[Sca-cooks] Preserved Foods

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach lilinah at earthlink.net:
>OK, as if i'm not doing enough already, i am now the Deputy Silver 
>Spoon. The Silver Spoon is the cooking competition in the 
>Principality of the Mists (in the Kingdom of the West) held at our 
>four main events each year.
>
>The Minister and i have come up with the competitions for the coming year.
>
>One - in the fall - will be for Preserved Foods.
>
>I'm thinking of mustards, compost, pickles, jams, and such.
>
>I am not looking for specific recipes or sources, although those are 
>nice, but i would like to know what other sorts of preserved foods 
>are period. I'm sure the above only scratches the surface...

Hmmm. A much broader spectrum of fruit preserves than just what we'd 
call "jams", ranging from spreadables like jam to fruit butters and 
"cheeses" you can slice, and various pastilles, sort of in between a 
lozenge and  a cookie, mostly made from fruit and sugar and/or honey, 
some with gums such as tragacanth or benzoin, or isinglass added. And 
then there are the pickled fruits which people might not consider 
when they think of pickles.

All the pickles which aren't cucumbers ;-).

All those which _are_ ;-)

Preserved meats: an assortment of ham, bacon, and sausage entities. 
Puddings (i.e. black, white, haggis, etc.) being on the fringe of 
preserved.

17th-century sources (will you allow for those?) begin to show 
[written and/or easily documentable] understanding of "potting" 
technology, or air exclusion, such as in confit of goose, but we'd 
call them...  pies. Specifically, the ones which have their juices 
poured out and replaced with butter, as seen in sources like Markham, 
and, perhaps, Hugh Plat.

And then, there are jellies, which also involve air exclusion as a 
form of preservation, at least when made from meat or fish. These are 
much earlier than the pies I mentioned above. The typical 
17th-century English brawn would be a combination cured and jellied 
meat, frequently.

Powdered or corned meats, also mentioned in the late and 
grandfathered-in post-period sources.

Dried or salted fish. Pickled fish. Smoked fish seems to be referred 
to less often.

Buried foods: usually, but not always, fish, such as gravlax and 
haakarl (or whatever that stuff is called).

Cheeses of virtually all kinds.

Beer, wine, and mead.

That's just off the top of my head, and assuming you're talking about 
Europe. For all I know sushi, in the form of pickled fish packed in 
rice for transport, is period. I forget...

HTH.

Adamantius