
checked the relevant literature on potential problems before
experimenting with it.

> Jerky is an example of a age old meat preservation method that is
> still practiced today. Dry-cured ham is another example. These are
> both room temperature stable, although jerky is easier to make.
> Smoking does not "preserve" meats by itself.

Harold McGee disagrees--he describes it (p. 104 of _On Food and
Cooking_) as an old preservation technique. And in the first of the two
pieces you reference below, you write:

"Smoking meat imparts an attractive and appealing sensory property, in
addition to preserving meats."

To take a somewhat earlier source, Le Menagier has a recipe for sausages
which uses only "a little fine salt" in the list of ingredients, smokes
them for four days, and clearly intends them to keep thereafter.

> Read my review for indepth information if you like:
> http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/publication...smoke_rev.html.
>
> Historical Origins of Food Preservation
> http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/publication...pres_hist.html

Thanks for the cites. One small point of disagreement. In the second
one, you write:

"The same fervor of trading with India and the Orient that brought
pickled foods to Europe brought sugar cane. In northern climates that do
not have enough sunlight to successfully dry fruits housewives learned
to make preserves‹heating the fruit with sugar."

Sugar in the Middle Ages was coming to Europe from the Islamic world,
not from India and the Orient. And I believe the making of fruit
preserves in Europe only happens towards the end of the sixteenth
century, when sugar was becoming less expensive because it was being
imported by sea from the West Indies. I believe C. Anne Wilson discusses
the subject in _Food and Drink in Britain_--and I'm pretty sure I
haven't seen any sugar preserved fruit recipes in the 14th or 15th c.
English recipe corpus.

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