Transcription
In today's society, those who want fresh fruits and vegetables in the dead of winter head to their local grocery store or even a farmers market. But if the year is 1730, 1830, or even 1930, people could only enjoy fresh produce during the season it was produced. So, if you wanted the taste of raspberries any other time than raspberry season, you had to do something to preserve them.
Karen Becker, a costumer with the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia, demonstrates for visitors how settlers preserved their foods—techniques we still use hundreds of years later. Today, people many times make jams and jellies and preserves. The way food, usually fruit, is preserved is by cooking it with a great deal of sugar. The technique is entirely the same; all that has changed in the making of preserves is what kind of container we put it in. How much—right there, that's good—and that's true of most food preservation methods, including fermenting fresh vegetables.
The process of making sauerkraut really hasn't changed over the years. We still slice it up real thin, we still add salt, we still add caraway seeds; it still gets pounded or bruised. The only change today is that most commercially prepared sauerkraut has been pasteurized, packaged in a plastic bag, and canned or frozen.
While the convenience of buying cabbage and other fresh vegetables at the grocery store is nice, Becker says preserving these foods actually provides more health benefits. The process of fermenting cabbage is not only a good preservation technique, it also releases even more of the nutrients found in cabbage than any other preparation technique would.
Perhaps one of the easiest methods of food preservation is drying. When we're talking about drying as a preservation technique, of course it was used heavily pre-industrial age, pre-electricity age, pre-commercially prepared food age. Foods are still being dried today; you can go to the grocery store and buy dried cranberries and, of course, raisins or dried fruits. Those are all processed commercially. For the home producer, the main thing that has changed again in drying is the equipment used. Becker says the other main difference is the length of time the foods are meant to be kept. In the 1800s, I'm pretty convinced that the food preserved in the spring, summer, and fall was meant to be eaten the following winter, so it only had to be kept for at most seven or eight months. Nowadays, commercial factories that preserve canned food and things like that, they're kind of in it for the long haul, and those foods are good for two, three, or more years.
Many people today don't dry their own beans, make their own preserves, ferment their own cabbage, or make their own pickles. Many people do, and none of it is rocket science. At the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia in Staunton, I'm Veronica Roser.