Food That Preserved A Nation

We ferment some of the sugars in grains, and of course we want that kind of flavor that we get. Now this happens not only in beer, but fermentation occurs in wine. Fermentation is also used for dairy products and we can do multiple different types of fermentation with milk. We can let the milk go sour or turn it into buttermilk. We can also make soft cheeses. and hard cheeses, it all depends on the type of culture that exists and how much salt can be in a mixture to save milk not only in days, but in months or even years.

Sometimes preservation isn't necessarily about survival, but about how to best use what we have, especially if too much arrives at once. We all have a giant harvest of fruit, perhaps the best way to avoid wasting it is to turn it into alcohol, we could turn it into wine or even distill it into brandy. Using sugar is another way to preserve

food

, it is usually done with something like fruits, which really lend themselves to sugar preservation and this again has been done for hundreds of years, we have the Romans dipping things in honey and in our period of time they sweeten different things by covering them.

We dip them in sugar, which removes the moisture and the sugar itself is antibacterial and prevents them from spoiling. Another way to achieve the same thing, especially with fruit, is to make a concentrate that removes moisture from the fruit, usually by simply boiling it, and increases its sugar content to the point where it will not spoil. Jams or jellies are something that we have today and that we use and we simply take that fruit and boil it, sometimes we add a little sugar and it keeps for a long time. There are circumstances where they did not know that fermentation was occurring; we have a combi

nation

of conservation techniques.

So sausage is a perfect example: we will have salt in our sausage to preserve it, we will have spices to preserve it, we will smoke, and there will also be fermentation that happens almost exactly at the same time. It makes for a very complex product with a lot of complex flavors and all these different things add up to form a

preserved

food

. You probably have canned food in your pantry right now. In the 18th century they didn't have cans, certainly not metal cans, but they did have a way of doing almost exactly the same thing. Now, in a canning situation, we bring a food to a pasteurized temperature and we seal that food away from any type of oxygen so that no new bacteria can enter that environment to infect the food and start spoiling it.

In the 18th century they made meat in pots that effectively did almost exactly the same thing: they cooked the meat in a kind of small container like this, it was usually very finely shredded, they cooked it with a lot of fats that necessarily moved. to the top and then they would automatically seal it and then they would go in and put a little paper seal on the top so that the fats from the top wouldn't spoil on the top. Sometimes clarified butter was added on top again to seal the natural fat barrier and keep oxygen away from the food and we kept things in bottles for that period, whole fruits like cherries or strawberries that we could soak in water or sometimes a alcohol that would preserve them for a very long period of time.

And the bottle is specifically made to have a small surface area so that oxygen cannot reach the contents. Now, these are all in hard containers, usually ceramic or glass, and today we use metal, but back then they sometimes used the food itself to seal them from the air. So they cooked specific pies, meat pies, with a very hard crust and the crust itself was not meant to be eaten, but to seal the food for preservation. Nowadays we think about meat pies and we want to eat the crust and that's part of it, but back then it was all about preserving food and the crust was something that might not be right after a couple of weeks, but the content would still be. so we ate the inside and then discarded the rind.

There are all these food preservation techniques and there is a group of people who seem to have to use them all in at least some small way and that is the military and maybe even specifically the men aboard Navy ships in that period. They have to use all these different feeding techniques because they are far from the land. There is very little food you can take out in the middle of nowhere. Yes, once in a while you can catch a fish, but you can't depend on that, so they use salt. Provisions that use fermentation, use all of these different things together to be able to survive over thousands of miles of ocean voyages.

It may be easy for us to imagine that we would need to preserve food for the winter, but the reality is that there is much more to it than that, especially in the 18th century and for the people of North America. You can't travel across the oceans and that's how you get here unless you have food preservation. You can't move from the east coast to the west unless you have food preservation. You really can't have America without food preservation.