In this video, we do some experimental archaeology and try four different techniques used to preserve fresh uncooked eggs before the advent of refrigeration.
You can also read about meat preservation techniques prior to the invention of refrigeration here.
It’s easy to take our refrigerators for granted. There they sit in our kitchens quietly keeping our food safe to eat and making our lives quite easy. It may be difficult to imagine but a large percentage of time on an 18th century homestead such as George Washington’s Ferry Farm was spent preserving food for long term storage.
Before grocery stores and refrigeration, most foods were only available at particular times of the year – this is called seasonality. Eggs, for instance, were not plentiful in the fall and winter when hens traditionally stop laying. Certain fish, such as shad and herring, can only be caught during the few weeks a year when they spawn. And, of course, most crops were harvested in the fall. So when food was available it needed to be preserved and stored properly if there was any hope of enjoying it in the future.
Food preservation was especially important in the fall and early winter, which was butchering season for large animals. Chickens and small game were enjoyed year round because they could be eaten in one or two meals. A larger pig or cow, however, would spoil in mere days when exposed to the humid and hot Virginia summers. Therefore butchering was left to the cold months. Even the frosty temperatures were not enough to stave off decay and therefore long term preservation techniques were employed to guarantee a supply of meat throughout the year.
To begin, preservation involved many people. In my own household today, we butcher two hogs once a year and it’s a family event with our neighbors and friends helping out. In the Washingtons’ case, a number of their slaves were put to this task and likely butchered dozens of hogs at once to ensure the family and the enslaved population had enough meat for the upcoming year.
Pigs were the preferred livestock for meat in Virginia, as anyone who lives here knows well. We love our pork. This is not a coincidence as pork’s high fat content aids with preservation and helps the meat survive the nasty summers previously mentioned.
A butcher’s diagram showing the main cuts of pork and from where the come on a pig. Credit: Wikipedia/Pearson Scott Foresman.
After butchering, the next step in preservation was to treat the meat in a manner that would facilitate storage. This usually involved drying, salting, or a combination of the two. The idea was to reduce the meat’s water content, which promotes spoilage, and kill or inhibit bacterial growth. Salting pork drew out moisture so small meat cuts could be rubbed down with salt and then stored in even more salt, which was relatively cheap in the 1700s and keeps the nasty bacteria at bay. Furthermore, adding the chemical compound saltpetre (potassium nitrate) to the rub kept meat edible even longer and had the added benefit of ‘fixing’ the nice red color of the meat. Saltpetre is still in use today for food preservation (and also makes great gunpowder and fertilizer, strangely enough).
A technique that worked even better for long term storage was brining. This process involved soaking the meat in a salt water mixture and was good for larger cuts, like hams. Meat could be stored in the brine and packed tightly in covered jars or casks in a cool environment for months. The Washingtons had cellars in their house ideal for this purpose and the archaeological record at Ferry Farm is full of fragments of stoneware and earthenware jars – the Tupperware of their day.
Of course all this salted meat would need to be soaked in water before it was edible. Even the salt-loving Virginians couldn’t palate it otherwise.
Adding the extra step of smoking to the salting process preserved the meat even longer. The smokehouse was ubiquitous on 18th century farms and, while we know the Washingtons had a smokehouse, we have yet to locate it archaeologically. We have found evidence for a smokehouse that predates the Washingtons moving to Ferry Farm, however.
Archaeologists have not located where the smokehouse stood when the Washingtons lived at Ferry Farm. Perhaps it stood among the fenced-in work yards behind the family home. More archaeological exploration will be necessary to place the structure on the landscape.
Your basic smokehouse was a small, square, one room structure with a pyramid-shaped roof and rafters in the roof to hang meat on. In the middle of the room was a fire pit or box where a fire was kept going for days at a low temperature. It dried the meat without cooking it and exposed the meat to a lot of smoke, which inhibits decay and is a deterrent for bugs and vermin. Have you ever wondered why mosquitos don’t seem to bite much when you’re around a camp fire? It’s the smoke.
One final common preservation and storing technique was to pot meat. This involved packing cooked meat tightly into a jar and capping it with a generous amount of butter, lard, or tallow (rendered beef fat). An unappetizing as this may sound it kept meat safe to eat for weeks or months in the right environment. Potted meat is still popular in certain areas, although you’ll find it in cans, nowadays.
A complete redware storage jar.
A variety of ceramic pots like the above redware jar were available for storage of preserved meat and other foodstuffs in the 1700s. Below are photos showing four different types of storage vessel sherds excavated at Ferry Farm:
All of the above mentioned preservation and storage techniques lend their own unique taste to meat, many of these flavors are now considered very desirable and the main reason these techniques are still employed for various foods, even though we don’t require them any longer thanks to refrigerators and freezers. Think salted bacon, Spam, smoked barbeque, and delicious salty ham. What originated as necessary methods for making food last have evolved into our own unique modern cuisine.
Mara Kaktins, Archaeologist
Archaeology Lab Supervisor
Further Reading
Oliver, Sandra L. Food in Colonial and Federal America. Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut and London. 2005
Olmert, Michael. Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies – Outbuildings and the Architecture of Daily Life in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London. 2009.
Root, Waverly and Richard De Rochemont. Eating In America. The Ecco Press, Hopewell, New Jersey. 1995.
“It is indeed bad to eat apples. It is better to make them all cider” — Benjamin Franklin
Name a beverage consumed by all age groups, men and women alike, the poor and the very rich, from sun up to sun down, that is touted as healthy and refreshing yet also contains alcohol. If you were a colonial American, the answer was hard cider. In America’s early days, cider reigned supreme and, even though the beverage is currently enjoying a resurgence in popularity, consumption of cider is nowhere near as high as it was during George Washington’s lifetime. To better understand early Americans’ obsession with cider, one must go back to the first European colonization of America (What a great idea! Let’s do that).
It’s the early 17th century and colonists are trying to make their new home a bit more like their old home. One sure way to do this is to bring over plants to grow the food you already like. Sometimes, this doesn’t work very well (grapes, for example) but, sometimes, the introduced species thrive in their new environment. Such was the case with apples. Technically, there are already two varieties of crabapple native to the Americas but these are not especially good eating compared to domesticated apple varieties in Europe. Ultimately, the apple became such a popular cultivar, some land grants stipulated that to claim legal ownership you had to plant apple trees to prove you intended to stay and improve the land.
“Still Life with Apples, Grapes and a Pot of Jam” (1700s) by Luis Meléndez. Credit: Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya / Wikipedia
That North American climate and soil was well suited to apples was especially fortuitous since colonists were also looking for things to ferment into alcohol. Alcohol was a large part of their diet, and it just so happens that apples lend themselves very well to this end. Think about it, in addition to providing fresh fruit, apples could be dried for storage, fed to livestock in the fall to fatten them before butchering, made into apple cider vinegar which is both useful for medicinal purposes but also a key ingredient for pickling, one of the most common preservative methods at the time, and finally turned into lots of yummy fermented beverages like, apple brandy, and applejack (we’ll talk about this interesting drink a bit later), and cider..
Making apple cider is very simple, and it’s even simpler to make hard cider. In fact, left to their own devices, apples practically ferment themselves since they are covered with wild yeast that loves to eat sugar and throw off alcohol as a pleasant byproduct. So, colonists didn’t have to work very hard to turn perishable cider into hard cider, which could be stored longer. Furthermore, if you expose hard cider to oxygen for too long, it will naturally turn into vinegar. What’s not to love?
“Cider Making” (c.1840) by William Sydney Mount. Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art / Wikipedia.
Did I mention how much cider was consumed during the colonial period? It should be noted that even though it did contain alcohol it wasn’t necessarily considered an alcoholic drink. John Adams drank a large glass of cider every morning (yep) and fancied himself an abstainer of strong drink. Cider was described as healthy and a thirst quencher, likely owing to the slight carbonation which is also a byproduct of fermentation. Children regularly consumed hard cider, which isn’t nearly as horrific as it sounds when you take into account that it had a low ABV of around 3% and this probably made it safer to drink that most water available.
However, children were not encouraged to partake of cider’s much bigger and somewhat brutish brother, applejack. Applejack resulted when you allowed hard cider to freeze and removed the frozen water crystals, leaving the concentrated alcohol behind. The more times this simple distillation process was repeated the stronger the applejack becomes. This method also does little to remove impurities contained within the cider so the result can be a very high octane skull splitter, which was still much beloved of colonials.
Although cider was a very common drink, it could also be elevated to gourmet status. Just as wine drinking has advanced to a fine art, with enthusiasts who obsess over the distinctive notes each grape produces under distinctive growing conditions, so did gentry colonists enjoy comparing fine ciders from different regions and varieties of apples. Much was made of the ‘terroir’ of ciders, or the climate, soil, and landscape where the apples were produced. Modern varieties of apples are much different than those available three hundred years ago so it’s interesting to ponder over the distinct flavors colonial ciders would have had, especially given that they had access to a wider variety of apples than we do today. There were thousands of varieties available across the colonies and early Republic producing thousands of distinct ciders. So perhaps the saying should not be ‘As American as apple pie’ but rather ‘As American as apple cider’.
Mara Kaktins, Archaeologist
Ceramics & Glass Specialist
Further Reading
Brown, John Hull. Early American Beverages. Bonanza Books, New York. 1966
Grasse, Steven. Colonial Spirits. Abrams Image, New York. 2016
Oliver, Sandra L. Food in Colonial And Federal America. Greenwood Press, London. 2005
Root, Waverly and Richard De Rochemont. Eating In America. The Ecco Press. 1995
One of the first pieces of furniture that will arrive at the recreated Washington house at George Washington’s Ferry Farm will be the large, round dining table for the Hall. It’s being made at a shop in Pennsylvania and we hope to have it before the end of the year. With Thanksgiving just a week away, we wanted to take a look at the practice of dining and the furnishings it required in the early 18th century, before it became a formal ritual and before it had a dedicated room in the home.
We’ve discussed the evolution of the dining room in colonial America in a video here on Lives & Legacies and in numerous posts on The Rooms at Kenmore. As you probably recall, dining rooms did not appear in American houses until the second half of the 18th century and then didn’t become common until the end of the century. Prior to that point (and even for a long time afterwards), meals were taken in almost every room of the house. Furniture was moved to wherever it was needed, to take advantage of a cool breeze on a hot summer day, or the warmth of a fireplace in the winter, or simply because the number of people to accommodate changed from day to day.
What can be glossed over, however, is that early Americans didn’t need dining rooms because they really didn’t dine all that often. They ate, yes, but not in any formal way, not at any set times of day, nor with set specific accessories. Meals were simply brief breaks in the unending work of the day. Even in gentry families, everyone had a job or task that added to the family’s production. Not everyone could break for a meal at the same time, so rarely did an entire family sit down together. Meals weren’t considered a time to chat and catch up with family members, rather they were a perfunctory chance to refuel before moving on to the next task. The concept of the “family dinner” that we try so hard to maintain today is the product of a much later time period.
In a household where there were fewer chairs than family members, the men got first dibs with women and children either standing to eat or sitting down after the men were finished. There usually wasn’t a central table but rather several spots scattered around a room or rooms where a person might set their plate or bowl while eating. Even in a household where seating could accommodate all members of the family, children were bumped from a table and chair whenever company came to visit. They were left to find a spot to perch elsewhere.[1]
The original Strother house at Ferry Farm was constructed during this early 18th century when meals were simply not an important part of life – none of its rooms were designated as eating spaces. Tables and chairs that could be used for eating were found in both of the main rooms. Even when the Washingtons enlarged the house after their purchase of it in 1738, specific rooms for dining were pretty much unheard of.
The Washington house features a room called the Hall, which was usually the largest room in a house of the time. The space was multi-purpose, being used for everything from sleeping space and entertaining purposes to keeping livestock warm on particularly cold nights. As the 18th century progressed, gentry families became more refined and devoted more time to increasingly formal versions of dining and the Hall eventually morphed into the dining room (probably because of the commodious space).
Augustine Washington’s probate inventory gives us a glimpse into this transitional time period. When the inventory is taken In 1743, the large room in the Washington house is still called a Hall, and it clearly has a variety of uses, but it is stocked with two tables of considerable value and 12 chairs. This indicates that more formalized meals are taking place in the room.
Section of Augustine Washington’s probate inventory taken in 1743 showing the furniture and personal property listed in the Hall.
The mention of two tables – one large and one small – in a hall or dining room pops up quite often in period inventories.[2] The likeliest explanation for having two tables in a dining space is one that is pretty familiar to us modern Americans. When it’s just the immediate family sitting down to a meal, you only need the one table. But, when the house is full of visitors, perhaps for a holiday or special occasion, an extra table may need to be on-hand to seat…well, the kids. Whereas the kids were bumped from the table to a spot on the floor to accommodate guests earlier in the century, by the 1740s, they were rating a place at a table, albeit an auxiliary one.
“An Election Entertainment” (1754) by William Hogarth. The painting shows a Whig banquet thrown to win votes through food and drink, a common practice in both England and the Colonies. Two dining tables – a rectangular one and a round one – are visible. Credit: Sir John Soane’s Museum / The Yorck Porject / Wikipedia.
Interestingly, the contents of the Washington Hall at Ferry Farm mirrors almost exactly the contents of the Dining Room at Kenmore nearly 40 years later: one large table (identified as oval-shaped at Kenmore), 1 small table (identified as square at Kenmore), a large set of chairs (15 at Kenmore, 12 at Ferry Farm), one large looking glass, and a desk (a bookcase-on-desk at Kenmore and an escritoire at Ferry Farm). Even in a very formal, elite house like Kenmore, there were still two separate tables to accommodate an overflow of diners and a desk, indicating multiple uses for such a large room.
We often find parallels between Kenmore and the Washington house in our research. Betty Lewis learned her skills as mistress of the house under her mother’s tutelage at Ferry Farm, and so it seems logical that there would have been things that she did at Kenmore “just like mom.” In furnishing the Washington Hall, we’ve decided to draw a visual connection between it and the Kenmore Dining Room, using one large round dining table and one small square table. In fact, the reproduction table being made in Pennsylvania for the Washington house is based on the round table from our collection that is currently on display in the Kenmore Dining Room.
Kenmore’s Dining Room with both the round and square tables displayed during a performance of the annual holiday theatrical drama “Twelfth Night at Kenmore” each year in early January. This season’s performances will take place January 5, 6, and 7. Visit kenmore.org for details.
So, as you make preparations for Thanksgiving, if anyone in your household grouses about being relegated to the kids’ table this year, just tell them to remember the Washingtons. In their house, even George sat at a kids’ table and it was a pretty big step up!
Meghan Budinger
Aldrich Director of Curatorial Operations
[1] Carroll, Abigail. Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal. Basic Books, 2013.
[2] The Probing the Past database of probate inventories from Virginia and Maryland during the 18th and early 19th century is a wealth of information. Here are links to just three inventories that show the table configuration discussed here:
http://chnm.gmu.edu/probateinventory/document.php?estateID=287
http://chnm.gmu.edu/probateinventory/pdfs/wshgtn43.pdf
http://chnm.gmu.edu/probateinventory/document.php?estateID=122
As George Washington’s Ferry Farm prepares to celebrate the reconstruction of the Washington house, we traveled around George’s hometown – Fredericksburg, Virginia – to visit a few places important in the transformation of George from boy to man.
Besides learning to survey and receiving his formal schooling, young George Washington also pursued an education in the social graces valued in gentry circles while a young man at Ferry Farm. These social graces included dancing, fencing, horseback riding, and gentlemen’s games like cards. Card-playing was a popular pastime in the taverns that Washington frequented all across Virginia.
On one occasion – Christmas Eve 1769 – adult George passed the evening at Julian’s Tavern in Fredericksburg with Edward Jones, the overseer of Ferry Farm. This tavern was located at the corner of present-day Amelia and Caroline Streets.
You can ready more about when Washington returned to his hometown for Christmas in 1769 by clicking here.
Join us at the Washington House Celebration on Saturday, October 7, 2017 from 12:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. to celebrate the construction of the Washington house! A special ribbon-cutting ceremony will begin at 1:30 p.m. featuring notable speakers. After the ceremony, guests will be invited to view the reconstructed Washington house! Parking for the event is off site at the VRE Fredericksburg Park and Ride Lot G at the corner of Prince Edward Street and Frederick Street. Limited handicap parking is available at Ferry Farm. Buses will transport guests to and from Ferry Farm. The Washington House Celebration is a free event and RSVPs are not required.
In this video, we make switchel, a summertime beverage popular in the 1700s. Its ingredients contain a lot of potassium which replenishes the body’s electrolytes. Learn more about switchel and other methods used to say cool in the 18th century on this blog post.
