Food That Preserved A Nation

Historical Food Preservation Playlist youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4e4wpjna1vxjVcKc_BHTb0…

Beef jerky went from essential preserved staple to luxury good. Jerky prices are outrageous.

Many of those techniques are still used in rural Poland. Every fall, when it gets cool enough we pack sauerkraut into a barrel with salt and shredded carrots for color and health benefits. We dry forest mushrooms to add them to soups and sauces during winter. We pickle cucumbers in jars. And many houses still have small smoke houses in the backyard, to smoke homemade sausages and cured hams or slabs of bacon.

My mother's family lived on a farm at the start of the Depression. They salted their pork every fall after slaughtering. According to my mom and aunts, the saying: "Scraping the bottom of the barrel" exists for a reason. By the time you got to that last bit of meat, you had to be hungry to eat it. It might not be bad, per se, but it sure wasn't good.

Many people don't realize that they had to endure the spring as well. The harvests of summer and fall are a long way off. Gardens do not produce food immediately. Spring can be bleak. But hope is there.

It's kind of crazy that preserving food is the backbone of history and yet it's rarely given the credit it is due. Excellent video and wonderful information.

My great grandparents had a farm in southern Michigan SW of Battle Creek, the area is now subdivisions sadly. Anyway they had a dedicated smoke house for smoking meat that was built in the mid 1800's, it took 4 cows worth of meat to fill that thing but every fall gramps would do 2-3 batches and give/sell/trade much of it. The dried meat was smoked with apple wood that was trimmings from their apple orchard that made up the majority of their farm land. I have not tasted any dried beef that has tasted so good or had that smooth texture since.

In a world of chaos, your videos are always a calming presence. Love to watch them. Thank you

I live in Saltville Virginia.The first recorded battle ever fought here, over the salt, goes back to the Spanish Conquistadors in the 1500’s. All of them were about food preservation.

I'm from Norway and "klippfisk" is still very popular here, it is salted fish that has to be soaked in water for many hours before you can cook with it.

Technically the fermenting process with cabbage is done by Lactobacillus. While the yeast make alcohol, the lactobacillus creates lactic acid, which pickles it. It's why I still consider it a form of pickling. It's also much healthier as the lactic acid improves your immune health and the bacteria improves gut health.

Up here in Newfoundland, we still have salt beef and pork all the time! We soak it overnight and boil it with our veggies for jigs dinner ❤

Used to smoke a lot of salmon back in my Alaska years, I lived on an island near a beaver pond and would gather the alder chips they left behind when downing trees, some of the best smoked sockeye ever.

I remember a business near where I lived that smoked salmon to sell to tourists. They used old refrigerators with the lower part with the motors removed. The salmon strips were hung from the old racks, the fire was built just at the front of the open bottom and the smoking coals pushed underneath. They also dug out the area under the smokers a little. They drilled holes in the metal bottom of the fridge for the smoke to rise and the doors provided easy access to the products. My dad and brothers had built a large smoke house for our fish and game and while dad said he admired the creative thinking with the friges, they wouldn't be big enough for our family.

And don't forget the "shrubs." Preserving fruits in cider vinegar with some sugar is very tasty.

Years ago I read they would preserve slow cooked meats covered in hot grease in a tall narrow pot so the grease when cooled would seal and keep safe the meat. It was called confit (sounds like con-feet). Apparently, the meat could be kept for up to a year if done right.

When my mom was young they would preserve meat in a barrel between layers of salt sealed by a layers of lard. No air would get to the lower layers that way.

I find it magnificent that this video is all about preservation and its importance, but all footages used come from this very channel, showing how much information has already been produced and published by you.

As a child, I remember that my great-aunt and uncle’s Indiana farm had a fully stocked fall root cellar up until the 1930 when rural electrification finally reached their farm. Potatoes, beets, squash, gourds, mason jars full of green beans, sacks of wheat and the hand mill were all down there. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Respectfully, W.S.

The preservation techniques are great knowledge from the past that we still use today, in all aspects of food. In first year of culinary we studied food safety by learning FAT TOM, meaning Food Acidity, Time, Temperature, Oxygen and Moisture. By understanding this and stopping any one or more from preventing harmful bacteria growth it's easy to understand preparing food safely for immediate use or preserving it for long periods.