[Sca-cooks] period smoke houses?

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Olwen the Odd:
>>To some extent, these snippets kind of demonstrate my point, which 
>>is that the concept of building a smokehouse specifically for the 
>>preservation of meat might have been an unknown, or at least an 
>>unusual, concept, for many Europeans in period. Note that the 
>>tongue recipes don't even mention the word "smoke" (although the 
>>meat acquiring some degree of smoke flavoring seems pretty likely 
>>in the process). But I still think that smoking, in a smokehouse, 
>>is the result of a particular combination of climate, the need to 
>>process a relatively large amount of meat, and insect population, 
>>and that not every period European culture shows that combination.
>>
>>Adamantius
>
>Then how do you account for the viking smokehouses?
>Olwen

High humidity, a plentiful fuel supply (if not lumber; remember the 
Vikings largely deforested Ireland to build ships); possibly a 
particular type of insect problem some other parts of Europe didn't 
exactly share. And it's still possible that the Viking smokehouses 
were in fact intended for drying, like an oasthouse used for malt or 
hop drying, and the smoke factor may have been incidental, where, for 
example, the smoke in the smokehouses in, say, Smithfield, clearly is 
an effect deliberately tried for.

But even so, I never said that smoking wasn't done, I just said it 
may not have been as universal as someone researching food 
preservation in a refrigeration-less period Europe might be led to 
assume. There are lots of preservation methods these people had the 
technology to do, but that doesn't necessarily mean they did them.

Even something so seemingly obvious as some of the salting techniques 
we take for granted now were apparently developed in period, and the 
imposition of fish days and Lenten observances might have been very 
different without them; one might say that Basquaise fishermen, and 
later, the Hanseatic League, made Lent possible for the rest of 
Europe, but we just can't assume that the techniques they used were 
applied universally. Not everyone had the need or the means.

Adamantius