walkitout | crockery and potting (Reply)

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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.