Food That Held Up A Nation

the food that held up a nation fish we don't think about fish the same way they did in the 18th century we don't think about fish as one of those most important provisions in the 18th century it was so very very important it would show up regularly on the table of the richest man in the colonies as well as in the stomach of the very very poorest it was so plentiful anyone could harvest fish from the sea or from the rivers it would take maybe just a tiny bit of equipment a hook and a line or even just a sharpened stick if that's all you had you could even just dig along the shore of the ocean and get shellfish it was so important that it would show up in the list of commodities that were being traded so today in the midwest we can turn on certain radio stations and we can hear about you know how much beef cattle are selling for or pork corn and wheat how much that sells for by the bushel in the 18th century one of those things was barrels of cod preserved fish it was that important fresh and preserved fish were important not just to the coast but to inland portions as well the rivers were full of fish in the 18th century there's a wonderful memoir of william nolan where he talks about his childhood in 1830s backwoods michigan and his father built a fish trap he caught fish so many fish that they had more than enough for the immediate need they were able to preserve those fish and survive on them throughout the year when other crops were not available today we're going to dive in and take a deeper look into why fish was the food that held up a nation [Music] for the individual or an individual household fishing could be extremely vital to their household economy to their very survival there are times when you might choose to settle in a particular spot just because the fishing was good even though that might not be the only thing you're going to be doing matthew patton is a perfect example in his amazing diary where he really goes in depth he talks about creating this fish trap across the local river with a group of three other households and between them they harvest shad in the springtime and salmon all through the summer so in the summertime he'll every three or four days he'll go up to the fish trap and he'll get two or three or six fish and then he will share those with other people that are his partners in that and he uses those fish as a means of trade in in his local economy so all the the households around him in the town they're going to be uh benefiting from that fishing that's going on so it's it's really important we don't think about that today as part of our family income that we would that we would go out and go fishing specifically so we could trade those within the households around us so today on the homestead we are smoking fish and smoking fish has been done for thousands of years and people are still smoking fish today it's great for a situation like the homestead where you may not have access to a great quantity of salt and it may be difficult to dry your fish so smoking is a means of preservation it might not last as long as as the other ones but it gives it a wonderful flavor and it makes it so your fish can last several weeks instead of several days and this is a method that also can go along with some of these other methods so there are times when fish would be partially salted and then when they got back they would be processed and they would be smoked so like a red herring or smoked herring that's done that way where you would kind of salt the fish and then when it comes back in from the ocean you would reprocess that and put it in a smoking situation so the smoking can be done in an individual situation which perfectly very easy to do or can be done in a very large sort of commercial operation so smoking was done a lot and it really really imparts a whole different flavor to your fish smoking fish does not take incredible equipment we see here a simple rack made of green twigs and this is very very simple it would be done by native americans as well as settlers in this situation and you might also have a smokehouse that's specifically made for smoking and use that for fish you can even hang them up in a chimney in your cabin or in your house there's so many different ways you can do the smoking of your fish or other meats too [Music] there's something else going on with smoking that we might not realize especially today and in the 18th century especially with those partially salted fish those fish are starting to ferment they're starting to go off to go bad and they would use a method like smoking to impart extra flavor to cover up those fermented fish but at times that very fermented fish flavor was sought after so they would let the set those fish aside so that they would begin to ferment and then bring them in and smoke them to get all that flavor fermented fish a little salt and the smoking all together in one very sought after flavors [Applause] so [Music] one of the great things about the smoked fish is that it's edible right out of your package you don't have to cook it if you don't if you don't have the ability to do that so if you're on the trail in the canoe it's something that we can we can eat just like it is enjoy it so very very good we do have to be a little careful work around those bones it is a great on-the-go food especially in a situation like this where we're traveling we need to have something but we don't want to take the time to stop and camp we want to be able to eat right out of our haverstack so boy that is great we're traveling here in the dugout canoes it makes me think of a story so all up and down the east coast to the united states out in the ocean you're doing fishing but the rivers are super important for fishing too there's a problem though when you're fishing in the rivers in the 18th century it's not people with you know fishing poles along the side of the river it's nothing like that in the 18th century fishing in the rivers had to do with making fishing weirs and fishing traps so they would create these these funnels in the river out of stones out of brush to make the fish all go into one particular spot and then in that spot they would have nets or other kinds of fish trap so that they could cat capture fish 24 hours a day it was really important to be able to do that but the rivers in the 18th century they were also the interstate highways that's how people are transporting themselves and their goods to market so they're taking a dug out canoe just like this and they may have it heaped over with grain hides all kinds of things they're taking to market fish traps and transportation they don't go together so this created a collision between the different people groups there in north america they took this problem to the government they said who gets the rights to work with the river here is it about transport or is it about fishing the government at times sided with transportation but they had no way to enforce that they didn't have a way to say you know who's in charge of policing the river so the people took this into their own hands basically there's a story about a group of folks who gathered in the upper river section they came down the river in their dugout canoes and they started to tear the fish traps apart take them down so that they could use the river for transport well they were met by another group of fishermen there on the river and a battle ensued let's just say the fish traps won the day that day stories like that are the ones that really excite me about digging into history where we can find out about people how they interacted with these problems and those are everyday people not rich people or people that show up in history books but the the folks that really are battling it out for their very survival so so industrial fishing in the 18th century was just as important to the economy in fact probably more important to the economy of north america than industrial fishing is today today and in the 18th century there's this real big problem when you're industrially fishing you are catching thousands and thousands of fish in a day possibly and your fish need to be processed because they immediately start to rot they start to go bad today in the giant industrial fisheries the fishes are gutted and then they're immediately frozen that's what we're used to today aren't we frozen fish we get maybe fresh fish at the market or we get frozen fish in the 18th century they didn't have that possibility there was no frozen no freezing going on uh to deliver to customers so in the 18th century the fish were salted so that they could be preserved immediately so the fish would be gutted and then they would be processed in piles with salt and if they were going to be out any length of time they would actually mix those fish with salt even more salt and then barrel them up we might not think about it today but new england was specifically chosen as a spot for great fisheries that's one of the reasons why they landed in that location so they knew about this great fisheries right off the coast of new england because they had been fishing up and down the coast for decades before the puritans landed at plymouth plantation while ocean fishery was the very very important part of the economy river fishing is probably just as important there are multiple species of kind of fish that would come up from the ocean into the rivers in north america during the 18th century and they had very very prolific runs so it was even easier to catch large quantities of fish as they run up the river especially in the spring mount vernon george washington carried on a large business in fisheries there on the potomac river the shad would run up the river in the springtime and they would literally catch thousands of shad every day and these were very large fish so these fish would immediately have to be preserved so george washington purchased many many barrels of salt just so these salt these fish could be processed at that location salted down put into barrels and sold as pickled chad or salted shad into the market so it was one of his best cash crops [Music] we've got some great examples of preserved fish right here on the table here is a box with salted cod this cod was caught off the coast of north america and immediately salted and today we get them in in small boxes in the 18th century these were put into large 50 gallon barrels of salted cod and these would be sold into the market in different areas in europe in the caribbean and along the coast of north america it's very very common product being sold to and used by any sort of workmen sailors soldiers and if you don't have a lot of salt and this takes a tremendous quantity of salt to process salt fish like this cod and other species can be just dried this is a difficult process that takes a special time of year in sometimes a special location so this is a cod that has caught in the winter time probably the sort of late winter and these are processed gutted on board the ship and then taken to the shore and put up on racks where they would sort of dry in the winter time when it's still very cold so that they don't do a lot of decomposing and then all that moisture is like pulled out of the fish so it's very very cold and very very dry at the same time and they would have racks and racks of fish like this so that they would be able to process again thousands and thousands each season and stockfish is amazing in its preserved capabilities like this it's so dry that it really doesn't go bad if you keep it dry it'll be good for years in the future if you only need your fish to be preserved for a week or two weeks one of the very special methods is the potting of fish and this is a method of cooking the fish then draining all the liquids off of it and then sealing that into butter so it's sort of a very very primitive canning method of the 18th century they weren't able to do it under pressure or anything like this but it would seal that fish off so that it wouldn't continue to deteriorate and really all these methods are trying to achieve exactly the same thing after our fish dies it immediately starts to decompose bacteria start to try to break it down and what we want to happen is to slow that process down or stop it as much as possible there are times when we allow that to happen a little bit so that the fish will ferment and that's all right and they would like that some of those flavors and there are other times that they would try to make that happen not happen at all so that the bacteria would be shut down immediately by large quantities of salt or in this case cooking in the research when you dig into it it's very interesting to watch what happens and how each culture and different places deal with the situation they have with a particular fish and their availability of salt and what their climate is like so certain fish you could not dry if you wanted to the fish would immediately start to rot but the culture was able to find a particular fish they could do that with and then there's the idea of salting different different types of fish need more or less salt and then there's the idea of why they let the fish go ahead and ferment and then salt it and stop it at a particular kind of flavor and you can imagine that that probably happened by accident people weren't able to deal with the fish when they wanted to and they came back and had to eat it and found out that it had a great flavor if they actually let it as it were rot for a little bit before they started doing this preservation method and today we might look at it and say yuck but we don't actually know how that was processed so some people really really enjoy the flavor of certain kinds of fish that other people would say was garbage i think we would be amazed if we went back into the 18th century and saw the things they were throwing away and or giving to animals as feed that we would consider great luxuries today the roe that comes in fish can be very very sought after by people like caviar and yet in the 18th century most of that was given to the pigs [Music] there's a wonderful story in nicholas cresswell's journal from 1774 and he is the son of a fairly well-to-do farmer and he is going to the new world to seek his fortune he's going by ship and while he's on board ship he's interacting with the sailors and everyone on board ship is a fairly small ship but he's he sees uh stockfish being uh served out and he he relates the whole story because he's he's never interacted with stockfish and he's never seen it in his life so he sees them pounding with hammers and serving it into some sort of a stew and he can't imagine actually eating that he rejects that as food so as a as somebody who's from that upper crust he has never thought of having to eat stock fish in his life what is he really eating well he if he's going to have preserved fish he's going to have some of this wonderful potted salmon this is the kind of food that the upper crust would be able to afford and that they would enjoy and probably the very best way is to serve it on toast so let's give this wonderful potted salmon a try it was made a few days ago spiced nicely is wonderful a filet of salmon let's find out [Music] there are some really really wonderful flavors that come in here obviously we've got some creamy butter flavor now if if this was older we would scrape off the very very top layer of butter but the butter goes with it and mixes everything together here brings out some wonderful flavors we have a chance to spice this nicely so it's got some salt some pepper a little bit of nutmeg which shows up in all these recipes and it is really a very superb dish and a wonderful spread on something like this i can imagine nicholas creswell and his well-to-do father sitting beside their fire and snacking on something just like this potted sandwich very crazy this batch turned out really good the last batch again it's very very spreadable and we added a little bit more spices i think this one's even better than the first time we made it in our earlier episode again we can see this as a very high-end dish for the 18th century nothing like the salt cod or the stock fish or any of these other dishes that were really meant for enslaved africans indentured servants day workers and soldiers and sailors those people are the ones that are really the people that have to feed themselves upon these other sort of less expensive ways of preserving fish [Music] [Music] earlier i mentioned nicholas creswell's journal 1774 through 1777 and not only does nicholas cresswell run into stock fish and decide that it's just disgusting and you know we surmised that he undoubtedly had eaten potted fish at home in england but he also deals with other kinds of fishing so nicholas cress well he heads into the back country not many people talk about heading into the back country luckily we have this wonderful journal here um this begins probably a week or so after he is already started on his journey into what is now kentucky tuesday may 30th 1775 this day mr norse mr taylor and rice went to take a view of the country mr johnston and i took a walk about three miles from the river find the land pretty level a black sandy soil timber chiefly beach in our absence those at the camp caught a large catfish which measured six inches between the eyes we supposed it would weigh 40 pounds i don't expect our company back tonight so while they're traveling in the back country they have to have all the sorts of provisions they would need you can't take everything you need so you're always supplementing that whenever possible with whatever you can get fresh they shot turkeys buffalo at times and in this case they were fishing they even found turtle eggs so that they could make bread or pancakes so very interesting journey about a month later he has been into the back country and now it's time to head home and they are out out of provisions they're he's really kicking himself that they hadn't stopped and smoked a bison along the way that they had shot so here he is uh saturday july 1st 1775 this morning john clifton left us he intends going home by land he's behaved very well our provisions are almost gone all our hooks and lines are broken all our feet so tender by standing continually in the wet that it is impossible for us to hunt and the small quantity of provision we have is swarming with maggots yeah they're having a rough time of it they are unable to hunt and they have lost all their fishing tackle on the way and they are starving it uh they do survive they don't have any problems you know within a couple of days they land at a place that's civilized enough that they can get supplies they dig potatoes right out of the ground and eat them raw even in this case they're not always eating fresh when there were opportunities they had more meat or fish available to them at one time than they could eat they would stop and they would smoke it along the way so that they would have something to eat for the next few days it was incredibly difficult to travel in this situation because there was no means of supply other than what they had brought themselves and what they could catch so today's fish stew is a perfect example of what you would cook either in a household or maybe on the trail depending on the supplies that you have with you this has got green vegetables that have been chopped down placed in there we've got some root vegetables we're going to let those cook down and then whatever fish that we have we might use fresh fish if that's what we've caught today if we don't have that we'll go back into our provisions and we'll use a salt cod possibly or even stock fish and maybe if we've got some spices we can really bring some flavor out i think this one's going to be delicious [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] whether a person was an enslaved african an indentured servant working class or a wealthy landowner fish was one of the most plentiful resources the continent provided it wasn't only food for your family entire industries other than fishing counted on a good catch barrel makers salt workers shipping and ship building all depended on what came from the sea tens of thousands relied upon it for their employment even their very survival north america was chosen for its fishing opportunities the waters were tested for years before europeans ever settled here the nation was built upon

Channel: Townsends

Views: 704,476

Rating: 4.9718447 out of 5

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, Fishing, Fish, Fish preservation, fish preservation methods, smoked Fish, townsends fish, history documentary, fish preservation salting method, fish preservation by salting

Id: eIpDILFHTBw

Length: 27min 31sec (1651 seconds)

Published: Tue May 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/structee]

one of my favorite channels on youtube

[u/ConsciousLiterature]

Lewis and Clark diaries also describe unbelievably abundant wildlife in the country. Bird flocks that block the sun, waiting for days for the buffalo herd to go by etc.

It just highlights the old adage.

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he will deplete the rivers and oceans.

[u/tjx-1138]

Love this man and his videos. Also worth a watch is Tasting History with Max Miller.

[u/AnonymousAutonomous]

I would have never thought I would give a rats ass about the old ways of preserving fish. From these food videos that he does, for some reason always get me hungry. But the nostalgic kind of hungry, like gran-grans cooking on a weekend while binging on cartoons hungry.

[u/getmarshall]

I can get lost in this channel for hours. My favorite episode(s) from Townsend has to be the invention of barbecue by American slaves. Just fascinating stuff.

[u/two-thirds]

My middle school biology teacher made us read the book about Cod. Thanks for listening.