Sailor, Soldier, & Explorer Rations: Food for the Commoner - Salt Pork

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 the 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 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, it's 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. It 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 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 going to open up this barrel, it's going to 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. And 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 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, if 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 the 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 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 for pound than fresh pork. So, if salt pork is very, very popular, the question is, does it taste good? Now, one of the reasons why it's popular is because it's longevity. It can stay, you know, stable and not go bad. But is it good? 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 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 permissions 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 just so tired. Now, you could not take a piece of salt beef and just eat it raw. 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 weed 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. Let's say New Orleans. So that's one of the first cash crops that's coming out of someplace 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 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. And 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 reading here. This is November 30th. I cut up a pork and my wife salted a barrel full of it in the, in the outseller. 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 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 unbarrel 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 naval force. Here's a shipmaster's accountant book and it's sort of, if you're going to be a shipmaster, 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 Thursday is going to be pork. There are 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 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, 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 voyeurs. 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 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 cache 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 months or even years later. You'd come back and find this salt pork. So Lewis and Clark were doing that. 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. This 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 ate their venison first. It could go bad. They kept 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 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. 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 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.