[Sca-cooks] Smoked Meats in Northern Europe

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius adamantius.magister at verizon.net
Mon Oct 9 15:49:16 PDT 2006


On Oct 9, 2006, at 2:08 PM, David Friedman wrote:

>> Or, to put it another way, how comfortable would you be having the
>> hero of the medieval historical novel you're writing pack smoked meat
>> into his saddle bags for a journey, all other things being equal?
>
> Since you asked:
> --
> "Back home, they smoke meat for days, weeks sometime."
> "Keep it for months, too. This'll be gone in a few days. Then beans
> if we can cook them, oat cakes, dried stuff while it lasts."
> ---
>  From my novel _Harald_, recently published by Baen.
>
> Not quite a historical novel, but close.
>
> Was I wrong? Le Menagier has that line about smoking sausage in a
> chimney where a fire is kept all of the year.

I don't think you're wrong. As I say, we do know meat was smoked as  
part of the available battery of preservation methods. I was just  
wondering if it was as common in the scheme of things as, say, salt  
pork or stockfish, if anyone had any hard data to support such a  
theory, or if it was one of those assumptions we sometimes make  
because it's too blinkin' cool, conceptually, not to have been a  
widespread practice.

Adamantius



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