When was food preservation invented

The Chinese used vinegar brines for pickling proteins, including eggs, rabbit, venison, and goat. Many cultures in North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East were rolling and pickling grape leaves thousands of years before they became a Greek staple.

Preserving food in honey or the condensed liquid from sugar cane was known to the earliest cultures. Sugar draws water from microbes in a process known as plasmolysis, which dehydrates and ultimately kills them.

Sugaring was especially a favorite method of preserving fruits, as we recognize today in our own jams and jellies lining the supermarket shelves. The ancient Greeks and Romans mastered the art of using heated sugar and fruit pectin as an emulsifier. As we will see in Part 2, with the rise of the scientific and industrial revolutions, all kinds of modern technologies vastly improved food safety, from pasteurization to probe thermometers.

Yet the traditional methods live on in kitchens everywhere, primarily because they have preserved not only our health, but also our cultures. From smoking and drying to salting and sugaring, these techniques have become indelibly tied to particular culinary tastes, religious meanings, and ethnic identities. Food preservation and cultural preservation go hand in hand.

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See our story. The same goes for late-season green tomatoes. Chowchow is another way to preserve the last vegetables of the harvest.

Despite the differences in climates, many of the food preservation techniques from Europe, Africa, and other parts of the world eventually found a home here, often with new twists. Some of the sweet-and-sour flavors in chowchow, piccalilli, chutneys and spiced fruits find their roots in Malaysia, but were introduced to the South by West Africans, in whose culture drying and salting fish were also common.

Other types of pickling traditions came from Germany. And biscuits and gravy? Those came from the method of preserving ground meat cooked into patties, stored in crocks and layered with rendered lard. Additional lard provided the fat for biscuits. After the Civil War, poverty hit everyone in the South, and food preservation became more important.

Souse, or head cheese, is a way to preserve all the extra bits of a pig. Jams from native, wild-growing fruits such as scuppernong grapes were produced after foraging. The World Wars also changed things. During the Great Depression, the Ball Brothers Company, which made jars for canning, developed a canning unit. The federal government, through the Works Progress Administration a program of the New Deal used the canning unit to create canning centers around the country, helping families manage the cost and work of canning food.

More canning centers opened during World War II, until over 3, centers were open around the country. Most of these centers were in the South and not only helped people eat but also gave people, especially women, jobs.

The majority of them closed after the war, except some that received continued support from local governments and schools. This necessity, along with the unique flavors, ingredients, and seasonal abundance, is what made canning and preserving unique in the South.

Now, our modern back-to-basics sensibility, according to experts like Sorensen, has people reconnecting with millennia-old preservation techniques and is also leading to new creations. Strips of pumpkin were dried and woven into mats for storage.

The dried pumpkin would be used to flavor soups and other dishes. Tribes such as the Kiowa and the Comanche often traded buffalo meat to the Pawnees and Wichitas for pumpkin mats.

Most of the other forms of food preservation used prior to canning and refrigeration employed naturally produced chemicals to retard the growth of organisms that produce spoilage.

The smoking of meat and fish, for example, leaves compounds in the meat the destroy microorganism. Usually meat is soaked in brine or salted for a short time before smoking. The meat is then usually rinsed with warm water and allowed to drain before it is placed in the smokehouse.

Many containers are used for smoking meat. A sealed box or barrel may be used, but at one time many farms had a proper smokehouse for the large-scale preservation of meat. Generally such a building has a series of hooks for hanging the food, a fire box to provide the smoke, and small holes to create enough ventilation to draw smoke from the fire.

In most cases the fire box is connected to the smokehouse with a small tunnel to reduce the amount of heat to which the food is subjected. This is to prevent the meat from being partly cooked. The house is often heated in the winter because smoke will not penetrate meat if it is frozen. Although chips from hardwoods such as hickory are often favored, bark and corn cobs are frequently used. Meat may be smoked for up to three weeks before it is properly done.

In the Croatian American community of Strawberry Hill in Kansas City, Kansas, families have traditionally made kobasica , a spicy sausage. Meat also may be preserved by curing it in salt.

This treatment is especially good for preserving fish. This can be done either by rubbing dry salt into the meat or by soaking it in brine. Salt or brine may be used to preserve vegetables as well. This method was once very common in the United States, but declined with the onset of the 20 century.

In fermentation the growth of specific microorganisms is encouraged. These beneficial microorganism in turn produce chemicals that inhibit the growth of those causing spoilage. Fermentation depends on the production of alcohol in the case of wine, acetic acid in the case of vinegar, or lactic acid in the case of sauerkraut to destroy or slow the growth of microorganisms. Fermentation of the kind used to make sauerkraut depends upon the properties of salt as well as the fermentation process.

The salt, however, does not prevent the growth of bacteria that cause the production of lactic acid. It is this lactic acid that prevents the growth of undesirable bacteria in the long term. Sugar also has strong antiseptic qualities. Any substance that is composed of a minimum of 65 percent sugar is resistant to spoiling. For this reason fruit rarely needs to be fully dried to be preserved. Rather, it must only be dried to the point that 65 percent of its weight is composed of sugar.

Fruit may be preserved in sugar in its whole state, as in candied fruit, or packed in a syrup, as in marmalades and preserves. In either case the fruit is first placed in a diluted sugar syrup to allow the sugar to fully penetrate the fruit. The concentration of sugar in the syrup is then increased until the fruit is fully saturated. Some molds will digest sugar, and for this reason a paraffin cap is often poured over jars of jelly or preserves. The paraffin prevents the growth of these molds by depriving them of air.

The ancient methods of food preservation remained unchallenged until the introduction of canning in the 18th century. The method was developed between and by Nicolas Appert of France.