What is the best way to store food? It’s a question that has puzzled people for centuries. Most of us take refrigeration for granted, but there was an era when this technology didn’t exist, and people had to find their own ways to keep food fresh. Here are some of the most popular methods used throughout history.
Root Cellar
A root cellar is a place underground where people store fruits and vegetables that aren’t good keepers (like potatoes, onions, carrots). Fruits and vegetables that don’t spoil quickly maintain their quality longer when stored in the right conditions. These conditions include dark, cool places with high humidity; you can achieve this naturally if you build your root cellar underground or artificially by putting something over it (like dirt) to keep out sunlight while still letting water escape.
Root cellars were especially common before refrigeration was widespread because they had some natural insulation against extreme cold. They could also be used during warm seasons; many people would bring foods inside the house that would normally go bad outside, like potatoes or cabbage, then use them as the weather cooled.Â
Smoking
People used to smoke their meats and fish as a method of storage and preservation. Smoking preserves and cooks meat (cow, deer, turkey) at the same time. However, it is less effective for fish that need to be cured or dried out after smoking to keep them preserved. This technique works because the chemical sodium nitrite found in meats creates bacteria that cause rotting to die when exposed to high heat and restricted oxygen flow.
Smokehouses were typically built outdoors with wood-burning fires underneath metal racks where people put the food they wanted to smoke. As long as you continue this process, your food wouldn’t spoil and could last up to six months if you managed to keep the temperature in your smokehouse low enough.
Salting
This method involved burying meat or fish completely in salt to preserve it. However, when you bury your food, no water can evaporate, so you don’t lose anything. The only problem is keeping insects and rodents out. People would try and keep them out by covering everything with salt then putting something on top (like straw) to seal it all in. They would also have to occasionally check for rotting by digging up the food periodically and checking if anything was rotten.
Curing
This method of food storage is similar to smoking, but it uses salt, sugar, nitrates (usually made from paprika), or honey instead of smoke that has a preservative effect. The good thing about curing meat is that you can do it faster; however, this method doesn’t cook the meat as smoking does, so it will need some other form of heat before eating.
People would cure meats like beef, pork, venison on racks over pans on the floor where excess liquids could drain out; they would make cuts in their meats first so salt could more evenly permeate them.
Larding
This method is also a form of curing where people would use a needle to “pitch” a stick of fat through the meat so that the fats could go throughout. This both added flavor and preserved meats from spoiling.
To do this effectively, you had to have cold temperatures, which at the time were only available naturally in cold climates like Scandinavia or Russia, which led to it being popular there. In other places, people would just keep their cured meats outside in the winter since they wouldn’t rot as much in those conditions, especially if it was dried out.
