20 Clever Ways People Kept Food Fresh Before Refrigerators

I have a love-hate relationship with eggs and their freshness. One day they’re perfectly fine, and the next I’m questioning whether I should risk it! Long before refrigerators, though, people had a way of keeping eggs fresh for months. The process, known as water glassing, only worked on fresh, unwashed eggs. When the eggs were submerged in a crock filled with a sodium silicate solution and kept in a cool basement, the bloom on the unwashed shells interacted with the solution. The result was a gel that formed a tight seal over the pores in the eggshells. Through this method, no air was able to get in, and therefore, no decay occurred. But wash the bloom off, and the eggs would surely rot!

Pemmican was a long-lasting food traditionally made from lean dried meat pounded into a fine powder, mixed with rendered fat and sometimes dried berries. The mixture was then packed tightly into rawhide parfleche bags. The meat had to be very lean because raw fat, unlike properly rendered fat, could spoil and turn rancid. As long as the pemmican was prepared properly, its lack of moisture prevented bacteria from thriving, allowing it to last for years.

In the 1890s in Western Australia, Arthur Patrick McCormick built a mesh-and-burlap food safe with a water tray on top. The cloth was kept moist by capillary action, and in the dry outback air, evaporation cooled the air inside the safe 10 to 15 degrees below the surrounding temperature. This safe didn’t work in a humid climate, however.

I love me some pickles. And I’m grateful that pickling has emerged in virtually every food culture throughout the centuries because pickling works extremely well. Submerging vegetables, eggs, fish, and so on in vinegar causes acetic acid to lower the pH of the object to less than 4.6, an environment in which most pathogens and other organisms (including the bacteria responsible for botulism) will not grow.

Preserving unrefrigerated meat under a thick layer of fat may sound risky, but with potted meat, the meat was thoroughly cooked first, which already killed the microorganisms present. It was then packed tightly into stoneware crocks, which were covered with several inches of hot, melted lard that was left to harden. The hardened fat, in turn, created an oxygen-tight seal over the cooked meat, so it could last longer without the need to refrigerate it. Without that initial cooking, however, preserving meat under fat could be a gamble.

Families without a cellar could store their harvest by building something called an earth clamp. These were shallow trenches, dug in the field, and lined with dry straw. Root crops were heaped into them in pyramids, and this was covered by more straw and earth. The straw and earth insulated the crops enough to keep them from freezing through winter. The clamps would be opened at one end at a time, keeping the rest sheltered from the frosts.

To make Rumtopf, a traditional way of preserving fruit in alcohol, fresh produce and sugar are layered in a crock, and a liquor of no less than 50% ABV is added. The high ABV is important since the juice released from the fruit will gradually lower the concentration of alcohol in the mix until it drops below the level that inhibits mold and bacterial growth. A standard 40% liquor wouldn’t stay strong enough, spoiling the whole batch.

When 80 to 90 percent of food’s moisture content is removed, microorganisms don’t have an environment in which to grow. Fruit, fresh herbs and eviscerated fish were laid on racks outside or in warm, drafty attics. Dried items like apple circles and fish, kept in cloth bags, could then be eaten all winter, without ice.

The solution to unreliable home canning was a jar, patented in 1858 by John Landis Mason: a threaded glass jar with a screw cap. High-acid food, when placed in the jar and boiled at 212°F, creates steam that contracts as the jar cools, pulling the lid down until it is airtight. Fruits, jams, and pickles all preserve this way reliably; meats and low-acid vegetables, not so much.

A meat safe was a timber cabinet covered in close wire netting. The netting allowed air circulation to dry the surface of the fresh meat but prevented access to flies and rodents. Ants were excluded by standing the legs in saucers of oil or water. Contents were not protected from ambient temperatures, however, because meat safes did not really cool food.

Some farmers were lucky enough to have nature do the refrigeration for them. They built springhouses directly over cold water springs, where the water ran through a stone trough in the floor of the building at a constant temperature of around 50°F. Crocks of milk, cream, and butter were set into the running stream, which kept them cool. The natural flow of water did most of the work, continuously cooling the crocks without a refrigerator or a single electricity bill in sight!

Unwashed carrots, parsnips, and beets are often stored in wooden crates in alternating layers with sand or sawdust. The dry substrate absorbs the moisture in the air and keeps the neighboring vegetables from touching so that a fungal rot can’t transfer easily. Because moisture encourages fungal infection, the vegetables are stored unwashed to avoid introducing mold spores.

Traditionally, root cellars are dug into the ground, whether into a basement or into a hillside. Dirt floors keep humidity high; a temperature of 32 to 50 degrees is constant; and the moisture prevents produce from shriveling. A ventilation shaft allows humidity and carbon dioxide to escape. Apples give off ethylene gas, which makes stored carrots and greens turn bitter and rot faster, and apples also absorb earthy odors from stored potatoes, so apples are kept in a separate bin.

The concentration of sugar in cooked fruit can create an osmotic pressure strong enough (65% sugar or higher) to pull water directly out of the cells of microorganisms, effectively disabling them. In a sense, the high concentration of sugar is the preservative. Earlier cooks used honey to the same effect.

Before electric refrigerators, many families used iceboxes, insulated cabinets that were kept cold with actual blocks of ice. Ice was placed into the top of the box, which was typically lined with cork or zinc, and as it thawed, the cool air drifted down over the stored food below. If the catch pan beneath the ice didn’t get emptied daily, the floor of your home was next. The icebox’s air circulation kept temperatures between 40 and 50 degrees.

In households without refrigeration, the butter was either kept at gentle heat (to cook out the water, after which it was nearly pure butterfat and far more resistant to spoiling) or very heavily salted and beaten, and stored in stoneware butter tubs. Water and milk solids inside the butter are what cause fresh butter to turn rancid.

Sauerkraut is preserved through fermentation. This process gradually makes the cabbage more acidic. In a way, this acidification process is similar to what vinegar does (dropping the pH below 4.6), except that instead of pouring a bottle of vinegar over the vegetables, wild Lactobacillus bacteria convert the natural plant sugars into lactic acid. Vegetables are submerged under saltwater (brine) in a crock, and then weighted down to keep air out.

One of the oldest ways to preserve meat without refrigeration was to simply pack it in salt. In the case of pork or cod, the meat was packed into coarse rock salt immediately after butchering. The salt removed water from the meat by osmosis, leaving bacteria with little moisture to live on. Before cooking, the heavily salted meat had to be soaked for 24 hours in several changes of fresh water to remove much of the salt, after which it could also be smoked.

Without salting first, smoking by itself doesn’t preserve raw meat (without salt, the smokehouse is moot). In this case, the meat is hung over smoldering hardwood (hickory or oak) for weeks, slowly desiccating. The smoke leaves a coating of antimicrobial phenols on the meat, but the preservation is accomplished by salting.

Beginning in the 1910s, USDA extension agents began advocating the use of pressure canners to farm households. Pressure canners trap steam, allowing them to reach a critical 240°F. Boiling water tops out at 212°F, which is not nearly hot enough to kill Clostridium botulinum spores, which live in low-acid foods (think: meat, poultry, green beans, etc.). For this reason, low-acid foods must be pressure canned.

This content was created with the help of AI.