500 years ago, although there were no refrigerators and cans, the ancients also had many ways to store food, such as placing food in peat bogs to inhibit the growth of bacteria; storing it in cellars to isolate the air; dehydrating fresh food at low temperatures.
In the age of great voyages, food preservation was crucial.
European sailors 500 years ago could eat meat, wine and biscuits, but vegetables were difficult to preserve for a long time, which also caused the voyagers to encounter the threat of scurvy.
It was only after a long time that people discovered that there is a well-preserved food that still contains enough vitamin C - pickled cabbage (called sauerkraut in northern China and sauerkraut in German).
Used by the Dutch navy in the early 18th century, and tested and recommended by Captain Cook in the 1770s, pickled cabbage became a nautical standard, saving the lives of countless sailors and captains.
Although refrigerators and cans have not yet been invented, the ancients relied on methods such as salting, vinegar soaking, candiing, and air-drying to preserve food for a long time.
Inhibit bacteria
When you go to the mountains in summer, you will find that tourists and vendors often soak watermelons and drinks in mountain streams;
Before the invention of the refrigerator, Westerners used mountain streams to keep food fresh.
Rural families in Europe and the United States often have a "spring house", which is a small wooden niche on the stream to prevent milk, butter and other perishable items from spoiling.
The flowing spring water is cool enough even in the hottest summer.
Peat swamps, common in northwestern Europe, are also good places to store food for a long time—swamps with peat moss are cold and oxygen-deprived, and bacteria have difficulty breaking down organic matter.
Archaeologists in Ireland discovered a barrel of "swamp butter" in 2009, which the ancients probably forgot to remove after storing it.
The butter tub is made of a whole tree trunk, three feet long and one foot wide, and comes with a lid.
The barrel was full of butter, weighing 77 pounds, which had lost its creamy consistency and became a white, harder wax.
Archaeologists dug up the butter with their bare hands and could still smell it, a smell that also attracted crows.
Studies have shown that this piece of butter is 3,000 years old.
It is a common practice to bury food (and many things that need to be preserved, such as corpses) in peat bogs.
Nearly 500 pieces of ancient butter have been found in the swamps of Ireland and Scotland.
In 2013, archaeologists also discovered a 5,000-year-old piece of butter weighing 100 pounds.
Microbial growth and decomposition are inhibited in acidic, anoxic peat wetlands.
We can't be sure whether ancient marsh butter was used in sacrifices, preserved as food, or fermented for more flavor.
In 2012, food researcher Ben Reid conducted an experiment.
Buried in a swamp for 3 months, tasters describe the butter as "gamey, funky and spicy, like moss, animal or salami".
After a year and a half of burial, Reed thinks the butter tastes better—arguably the swamps created a lot of benefits for ancient Europeans.
cut off the air
Potatoes are a kind of vegetables that can be stored for a long time, but the premise of storage is that one is cold and the other is not light.
In the past, in the rural areas of northern my country, potatoes, radishes and cabbage eaten in winter were generally stored in cellars or caves with small openings.
Europeans and Americans also traditionally used cellars to preserve root crops such as potatoes and radishes.
People would dig a cellar, fill it with sawdust or straw, put vegetables in it, cover it with sawdust and straw, and seal the cellar with wood or tin.
Another way to stock up on vegetables: dig a trench next to the cabbage, pull up the cabbage, place it upside down in the trench, and cover with loose soil.
Over the next few months, the cabbage will turn white in color, but not in taste.
Food spoilage can be prevented as long as it is not exposed to air.
The ancient Mesopotamians would fill food storage jars with oil to keep out the air.
The British have canned fish or meat stewed in butter. If the fish or meat is cooked in this jar, then there is no need to refrigerate or add preservatives, and it can be stored for several months.
This method is also commonly used in rural China.
In the same way, medieval Europeans liked to fill every hole in the pie with butter or aspic to prevent the filling from contacting the air for storage.
Uncooked animal water is highly perishable, especially blood, which is very nutritious, and will spoil rapidly.
Therefore, after slaughtering livestock, nomads will quickly make the internal organs and blood into cooked food, such as blood sausages in the northeast.
It is speculated that the earliest sausage was blood sausage.
Southerners will mix pig blood and glutinous rice to make a soft and glutinous pig blood cake.
Coincidentally, the black pudding that the British like to eat is also made of pig blood mixed with lard and oats.
The famous Scottish haggis also belongs to this category.
This dish is available wherever there are Scots.
It is packed with sheep tripe with various offal, some are lamb lungs, lamb liver pieces, some are suet, and some are oatmeal.
Those who are used to it find it very delicious.
Nomads often use this animal offal to store food, because no food is wasted and no containers are needed.
After slaughtering the reindeer, the Nenets in Russia emptied the reindeer's stomach, rinsed it, and then sliced the reindeer meat into thin slices and stored it in the stomach.
Store food in this way in late autumn and it will last up to 8 months.
remove moisture
Lu Xun once complained that in his hometown, all vegetables had to be dried—“If there is vegetables, they are dried in the sun; if there are fish, they are dried in the sun; if there are beans, they are dried in the sun; The water chestnut is rich in water, the meat is tender and crispy, and it should also be air-dried..."
In fact, Shaoxing people are not the only ones who love to eat dry vegetables.
Medieval Europeans also often skewered vegetables and hung them by the fireplace or in a warm, dry place to remove moisture.
People also soak vegetables in water for a period of time before drying them.
Beans made in this way are called "leather pants" because they are extremely tough when dried.
Fruit, squash, and other vegetables can all be kept this way for several months.
The Americans 500 years ago mastered an advanced technology - freeze-drying.
The Incas in the Andes grew potatoes very early on.
They invented freeze-dried potatoes (Chu?o, literally "crumpled") that can be stored for 10 or even decades.
The Incas generally chose a smaller, frost-resistant, bitter potato variety and freeze-dried them in June and July, the beginning of winter.
In the mountains above 3,800 meters above sea level, the nighttime temperature drops to minus 5 degrees Celsius.
Small potatoes are densely spread on a flat ground, frozen at night, and dehydrated by strong sunlight during the day.
Then, people stepped on these potatoes, on the one hand stepping out the water still remaining in the potatoes, and on the other hand removing the skin.
Then freeze and dry the potatoes for another period of time.
In this process, the toxic glycoalkaloids contained in bitter potatoes are also removed.
Freeze-dried potatoes are soft in texture and have a very flat taste on their own, with a slight sour taste.
When cooked, it looks like a sponge, thick, chewy, and easy to taste.
This technology has a history of at least 800 years, and some people believe that the rise of the Inca Empire is relying on "crumpled" logistics.
The Spaniards also quickly realized the importance of this stuff, and the mine workers in the Andes ate it every day.
Today, we can apply Incas techniques to everything.
Strawberries, for example, are frozen, placed in a near-vacuum drying chamber, and heated.
Ice in strawberries sublimates easily into water vapor.
In this way all the water in the strawberry is gone, but the cells are not destroyed, and the vitamins, trace elements and fiber are retained for years or even decades, and are often as fresh as when they were originally picked.
For vegetable hoarders, freeze-dried vegetables are a delicious and nutritious choice.