[Sca-cooks] period smoke houses?

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Stefan li Rous:
>What do we know about period smoke houses? Do we have any still 
>existing ones? Or diagrams, pictures or illuminations? Do we have 
>any written information on them that might, for instance, tell us 
>which woods they used or preferred to use?
>
>I know we have records from the 19th and 18th centuries. We have a 
>re-created farm community here called Pioneer Farms, which has one. 
>Unfortunately, a lot of their funding comes from the city and is 
>likely to be lost this year and they will have to shut down. :-( 
>Several of our SCA folks volunteer/work there teaching things like 
>spinning. No, our economy is not in recession. So the (our?) 
>government says.

Hey! Don't talk about Fearless Leader that way! Britney Spears said not to!!!

At the risk of giving what appears to be a maddeningly frustrating 
non-answer, I'll point out that much of the culture, overall, of the 
earliest settlements of the US in places like Virginia, has remained 
largely unchanged (at least, certain aspects of it) from 17th-century 
England. I suspect some of the smokehouse designs seen in The Foxfire 
Books are pretty similar to designs used in period.

On the other hand, to add to the mix, it also seems likely that there 
might have been fewer dedicated smokehouses in period Europe than 
there were in early American settlements, or even today, both because 
salting was so necessary a preserving process that many foods were 
salted and left at that. These people were probably not smoking their 
foods for flavor, generally, and I doubt the particular climate and 
insect population (the creosote layer acquired by smoked meats is an 
insect repellant) justified using fuel for such a frivolous purpose. 
Surely the period recipe corpus, in general, refers frequently to 
salted and, less frequently, pickled, meats, and not often, if at 
all, to smoked foods. In fact, if you look at recipes which go into 
detail on ways to keep the smoke off a given food, it suggests that 
at least some period cultures might have viewed smoky meats as 
something to be avoided.

But we know they did it: there are both Roman and 17th-century 
recipes that call for hanging foods up to smoke in the kitchen fire 
or chimney. It may be that the smoke is incidental, and that the 
warm, dry, updraft is the aspect of the process these cooks were 
going for.

I think, for what you're looking for, we would need a period book on 
pig farming for a really detailed description.

Adamantius