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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ❤

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.

With the fear of sodium that we have today, salt preserved foods are pretty much gone, BUT in our world today, having these vintage food preservation techniques, and knowing how to return that preserved food to a palatable as well as edible dish, is a valuable skill set and knowledge base. I'd like to see a renaissance of old foods. Huzzah also for Townsends for mentioning the use of beer over water "in some places" which was quite correct! Too many people think it a myth.

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.

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.

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

The wood ash preservation for eggs still blows me away

These videos make me feel conflicted. It's such an enjoyable, educational and calming video that gives me a sense of dread due to how little I actually know if the grocery stores turn empty and the grid goes down

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.