Preserving Meat

In a premodern context, preserving meat is important, time consuming, and can be delicious (Shepard 2006, Huang 2016). 

There are several basic ways to make animal flesh last:

Drying

Smoking 

Salting

Pickling

Potting

or some combination of these. 

Eventually, this section will involve subpages for all of these and their various combinations, but we haven't done those experiments yet, so stay tuned. 

What we have RIGHT NOW are some results of meat in whey vat experiments. 

"Wait, what?" 

Yep, you heard correctly, meat in whey :) As mentioned on the previous page, this is something still found in the Icelandic food traditions, specifically sausages and other offal held in very sour whey (Amilien 2012, Dungal and Sigurjónsson 1967). 

There are two ways to go here, the first is to cook the meat first, and then preserve it (as seen in the Icelandic tradition) or you can preserve the meat raw. (side note: we would bet that there is a kinda half-way here, which is to soak the meat in brine, then smoke it (as seen in a ham preparation), but we don't have any evidence for this YET). 

We started from the raw preserving side, though some of them are very short brines. There is an Icelandic cultural context for this, as they both preserve meat in whey, and use it as a...marinade? brine? flavor-enhancing soak? Some of our experiments are more successful than others! PLEASE be careful, use good food preparation practices, and be up-front with people eating the product if you've done something unsafe. I am underlining the BEST experiments below, follow THOSE recipes!  

Gersvinda’s meat vat experiments:

1. A raw pork roast, in half whey half water with salt. Left on the counter for over a week. Cooked the pork and ate it.

2. Rendered fat poured into a whey jar (went moldy, threw away)

3. The brined pork. 

Gersvinda took a large pork roast and cut it into three chunks. She put them into a sterile glass jar, and filled it with the standard brine (3 TBS salt per 1 L of water, or seawater that has been boiled). This first soak she left in the fridge for 3 days. Then she removed the meat from the brine, cleaned out the jar, put the meat back in, and filled it with home-made yogurt whey, garlic, and mustard. She roughly crushed the brown mustard seeds in a mortar, and knife-crushed the garlic. This went back in the fridge for another 3 days.

It came to the event in the jar, when we were ready to cook it, we got the grill hot, then put the meat onto the grill, turned it several times, and when it was done in the middle, ate it. Most of it rested a while because we were busy eating the first part.

Kada's meat vat experiments:

1. A chunk of raw pork, in standard fermenting brine with a bit of whey starter. Left in the fridge a LONG time. No visible deterioration of the meat, but it was too gross and she didn't eat it. YUCK.

2. The “quick bacon”:

Cut pork into cubes (1-1.5 inches). Make a whey brine of 1 TBS salt per L of whey (we usually don’t use this much, proportional to this, usually about a cup or two of whey). I also added some liquid smoke, just smoking the meat would be easy, but it was HOT and we were in a hurry. Put allllll that in a ziplock and put it in the fridge for a few days. Cook on the grill. This stuff, served with boiled grains and gravy, was a HUGE hit. 

The full recipe for that dish is here: Grain and gravy

Amilien, V. (2012). Nordic food culture–A historical perspective. Interview with Henry Notaker, Norwegian culinary expert. Anthropology of food, (S7).

Dungal, N., & Sigurjónsson, J. (1967). Gastric cancer and diet. A pilot study on dietary habits in two districts differing markedly in respect of mortality from gastric cancer. British journal of cancer, 21(2), 270.

HUANG, Y. (2016). Fermented Food and Ancient Civilization. DEStech Transactions on Social Science, Education and Human Science, (icss).

Shephard, S. (2006). Pickled, potted, and canned: How the art and science of food preserving changed the world. Simon and Schuster.

Wicklund, T. (2016). Utilization of Different Raw Materials from Sheep and Lamb in Norway. In Traditional Foods (pp. 265-270). Springer, Boston, MA.

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep07104