One of the most common questions on this
channel has to do with what kind of food is available in the 18th century that
we don't have today in the 21st century. Truly one of the very most common foods in the
18th century was salt pork and today we really, right here in america, don't have
anything quite like it at all. If you go to the grocery store you will find
something that is called salt pork but it's nothing like 18th century salt pork. Imagine a
food that everyone, everyone in the 18th century is familiar with whether you're the poorest person
or the richest person it might not be on your table as the very richest person but you would be
very very familiar with. It it is something that's used by sailors, soldiers, anyone who is doing
exploring, common laborers are going to be eating salt pork all the time and even in a typical
household it's something that you would prepare for your own family or you could find it in the
marketplace. Imagine something that's so common that the prices are listed in the newspaper like
stock prices might be listed today so you know what's the price of salt in Boston you would be
able to find that out in any common newspaper. What is 18th century salt pork there are many
many descriptions of it even sort of recipes for it and I've got this simple recipe and it is very
simple from 1736 this is Nathaniel Bailey in his Dictionarium Domesticum and he says "an excellent
way of salting meat, let your meat be fresh and take out all the bleeding arteries then
sprinkle it with common salt and let it lie in the air for 12 hours but take care to salt the
pieces where the arteries are more particularly then wipe the meat dry and make some salt very
hot over the fire and rub it into the meat very well and lay the pieces of salted meat one upon
another and it will keep for several months or with common salt rub the several pieces of meat
briskly with it after the blood is out and lay salt enough in hollow places especially so
will you be sure to have your meat sweet either beef or pork" so this is a simple method
here of something that you would do in your house you might do this in a crock or some other small
vessel but salt pork is also an industrial product that is made in barrels so thousands and thousands
of barrels of salt pork would be prepared every year all around the western world and they would
be sold into the marketplace to be used by all these different people at different uh times. so
in an industrial setting you would have a barrel and many times this was a if it's going to go into
the marketplace is going to be something that is regulated by your local government and so
we have the laws say for like the colony of New York or Connecticut or Virginia and they said
well it has to be a certain size barrel has to be 32 gallons it was the typical size and you have
to have so many pounds of meat in there so there would be approximately 200 to 220 pounds of
pork in that barrel if it is the highest quality there can only be so many kinds of cuts here
of pork in your barrel and that's another thing pork salt pork is not a particular cut
like bacon right no it's the entire animal so you might find feet, legs, front quarters you
know hind quarters, or a head in the barrel. So the best quality of pork barrel will only have one
or two heads in that barrel I know we can't even imagine that today right it's like you're gonna
open up this barrel it's gonna have basically the whole hog in there any of the different pieces
you might find inside your barrel but again the regulations were there to keep you from opening up
that barrel and finding all feet or something like that we don't want that so there was a grade so
the top grade only has particular kinds of cuts in it and the lowest grade is sort of catch as
catch can you don't know what you're going to find there was also a grade that had basically
the whole hog you would find pieces of every type in that barrel but you knew you weren't
going to find too many of one kind or another. Salt pork is going to be available in different
ways so you might go to the marketplace and maybe you need an entire barrel or multiple barrels
of salt pork or there might be situations where truly you don't need more than a week's worth
of meat or maybe you just don't have that much money so you would buy pieces of salt pork that
you could set by so it isn't just oh I have to have an entire you know 200 pounds of salt
pork but you could buy smaller pieces as well. Now researching salt pork can sometimes be
difficult because at times salt pork can go under many different names when you see the
word "pork" you have to look at the context many times it just means salt pork and if it
means fresh pork it will actually say fresh pork it also goes by the name of barreled pork because
you can't put fresh pork in a barrel without it going bad so it's salt pork and there's something
that's very similar and maybe exactly the same thing at times called pickled pork so we see lots
and lots of references for pickled pork in the 18th century also so it's got all these different
names and it shows up in so many different places. So this is so popular in the 18th century why is
it popular what's special about salt pork well it has to do with how long it will last, today
if we go to this grocery store and we buy pork we have options. We can prepare it immediately we
can put it in the refrigerator as raw pork we can even freeze it for next week next year whatever.
They didn't have the options of refrigeration or freezing so if they purchased fresh pork it
had to be prepared immediately depending on the atmosphere or the climate where you're at you had
to prepare it within a day or two or it was going to go bad and you just throw it out it would be
a complete waste. Salt pork is totally different at room temperature it is stable and good for
as long as a year if you buy it you know in a barrel and it's sealed up it can be good easily
for a year if it's out of the barrel and you're buying an individual piece well it's still going
to be good for a week or two depending on how you store it but that's an incredible difference
between this piece of meat going bad in basically hours versus something that is shelf stable for
up to a year. That is a tremendous advantage so today we might think of it's like salt pork it
kind of tastes weird it's not as good as fresh pork so fresh pork should be more expensive not
true in the 18th century the longevity of salt pork was so important that your salt pork is going
to be worth more pound per pound than fresh pork. So if some pork is very very popular the question
is is does it taste good? Now one of the reasons why it's popular is because it's it's longevity
it can stay you know stable and not go bad but is it good? was did they like it well? that's
an interesting question you know people don't necessarily talk so much about whether something
is good or bad but we do have some hints about how desirable it was as something to eat so one of
the other commodities that's that's being traded right along with salt pork is salt beef turns
out that salt pork was generally worth more pound for pound than salt beef. Salt beef had a
tendency to get very very hard so so hard that you could carve it like wood and you had to soak
it for a long time and even after you soaked salt beef for a long time it still was very very tough
because that salt just makes the meat tougher. It's not true for pork one of the very best
meats to salt and you can get away with and it's still sweet and good was salt pork so it
was desirable because I mean it might still not be as good as fresh it's still much better than
other salt provisions like salt beef so much so that if you look at the rations that are given
out to soldiers and sailors generally a soldier or sailor might be given a pound of beef per
day to eat and the equivalent in pork would be three quarters of a pound so you like the pork
so much that you're willing to eat less of it. Now how hard was it to prepare you take salt pork
you need to soak it you need to try to get as much salt out as possible and then you can generally
boil it or use it in other dishes as you know little portions of meat but there are times when
we find references to people in that 18th century context and they're eating it raw I know that is
pretty hard to believe I wouldn't recommend it to anyone today but if you read in Joseph Plum
Martin's Memoirs as he is a revolutionary war soldier he talks about one setting where everyone
is just so tired after marching all day long and all they have are salt pork provisions that some
of the men they don't care they just eat it raw Joseph Plum Martin was one of those that said I
would rather just eat this probably not very tasty salt pork and just go to sleep he was he
was just so tired now you could not take a piece of salt beef and just eat it raw there's
it was an impossibility you would break your teeth but apparently the salt pork was something that
you could cut up easily and chew and digest. So salt pork is prepared in a lot of different
places they were creating barrels and barrels of salt pork in England and in Ireland you
know all along the eastern seaboard whether you're up north in New York, Virginia
all these places are creating salt pork and exporting it because it's such a desirable
you know commodity you just had to have it but another place that's kind of interesting is that
salt pork was actually coming out of the frontier so salt pork was one of the first things that you
could produce on newly settled land it might take a while to produce corn as a cash crop or wheat or
some other item like that but on the frontier they could turn hogs loose and they would just forage
in the woods and then you could harvest those and turn them into salt pork and send them down the
river in barrels and sell them in the marketplace say New Orleans so that's one of the first
cash crops that's coming out of some place like Kentucky and some of those very very interior
places. Anybody can produce salt pork it's such a simple process all you need is the pork and a
whole lot of salt and some vessel to store it in. Not all salt pork was made in these giant
barrels to be shipped out to a marketplace and bought as an entire 200 pounds of salt it was
prepared in the home in smaller batches for shorter periods of time so you might go to the
your local market and you might buy 10 or 15 pounds of pork again you can't use it immediately
you can't cook it all right away so you might need salt pork to last a week or two weeks just
in small batches or a couple of great diaries from the 18th century here's the diary of Joshua
Hempstead and he says "Thursday the 14th it's fair I was at home cutting and salting pork and making
a chest for Christopher Darrow it's a cold day" and so there you go so he's talking about
his diary where they're just doing a small portion of salt pork this wasn't one
of those I mean if he was doing barrels and barrels of them he would have said oh I this day
I did it and the next day I did it the next day this circumstance it only took a few
hours. Here's Matthew Patton's diary and his diary is very very voluminous wonderful
uh reading here this is "November 30th I cut up a pork and my wife salted a barrel full
of it in the in the outceller and John got a bushel of indian corn and a bushel of rye ground
at Lieutenant Daniel's mill" so here's a session where we're making a little bit larger portion
this is probably going to last them all winter into next spring so and notice the time of year
November 30th a lot of this harvesting especially if we're doing larger quantities of it is going
to be done in the very late fall and early winter time when it's cool outside the meat isn't going
to go off really quickly so you have some time. We have examples where salt pork
is trading hands in communities without necessarily being bought
and sold it's really being traded so you'll find these interactions with people
you know I got five pounds of salt pork from my neighbor and then you know sometime later I
paid them off in some other commodity totally different than that so we do have salt
pork being traded used almost as currency. As we read about salt pork in
the 18th century we find that there are various regions who thought their salted
pork was the best and other peoples were inferior you see that even reflected in some of the laws
so there are laws in New York that talk about um the repackaging of salt pork so one of the
things that did happen is you needed to sort of see what's going on with the salt pork at times so
you might un-barrel it and re-barrel it re-salt it and pick out the pieces that were going bad
especially after the first couple of weeks so in the New York laws it says if pork is
repackaged and that pork came from someplace else so maybe barrels of salt pork were coming in from
Virginia and it got to New York and we're going to re-barrel that you couldn't mark the barrel as
from New York you had to say this is pork from someplace else because they didn't want their pork
to get a bad name because our pork is the best. Aboard ship salt pork is one of those things that
every sailor is going to be eating during the week and it seems like almost every account we have
of the rations for sailors is very very similar whether it's in the merchant marine or whether
it's a military naval force here's a ship master's accountant book and it's sort of if you're going
to be a ship master here are the typical things that you're going to need to do and here he talks
about the weekly allowance that is given per man he says "hence the full weekly allowance per man
is seven pounds of biscuit, one quart of peas, seven gallons of beer that's per week
three pints of oatmeal, two pounds of pork, and they mean salt pork six ounces of butter,
four pounds of beef, and 12 ounces of cheese" so that has to be spread out through the entire
week and generally on board ship those things are given out in a particular schedule so
Tuesday might be beef and then you know Thursday's going to be pork they're going to
be some days when meat isn't served at all but this is very very typical and you'll find very
similar accounts in just about every memoir diary and even the regulations you see for you know
congress saying what the naval rations should be. Soldiers in the 18th century are given fresh
provisions fresh meat whenever available but salt pork is something that's also divvied out
especially at times when men have to go on the march for multiple days at a time and they would
be given their ration ahead of time instead of having to provide for these men as they're on the
march before they started the march they would be given a ration of meat like three or four or
maybe five days worth of meat at that time. Now that meat is not going to stay good so you want
to give them a salt provision so they would be given salt provisions at those times so that that
meat would be good even four and five days later. It's not just sailors it's not just soldiers
but we have people that are trading deep into the interior and here's a description of sort of
voyageurs this is a book called "Travels in Lower Canada from 1797". "On setting out each man is
furnished with a certain allowance of salted pork, biscuit, peas, and brandy. The peas and
biscuit are boiled with some of the pork into a porridge and a large vessel full of it
is generally kept at the head of the bateau for use of the crew when they stop in the course
of the day". So they were making this sort of stew that was available to you all day long this cold
stew of a peas, biscuit, which is really just hard hard bread they pounded that up
and then cooked it with the salt pork and it was one of those you need a snack
during the day that's what you're going to eat. One of the most famous examples of using
salt pork as an explorer are the Lewis and Clark expedition that goes out into what
is now the western United States in 1805, 1804. They go exploring this whole area and there
they knew that there may not be food supplies available for them for maybe days and weeks at
a time. So they have to take lots of provisions with them they take salt pork along they take
salt pork along and at times they would stop and cash salt pork they would dig a hole in the
ground bury the salt pork make a quick note about exactly where they might be able to find it in
the future and then cover it back up and hide it. You would do this in many different situations
different people hunters and whatnot because you would need an emergency supply of
food that you could go back and find or maybe even find on your way back from going you know
months or even years later you'd come back and find this salt pork so Lewis and Clark were doing
that it's it was an important food stock for them when regular food was not available and there's
this wonderful section here in August 12th of 1805 they say "here we halted and we breakfasted on the
last of our venison so that would be fresh deer having yet a small piece of pork in reserve" so
they didn't want to eat this salt pork right away they were going to use whatever might go bad first
the salt pork might be good for weeks or months so we're going to keep that in reserve "after eating
we continued on our route through the lower bottom of the mainstream along the foot of the mountains
on our right the next day we killed nothing during the day we now boiled and ate the remainder of our
pork having yet a little flour and parched meal at the creek". So here it is they uh they ate
their venison first it was it could go bad they kept their their pork in reserve, no deer appeared
the next day there was nothing they could find to eat so they had to eat the last of their salt
pork. They were probably getting very worried you can hear that in the words there all we have
left is a little bit of flour and a little bit of parched corn they are up against it they need
to find something else they're out of salt pork. There's a wonderful reference to
salt pork in the bark covered house in his late teens William Nolan was helping his
family pay off the mortgage on their property and so he was going on long hunting trips he
would be gone for a week, two weeks at a time and he would take along salt pork. Why? because
they got tired of eating venison and they wanted a different flavor and something they could bring
along to cook and again he needed something some kind of a provision that wouldn't go bad as he was
out into the woods two and three weeks at a time. As I research food in the 18th century you just
never know when a topic like this is going to take you down paths you just never really thought
it's like any of these other things we research we don't think twice about salt pork
when we see references to it we read you know something going on a sailor a soldier in
the time period we don't realize how incredibly important this food item was and we don't have
anything like it today it's completely gone and you know it's a flavor that we're missing
we just don't kind of realize we have to try it out to even understand what it would taste
like. I love digging deep on a topic like this because it can tell us a lot about
what life was like in this time period.
