What about meat? Lex Anteinternet: Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. Part 3. A Hundred Years Ago.

Butcher Shop, circa 1920.

We recently started looking at the availability of various type of common foods here, in a post on vegetables and how seasonal they were:

Lex Anteinternet: Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Year...: The last garden I put in, 2017. Another interesting entry on A Hundred Years Ago. The Last Fresh Vegetable Month I've touched ...

After that, we went on to address the situation concerning fruits, which is a bit different when we looked at it:

Lex Anteinternet: What about Fruit? Foods, Seasons, and our Memorie...: Central Pacific Fast Fruit Train, 1886. I just posted this item on vegetables and how seasonal they were. Lex Anteinternet: Foods, ...

But something we haven't touched on is meat.

Most people most places are meat eaters as humans are predators.  Indeed, as the ultimate Apex Predator, we observe the code of predators by and large.  For one thing, while humans in their natural state, and if not confused by some modern puritanical substitution meat fad, are meat eaters, but we don't normally eat other predators  There's a natural reason for that actually, but if we get into it, we'll get into it some other time.

Anyhow, humans are carnivores and meat is a normal part of the human diet.  In the A Hundred Years Ago thread that spawned this line of threads, there was a lot of speculation on whether or not people ate lighter, and more fresh vegetables as part of that, during the summer, and heavier meat dishes during the winter.

I don't know the answer to that, other than I do know that by and large fresh vegetables were only available seasonally.  Fruit, as we've seen, has somewhat of a different story.  But meat, well that's another matter yet.

We'll reinsert the caveat here that we're really talking about the era just about 100 years ago, slopping over on both sides of that mark substantially.  If we go back even further, say 200 years, or 300 years, the story naturally changes.  But as part of any of that story, once again, we have to keep in mind that we're discussing the pre refrigerator era.

That's not all that long ago, but it's a big deal.  Indeed, it taps right into a major thread here that was posted some time ago regarding women in the workplace, which we'll note again here:

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two

Prior to refrigerators a member of the household, and if it was a married household it was use the female head of the household, usually purchased meat on a nearly daily basis. For that matter, she usually also purchased other perishables, with some exceptions, also on a nearly daily basis. Single men tended to live at home, or boarding houses, and rarely cooked for themselves. Living on your own was simply a lot harder in every sense.  The refrigerator is part of that story.

What people had were ice boxes, which kept stuff cool, not frozen, and which only kept things cool so long and needed fresh ice on a continual basis.  Ice boxes were still pretty common into the 1940s and even the 1950s, for reasons I explain elsewhere, including the thread noted above, and as I've also noted above my father tended to refer to the refrigerator as "the ice box" as many people his age did, as that's what their families had when they were young.

Anyhow, ice boxes were often quite small and only held so much.  And you kept things in them only so long.  As resources were also thinner, there was much less waste than there is now.  I.e., you didn't stick stuff an ice box and forget about it for weeks.

Also worth remembering, the number of American men who had jobs involving physical labor was over 70%, if we include agriculture, manufacturing and mining.  The number of people who had office jobs was much smaller.  Transportation was much poorer as well, which plays into this.  As noted in the essay The Cow's Revenge, this all meant that the average American simply expended a lot more calories in a day than they do now.  There was no need, in that era, for a Fit Bit.

Given this, the average person had a much higher caloric requirement than they do today.  In fact, the nature of living at the time put them in what may be the all time high caloric requirement era.  On average, aboriginal people spend much less time "at work" than we do today.  A century ago this would have not only still been true, but to add to that most people simply expended a lot more calories in a day than they do now.

How this plays in is perhaps at this point best illustrated by a conversation I was once party to with an elderly man in his 90s, in the 1990s.  He'd grown up on a Midwestern farm and noted how breakfasts at the the time always featured a lot of sausage at his home. Sausage and eggs.  He related "we needed those calories to get through the day".

He was right.  And it certainly hadn't made him overweight.  In his 90s he was a think as a pipe rail.  You get the point.

So, what this means is that I doubt that meat consumption was a lot lower for most people during the summer months.

Indeed, in my own experience sort of this area, as a soldier and a stockman, I've noticed no difference at all in this regard among people doing heavy labor.  When working cattle in the summer, when I used to get to do more of that, such as trailing them, I always found breakfast to be uniformly "hearty", as in the pancakes, bacon and eggs type of breakfast.  And there was normally a break for lunch, which if on trail is sandwiches, sort of a light lunch, but if doing something heavier such as branding is a full meal.  And the evening meal arrives as well, which is also heart if doing something like trailing, or perhaps light if not.  Be that as it may, three "squares per day", all of them featuring meat, are the agricultural norm in my region.

Soldiering it was the same way, but more so.  If in truck distance of a cook section, it was three full meals a day.  Only if out in the field and separated from the cook section was it different.

I point this out as these are examples of jobs involving physical labor and, therefore, by extension one in which the people occupying them expend more calories that others.  In earlier times, this described a lot of people.  Indeed, if you hang around ranches very much, you'll notice a fair number of men who are outright skinny and very rarely will you meet a working stockman who is fat.

The point of this is that I suspect meat was on the table year around and frankly in larger quantities than it is today.  Bacon and eggs didn't become American breakfast fare back in the day by accident.

"Spring pulpwood drive on the Brown Company timber holdings in Maine. Woodsmen start the day with breakfast at 6:00. Typical menu includes: hot cakes, syrup, baked beans, scrambled eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, biscuits, molasses cookies, gingerbread, pie, coffee, bread and butter"

Okay, so people were eating a fair amount of meat all year around.

And we know that refrigeration didn't exist.

So . . . ?

Customers at a meat counter in Washington D. C., 1944.

Well one thing is that people simply bought meat year around and they didn't freeze it. We've dealt with that in several other threads so we won't go into it here again other than to say that a trip to the butcher shop was a routine, even nearly daily, event for a lot of people.

Of course, an ice box will keep meat fresh for awhile, but not like freezing it will.

But other solutions existed as well.

Canning

Indeed, we've already dealt with one of them, in the context of vegetables. Canning.

I mentioned canning when I talked about preserving vegetables.  Just as vegetables can be preserved by canning them or freezing them (the latter of which was not done at that time) so can meat (which also wasn't kept frozen at home a century ago, for the most part. . .(but there is an exception).

Home canned, corned beef.

Canning, however, can be done and as noted I'm familiar with a single example of a family doing that, although the thought gives me the willies personally.  Commercially, however, it was very common a century ago and it had been a well established process for some decades. So canned beef and fish already existed and were well known. As we have already demonstrated here, even canned whale was available.

Family eating home canned, corned beef, turnip greens, potatoes, biscuits, cornbread, peaches and cake in Coffee County Alabama, March 1939.

Curing

Curing meat was also common, and it still is, although the necessity of doing this has greatly diminished.

Curing is also called salting or corning. If properly done it can preserve meat for a really long time.  It operates by the salt removing moisture from the meat, and therefore it denies moisture to bacteriological agents.

It also changes the flavor of the meat massively, which is largely why it is still done today.

Examples of cured meats are corned beef, pastrami (which is nearly the same thing), bacon and ham.  If you think about it, all of these forms of cured meat have a red color, which is due to the curing. They also all have a distinctly different taste from the same meat that isn't cured.

Curing was hugely common prior to refrigeration.  And it was also substantially different, as a rule, than it is now.  

Unless a person gets an extremely traditional cured meat, which most people never well, cured meats today are cured just to achieve taste and texture.  Prior to really good refrigeration, however, they were cured for preservation.  As curing is the use of salt, the salt on cured meats was usually still there when purchased and had to be driven off.

As most people boiled meat routinely prior to modern stoves, rather than cook it in some other fashion, this usually didn't present a problem.  Almost nobody would boil cuts of meat that people once did. For example, hardly anyone boils a ham, or boils a corned beef.  But if you had a traditional one, you might.  Cooks at the time boiled them in large pots of water and kept draining it, to drain off the salt.  Indeed, they might have cut the outer layer of the meat off to cut off the salt. Even when done, however, it would still have been extremely salty.

Bacon is of course the most common cured meat people eat today and likely was then for Americans.  Bacon speaks for itself, and hasn't changed much over the years.

Making sausages, 1893. Note that the laborers are children and teenagers.

For a lot of people in Europe, the most common cured meat in the time frame we're speaking of would have been one of the many variants of sausages that exist.  We don't even think of sausage in the context of meat preservation today, but that's exactly how sausages came about.

Sausage also make use of a lot of poorer cuts of meat, so it's also one of those poverty foods that people still eat as they like the taste.  The gist of sausage is that whatever meat and fat its made out of is salted and then often spiced to make whatever it is last a long time in a palatable fashion.

This takes us into the realm of culture as various cultures use various salted meats in various ways, and indeed, they even duplicate the same results of other cultures simply by what they were doing.  Hence corned beef and pastrami are two meats that are in fact pretty much the same thing.

In the United States bacon took on a cultural role that exceeds that of other nations. The U.S. Army in the second half of the 19th Century was huge on bacon as it kept and was relatively easy to transport.  The Army wasn't too shy about keeping back around for years, which nobody would do now.  Bacon was also a frontier staple for the same reasons noted above.

Americans were also big on ham, where as the British used a lot of ham but were huge on corned beef. We think of corned beef as an Irish thing, but it's really more of an English thing. Bacon was also an Irish thing.  On St. Patrick's Day the Irish didn't, even fairly recently, have corned beef and cabbage, they had cabbage and bacon.

American soldiers advanced on the frontier on a ration of bacon and beans to a surprising extent. The British army, however, expanded a global empire on a diet of corned (bully) beef.  Both keep in cans.

Central Europeans, to include the Germans in this example, relied on sausage.

Before we leave the topic of salting, we should note that salted fish was not uncommon either.  Salted cod, for example, was a very common salted food in areas that relied on fish for food.

A condemned load of salt fish, 1910.  Ick.

And we should note that, if you go back far enough, the salting aspect of all of this was emphasized by packing. Salted meats were packed in barrels of salt.  So while today you might go to the grocery store and buy a nice ham for the taste, or a corned beef, in earlier eras, particularly much earlier eras, you'd find such foods persevered in barrels of salt.

All of which made prior eras, well, salty.

We should note there that there's an obvious difference between meat that's salted and stored in barrels of salt as opposed to meat that's cured and not.  People have  never, in so far as I know, stored sausages in barrels of salt. So for sausage, which also exists in order to make use of poor cuts of meat, the curing would retard spoilage but not go as far as curing a ham would, for instance.  Bacon, is somewhat in between.

Which is not to say that even the wetter, if you will, means of preservation by salting don't have that effect.  Bacon, which was packed differently at the time, can last a very long time if very salty and packed with salt, in spite of it being very fatty.  There are accounts, for instance, of American soldiers in the early 1870s eating bacon that had been purchased by the Army during the Civil War.  Or, for a somewhat less disgusting example, I once heard one of the old time bluesman give advice on a public radio interview which consisted of always tour with salami,as odd as that may seem, as its cheap and keeps.  He noted how he had picked that up farming as a kid in Mississippi where he'd hang a salami in a tree in the morning while plowing a field, and it would keep all day in spite of the heat.  That's not something I'd try, but it was something he was acclimated to and when touring he kept salami on the bus so he could go from town to town without having to pay for expensive restaurant meals.

On that, it's worth noting that German troops in World War One marched with a fair amount of sausage and were routinely surprised, if they surrendered to Americans, that Americans did not.  Indeed, during the Second World War, before German rations got really tight, German POWs would complain that their rights as prisoners were being violated by being fed second rate rations, not realizing that they were receiving American field rations.

Smoking

Farm smokehouse, 1930s West Virginia.

And then there's also smoking.

Smoking meats is also something that's still done, but is principally done today for the flavor. The process itself is so old that it goes back to the paleolithic era.  Any meat can be smoked. The drying caused by the exposure to the heated fire operates to preserve the meat and therefore this process is related to other types of meat drying, which we'll get to in a moment.  Additionally, however, chemicals present in wood smoke also have a preservative effect.

Smoking operates the same way salting does, but in a simpler fashion.  The heat and smoke drives off moisture.  And that's why its the oldest form of meat preservation, or almost the oldest.

Smoking has changed little in terms of its substantial nature, even if the technical means of achieving it have changed a great deal.  Smoke meats of all kind have been round for a long long time, and still are.

Not too surprisingly, smoking is a method that has been, and still is, used in combination with other methods.  Originally this was a belt and suspenders approach to meat preservation, but today its' for flavor.  Smoked hams and bacon are common examples.

Drying

Flathead Indians drying meat, or "jerking" it, i.e., making jerky, circa 1900.

Curing and smoking are means of drying, but ancient peoples often dried meat by cutting it into thin strips and drying it in the sun.  This is the origin of "jerky", which we associate with American Indians, but people all around the world have done this with meat and fish both.

Very few people today have eaten real jerky, i.e. jerky preserved the original way.  But at least on the American frontier European Americans adopted the Indian practice to an extent.  Not quite realized today, however, is that Indians often approached jerky much like European Americans approached cured  meats and reconstituted it, often with fat.

Pickling (and brining)

Pickling is a process that's related to brining, which I should cover here briefly.  Pickling involves a brine, but brining doesn't necessarily involve pickling.

Brining is the process of soaking meat in a liquid salt solution. That's the brine.  Pickling goes one step further and uses vinegar as well.  Both solutions, and this is a liquid means of meat preservation, but one just relies up on salt alone.  Both methods still exist today, although once again they exist mostly because people like the taste and qualities of things that are brined or pickled, not because people are actually preserving something in that fashion.

By and large, we don't think of pickling meat and tend to think of pickled pigs feet of being about the only example of this oddity. But meat can be pickled and no doubt at one time was in greater amounts than today.

In the United States pickling meat is a southern thing for some reason.  Pickled pork remains a Louisianan dish.  And of course some people eat pickled pigs feet, for reasons which escape me.

The Table

So there you have it, or at least a snipped of it.  People in prior eras were likely eating just as much meat every day as people do now.  Indeed, because of current fads and misconceptions, they likely ate more.  They also burned off more calories in a day. 

A lot of that meat had come just fresh from the butcher shop as well. . . but not all of it, and not solely for reasons of taste.