[Sca-cooks] Smoking

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach David Friedman:
>Have you, or anyone here, experimented with smoking as a method of 
>preservation? Nowadays it seems to be mostly just for flavor--and 
>you specified putting your sausages in the freezer. It would be very 
>nice if we could use it as one more way of solving the problem of 
>having food at Pennsic without a cooler.

This is a conjectural response, but I'm sure it would work if done 
right. The typical one-two-three punch often dealt to spoilage when 
curing and smoking foods is that salt (and sometimes sugar) retards 
certain bacteria growth, a reduced moisture level (drying is 
frequently a byproduct of smoking, or smokeless drying can be used 
independently, as with prosciutto and hard salamis) also retards 
bacteria and mold growth, while both pepper and the various tars and 
creosote associated with smoking retard insect infestation (well, 
what did you expect when you hang your ham or sausage up in a cave or 
a dark, unsecure shed?).

So, that said, I've never cured, smoked and dried a food for long 
preservation without expecting to use refrigeration, but the 
technology is, and has been for centuries, out there. The process for 
making, say, Smithfield Ham, which is salted, treated with pepper 
(I'm pretty sure), and cold-smoked/dried until it has lost at least 
30% of its weight in water mass, is pretty much designed to keep a 
meat product free of bacteria, molds, and maggots, and the process 
pretty clearly works. On the other hand, I don't think even that 
process was tailor-made for working in the kind of temperatures 
commonly found at Pennsic. I think rancidity of fats might become an 
issue, but probably some of the really skinny dried sausages, such as 
Polska kabanosy (a specific kielbasa variant which is thin and 
generally eaten fairly dry, and looking a little like a Slim Jim, and 
a.k.a. a TV Kielabasa), or some of the North African merguez 
variants, which are both lean and well-dried in finished form, might 
work well. Maybe some kind of bastourma (a cured beef product which 
appears to be the Tuirkish ancestor of pastrami) would work for 
Pennsic conditions.  I know I've brought kabanosy to events like the 
Southern Region War Camp in Eisental -- not quite as warm as Pennsic, 
nor as high up, but not that far from it -- and kept them for up to 
48 hours without refrigeration and no ill effects after eating them. 
I'm sure they would keep for longer, but for how much longer, I don't 
know.

Overall, I think a region's conditions cause the predominant 
preservation method to evolve in a certain way. Northern Europe, 
whose ambient air temperatures rarely get much higher than the 80's 
Fahrenheit, also has/had enough lumber or other ignitable plant 
matter (including peat, turf, straw, etc.) to make smoking a natural 
product of both need and expedience. Desert climates which might lack 
the kinds of fuels used in smoking might also lack some of the insect 
life that makes such smoking necessary. Yes, I know there are flies 
and maggots in the desert, but still.

Adamantius
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