Before the refrigeration, how did people store food in the past?

If food refrigeration began in the mid-fifties of the 18th century and developed in the early 19th century so that household refrigerators became famous only in the 1940s, what did the ancients do to preserve their food thousands of years ago?

Archaeologists have found evidence of a variety of food preservation techniques that people used in the past, some as common as drying, salting, smoking, pickling, fermentation and cooling in natural refrigerators such as streams, underground pits and cellars, and others as unconventional ancient practices such as burying butter in swamps.

Despite the almost lack of technology, the old methods were so effective that some products survived thousands of years ago.

Creative ways

According to Live Science, people have had to find clever ways to preserve food for thousands of years that slow the growth of microorganisms that can cause foodborne diseases or lead to food rot, including burial in ponds and freshwater swamps as well as underground burial, but how did these methods work?

Burial in ponds

Water ponds provided a place to store animal parts hunted by the ancients, where animal remains are intentionally placed in one of the shallow ponds that dot nature.

But the process of preserving meat during this process was not due to water, but because of the presence of the bacteria "Lactobacillus" that live in the water and produce lactic acid, a chemical by-product of anaerobic respiration, so when the bacteria invade this meat in pools of water, the lactic acid secreted by it maintains the muscle mass in the meat.

In addition, lactic acid makes the meat tender, and imparts a strong aroma and taste, making it a delicious meal in the end.

Besides the presence of these good bacteria in the water, the low temperature and low oxygen content in the pond water helped in the conservation process.

Hunters kept the remains of their large mammoth catch in ponds for later use (Getty Images)

The story of the mammoth stored in the water

Two farmers in the US state of Michigan discovered the bone of the mammoth basin by accident in 2015, and when it was reported, a research team stepped in to find that more than 11,<> years ago, when mammoth herds roamed North America, poachers kept their catch remains in ponds for later use.

Daniel Fisher, a professor at the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology, told Live Science that the mammoth hunt may have occurred in the fall, and the animal was slaughtered and large pieces of it were placed in the water in nearby small ponds, and the meat remained edible until the following summer.

Based on experiments he conducted himself using deer, lamb and even horses, Fisher found that the meat was still edible even after spending months submerged in similarly small, cold tubs but first cooked thoroughly to kill any harmful bacteria that might have settled in it.

Underground burial

Natural water pools were not available to everyone at that time, so another method of preserving food was used, which is burial, and burying food is a good way to keep it fresh, because it protects it from sunlight, heat and oxygen, which are the three factors that increase the rate of food spoilage.

Swamp butter

The swamp is a freshwater wetland, it has a soft spongy floor consisting mainly of partially decomposed plant material called peat, and is considered a cold, low-oxygen environment, and its acidity ratio is ideal for preserving perishable foods, so swamps provided early farming communities with a way to preserve perishable foods such as dairy products for longer.

This method was used in northern Europe, where ancient civilizations placed food, including butter, in the swamp to preserve it.

Archaeologists pulled samples of a waxy, paraffin-like substance from waterlogged mud, and after conducting chemical analyses on the waxy substance, they identified it as a dairy product and gave it the name "swamp butter."

Archaeologists have pulled samples of a paraffin-like waxy substance from waterlogged mud they called marsh butter (University of Copenhagen)

Jessica Smith, an assistant professor at the University of Dublin's School of Archaeology, who published a study on "swamp butter" in Nature in 2019, says that "within two or three years, the fat in fresh butter breaks down into a mass of fatty acids."

The era of freezing.

According to Fairmont Public, a 19th-century Massachusetts man named Frederick Tudor believed he could get rich by shipping ice to warmer places in the world, and after trying and failing several times he finally managed to convince people that there was an ice market.

He has already been able to ship ice all over the world, preserving the snow by isolating it with straw and sawdust and storing it in warehouses until it is time to use it.

People would cut ice from lakes with hand saws, and then they used horse-drawn machines to cut the ice, but it remained a difficult and dangerous business.

People in cities also used snow as a daily necessity, and eventually the ice obtained from nature was replaced by ice made in factories.

Food was kept in ice boxes, wooden or metal boxes with a compartment at the top, in which a mass of ice was placed, so cold air from above fell on the food underneath and cooled it.

The electric refrigerator was finally invented in the early twentieth century, and became famous by the 1940s.