about those meat pies lasting a year

[walkitout]

I knew that people preserved all kinds of stuff in crockery or whatever, filled with oil or fat: cheese, pickled anything, etc. Apparently, before the crockery was widely available, crusts were used for a similar purpose. So that boar pie (I've been able to find references to the book in Clarkson, but haven't found a transcription of the book online that I can get access to. Yet.) may well have been: boar meat turned into sausage, cooked, dried, covered with oil or butter and sealed into a pie.

Not exactly what _I_ was thinking of, but that's because I was headed down the smoked/jerk path. ;-) Obviously a real botulism risk. Other sources indicate that stuff preserved this way (whether in a crust, crockery or a tin) should be kept in a cool, dry, place. According to a book I found on Questia, other near-contemporary sources to the William Salmon book indicate that meat pies had a tendency to go off around midsummer, so that whole keeps for a year thing was optimistic.

Context is everything.

Here's the most annoying bit:

p 46 Clarkson: "Keeping a meat pie for a whole year without refrigeration is a terrifying thought today, but it was such a common practice that we have to assume that most of the time consumers survived the experience."

Actually, we don't. First of all, not all sources claim a year -- some very much the contrary. Second, "without refrigeration" is misleading. People were pretty emphatic about keeping this stuff in a cool, dry place. Third, most of these things wouldn't have been kept around for a year; they would have been consumed much earlier. Finally, there were a variety of other practices prevalent for decades during the European middle ages that killed more than half the participants. Weaning at birth, as practiced in Iceland and parts of Austria, springs to mind.

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I'm kind of scratching my head about "before the crockery was widely available." I mean, some of the oldest manmade objects are crockery, no? But I guess I can see someone who was stuck far from a market saying, "Well, if I make a pastry that's thick and solid enough, we don't even have to eat it, it can just do instead of one of Mag's pots ..."

How common was it for non-rich people to have cellars, which if deep enough would have been whatever cave temperature is? a fairly constant fifty-five degrees or something, I think. Not necessarily dry, though. By the way, I'm reading a book to Peter just now that involves discovering the Elizabethan cellars under a burned-down wing of an old farmhouse.

crockery and potting

[walkitout]

I was a little puzzled for a while as to why anyone would preserve in a cooked rye crust when I knew perfectly well that even not especially rich people at the time kept a crockery full of lard. Then I went, d'oh. If you're putting up the result of the fall harvest/slaughter season for eating over the course of a year, I'm not sure anyone was rich enough to have enough crockery for the purpose. But even if they were, if you wanted to extract the contents whole, a paste item that was plastic in the old sense of shapeable and a cheap enough to be acceptable as a single use container might make a lot of sense. Part of the idea with potting in paste was to seal up the crust to assist in keeping stuff out, along with filling with oil/fat, to prevent access to aerobic bacteria.

All of the cookbooks and recipes under discussion would have been owned by and aimed squarely at rich people; they _definitely_ had a variety of cold storage options, altho I only realized recently that those cold storage options would likely have included an ice-room, in addition to a springhouse and/or cellar. A springhouse, of course, would _not_ be dry (but if you could store in the spring, might stay really cold). A root cellar, by definition, has to be dry, but even at cave temperature might or might not be cold enough to keep potted meat for a year (I am insufficiently expert). A dry root cellar/cave where you were also storing ice? Definitely cold enough.

As for non-rich people, if they had housing, they could certainly put a shallow hole in the floor to extend the life of butter and eggs in midsummer from days to weeks, for sure -- R. has seen those before and is consistently annoyed when people don't understand what they were. I don't know how many people had full-on root cellars at cave temperature. Also, the centuries I'm poking at would have been part of the little ice age, so that stable temperature might have been a few degrees cooler than it would be now.

ETA: Oh, yeah. I haven't checked in detail, but the population had been growing in England/Europe up to and through the late 17th century (which is when the disputed potted meat in a pie crust is from) -- I think the population had completely recovered from the plague die-off earlier, and there was a lot of pressure on wood for fuel. I have no idea how this might or might not have interacted with the availability of crockery -- for that matter, kilns at that time might have already used coal. I also don't know just what the crockery would have tolerated. Potting in the recipe in question involves cooking, covering with oil [ETA: oops. Not oil. Liquified clarified butter.] while still hot and sealing in. Could you do that with the brick fireplaces common in kitchens at the time and have the crockery survive? There was a lot of technological innovation in crockery around this time period.