Keeping the Essential Foods going

[Mortblanc]

I am sure there are different processes for different species fish, which I have no knowledge of. I know nothing of "oily fish" which are smoked and dried differently than what I have done.

The traditional method of drying, which I have used, was extremely simple. Split the fish from head to tail leaving the two sections connected at the tail. Hang the fish on the drying rack, dry in the sun with smoke wafting around the fish for minimum of 48 hours, or "fire smoke/cold smoke" in a closed shed where the temp is brought up to 160f for 48 hours. For drying and smoking no salt was required but that was a process of both drying and smoking, not one or the other.

I have also processed dried fish in the common house hold dehydrator with success.

Brining is far easier to accomplish and insures preservation beyond doubt. The recipe is about the same for any product.

First, you fill a barrel 1/4 full of water.

Second you fill another big pot with water and put in on to boil. Add salt to the boiling water until no more will dissolve. Move that to the big barrel of water. Continue doing this until the solution in the barrel will float a raw egg. Allow the brine water to cool.

Third, add fish, or beef, or pork, preferably not all at once. Separate barrels are usually desired.

Alternately, one can pour a layer of dry salt in the barrel, then a layer of meat. Rub salt thoroughly into the surface of the meat beforehand. No two pieces of meat should touch each other directly. Add another thick layer of salt and more meat. Continue the layering until the barrel is full or you run out of meat.

The British Navy lived on this salt beef or salt pork for several hundred years before refrigeration became standard on sailing vessels.

We used to kill as many as 25 hogs at a time when I was younger. By younger I mean in my 20s and 30s, not childhood. We waited for a crisp fall day and worked the slaughter, butchered the meat and laid it out to cool in the crisp air overnight. That night we cleaned intestines for sausage casings, ground scrap meat and fat, mixed pepper and spices into the ground mix and filled sausage casings. It was usually an all night job but we had to do it that way because we had no means of refrigerating up to 3 tons of meat!

Next morning we had a huge breakfast of fresh tinderloin, eggs, hash browns, hominy grits and biscuits (you would refer to them as scones). After breakfast we salted the meat and placed it in the "salt box" just like I described in the above reference to the barrel. When all the meat was covered with a good layer of salt we got to take a nap, finally.

After the nap you started rendering the lard, which was just as important as the meat.

Now this was not a project for an individual, or a couple. (well maybe a couple could do one hog if they were both big and burley) It often took a half dozen people just for manhandling the hogs around before they were blocked out. They had to be killed, then scalded to remove the hair, then the hair scraped off. Then they were hoisted and the innards removed and the offal searched for organ meats while two more men split the carcass with axes and saws. Just the killing and butchering would be an all day job for a half dozen grown men.

All this had to be done n a 24 hour period on a cool day to insure the meat did not spoil. A bad weather prediction, with a freezing night, a warm night, or even a brief rain, would mean all the meat was suspect. Environmental conditions had to be perfect. There was no "do over".

On the American family farm the ratio was usually predicted as one pig per person per year. Salt for preservation was figured at 20 pounds salt per pig.

10 pigs=200 pounds of salt needed. You are not going to get by with just that extra box in the pantry.

And yes, I have a 100 pound bag of salt in my preps. I also live within 10 miles of one of the most famous salt springs in eastern North America, where rendering salt was a business before Europeans ever set foot in the new world. Even the stone age savages used salt to preserve their foods.

All of this is knowledge which we have mostly lost in the past two generations.

Always remember, brining works almost all the time, salting, smoking and drying, or a combination of thiose operations, work only under the right conditions.

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As an after thought I must add that if one is drying or "jerking" it should be done only with meat from the Ruminant family; cattle, bison, deer, moose, elk, goat.

Never attempt to make jerky from pork, mutton or any of the animals with "soft fat" after rendering. The fat in the meat will go rancid.

One should also refrain from attempting to make jerky from "small game". Too many parasites which the drying process will not eliminate.