History How is food storage different then from now?

Old Hickory

Sergeant Major
Joined
May 4, 2010
Location
Enders, Pa.
Seems kind of obvious at first glance, but can we do some digging? Eggs need refrigeration, right? Maybe not, seems as though we may have been led to believe they do? I read most of the world doesn't refrigerate eggs. What else? I remember way back when we had this tiny, (by today's standards) refrigerator with a tiny freezer in the upper compartment. Loads of home canned meats, fruits, and vegetables in the cellar along with salted/smoked meats, usually deer taken for crop damage.

Non ice refrigeration came along at the turn of the 19th-20th century, but ice remained common for several decades. "Ice boxes" served for many years prior. Can we safely replicate non cold food storage of the ACW and before?
 
Seems kind of obvious at first glance, but can we do some digging? Eggs need refrigeration, right? Maybe not, seems as though we may have been led to believe they do? I read most of the world doesn't refrigerate eggs. What else? I remember way back when we had this tiny, (by today's standards) refrigerator with a tiny freezer in the upper compartment. Loads of home canned meats, fruits, and vegetables in the cellar along with salted/smoked meats, usually deer taken for crop damage.

Non ice refrigeration came along at the turn of the 19th-20th century, but ice remained common for several decades. "Ice boxes" served for many years prior. Can we safely replicate non cold food storage of the ACW and before?
In most homes built before the 20th century, an important element was a cold room/root cellar which would hold food in storage at temperatures that delayed spoilage. Most homes built since the 1960s don't have such a storage area, unless it is purpose built. People also shopped differently than we do today. Daily trips to buy the necessities for the daily meals were the norm, so you wouldn't have to store food as we do today. If you bought a dozen eggs, it was likely because you would use those within a day or two, in which case they could probably be kept safely at room temp., especially when their was no central heating. Walls were thicker then too, so likely the house didn't get as hot in summer (my 150 year old stays cool except for the very hottest days). As well, food was probably a bit fresher then as you would be buying from fairly local producers.
If you want to replicate your food storage to the same as 1860, you will need to change your shopping habits significantly, or raise more of your own food. It can be done. Back-to-the-landers did and still do it, as do the Amish and some Mennonites.
 
Those are very good comments Northern Light. My grand father's house had a huge walk in pantry for most food storage and originally a tiny ice box for home made cheese, milk from a goat and the few meat pieces. They shopped several times a week, grew their own vegetables and raised their own chickens for meat and eggs.
 
Apparently a pig farmer gave them fresh bacon and ham sometimes. On my parent's property we have found many cow bones from an ancient farm that used to operate here. Incredibly in England, I shopped very little for a few necessities years ago in separate shops and stored eggs, cheese and butter in an aluminum lined "cooler" cabinet.
 
Interesting question. I'd add that, as NL pointed out, since most of what was eaten was locally grown people also tended to eat what was in season with things canned from the previous seasons. Salted and smoked meats - like what we term "country ham" - were also common. If one lived in a city near a port then one might be able to get exotic stuff from afar (like bananas or oysters) but most folk didn't get much that wasn't local until refrigeration not involving ice came along.

BTW, my mother - who had two Master's degrees - referred to the refrigerator as "the ice box" to her dying day (from growing up in rural Georgia in the early 1900s).
 
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The Pennsylvania farm my dad grew up on still has the antebellum spring house, a stone house which had an underground stream of icy fresh water coming up and then running down a stone channel in the middle of the building. Bottles of milk and other things which needed chilling were set in the stream or close to it.

Part of the problem is that bacteria were different. Modern strains of e. Coli which are deadly to humans evolved in the intestines of exclusively grain-fed cattle to endure much more acidic conditions. Those specific bacteria did not exist during the Civil War, and their ancestral strains would make you sick but not kill you. Likewise I can remember when eggs were safe to eat raw, and until not too long ago eggs were considered naturally sterile. Battery chicken raising caused salmonella to spread and now it exists in the ovaries of chickens so the eggs come out already containing disease.

But there are some things I don't understand. Cheese, for example - in olden days, cheese was stored for years without refrigeration, yet today even harder cheeses go bad very quickly outside the fridge. Cheddar gets soft and smelly very quickly. How did this work? Oysters were shipped in barrels - how the heck did that work without everyone dying?
 
Makes me wonder. Our cheese lasted a long time in England outside of the "frige", but it was wrapped in layers of wax. They still had milk delivery in bottles each day .......
 
I grew up in a house that had a larder off the kitchen called the cold room and my stepmother grew up getting food out of the root cellar which had snakes in it that freaked her out as a child. When I lived in England, eggs where both sold and stored unrefigrerated. Expensive cheese the same thing. Traditionally, oysters are only to be eaten in months that have "Rs" in them, so no oysters, May through August.
 
When I was growing up in the rural upper-midwest, we had an ice box. A weekly trip into town for a block of ice would keep things cool enough for a week. We sold eggs and cream and ate chickens. The cream was dangled in a cistern to keep cool. The eggs and root vegetables and apples were stored a cellar which was lined with shelves of jars filled with good things to eat.
 
Eggs will last a couple weeks on the counter if freshly gathered. Eggs from the grocery store are up to 3 months old - my husband used to be a usda inspector - so fresh eggs can last a while. The bigger issue was keeping vermin out of them.

I suspect that fermenting foods were a much bigger way of storing than I have suspected in my previous research. It's becoming a big deal, check out the fermenting group on Facebook. I refuse to ferment eggs myself, or meat, but am game to experiment with most veggies or fruit when my kids are coming to spend a week. Sauerkraut wasn't the only thing that was fermented...
 
I think canning at home during the ACW was about 20 years too early. Salting and drying was a big deal, and the local newspapers, even the most rural ones, talked about barrels of salted things and pickled things for sale. I had a stroke about 6 months ago and can't remember things like I did, so I think ill nose around tonight and see what's there again. My father-In - law was still working at cutting ice off the Ohio river before going to Korea for an ice plant in Parkersburg WV.
 
A lot more pickling was done before refrigeration became widespread. A lot of things were pickled we wouldn't even think of eating today.

Who here has eaten pickled ham, pickled tomotoes, watermelon, pumpkin etc.

Many things were also made into jams and preserves as well.

Add quick pickles & sauerkraut or even kimchee which makes a lot of people Kringe but would not have been all that odd of a concept at the time.
 
I remember my Granny's root cellar. She kept lots of canned things down in it. I was afraid to go in it. It had spiders and bugs.

She raised chickens and had fresh eggs everyday. They also had the old ice box and got the big piece of ice about once a week to put in it.
 
Makes me wonder. Our cheese lasted a long time in England outside of the "frige", but it was wrapped in layers of wax. They still had milk delivery in bottles each day .......
most cheese was in fact waxed for storage, in fact we use some cheese at work that is waxed. Many things we refrigerate don't actually need it. Most produce doesn't need to be in the cooler neither does bread which a lot of people store there as well. There also wasn't as much to refrigerate I don't believe. If you are making everything from scratch a lot of what you have would have just been pantry items.
 
most cheese was in fact waxed for storage, in fact we use some cheese at work that is waxed.
I'm curious about wax-covered cheese in the Civil War era. I've not found evidence of it; if it was done, it doesn't seem common. It's a good way to virtually eliminate the rind and therefore make more of each wheel of cheese edible, but I'm guessing it was more modern, unless you have better information. Period cheese seems to have been aged with a naturally forming protective rind, though there were still suggestions in household books for wrapping it with brown paper to keep out skippers, or after it's cut, coating the faces with butter to keep it from drying out, and things like that.
 
During the Great Depression my grandfather was frequently out of work. He and some other men gleaned local farmer's fields and the produce was stored in a root cellar beneath the house. He was able to help feed 9 children this way. My mother said as a child she was terrified of the dark, damp, and cold root cellar .
I imagine many people in the nineteenth century survived winter this same way.
 
I'm curious about wax-covered cheese in the Civil War era. I've not found evidence of it; if it was done, it doesn't seem common. It's a good way to virtually eliminate the rind and therefore make more of each wheel of cheese edible, but I'm guessing it was more modern, unless you have better information. Period cheese seems to have been aged with a naturally forming protective rind, though there were still suggestions in household books for wrapping it with brown paper to keep out skippers, or after it's cut, coating the faces with butter to keep it from drying out, and things like that.
you may be correct, waxing cheese does go way back but I don't know how common it was during the war. I have seen pictures of cheeses which looked to be waxed, they weren't quite Civil War but very old. That is interesting about the butter that one I never heard.
 
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The Pennsylvania farm my dad grew up on still has the antebellum spring house, a stone house which had an underground stream of icy fresh water coming up and then running down a stone channel in the middle of the building. Bottles of milk and other things which needed chilling were set in the stream or close to it.
Allie,
I've seen the spring beneath a house used for cooling many times in our area. Most of the stone homes are of limestone which is extremely suitable for this use. On the other hand, maybe the folks were just a tougher strain than today. Nowadays we are saturated with chemicals at every opportunity in an effort to make things last longer or taste "better" without using expensive natural ingredients. Perhaps these advancements have back-fired to a degree and made people more susceptible to irritations due to a weaker immune system.
 
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