Ken Albala

And I think it's also a matter of flavour.

You know, we separate those two today and we don't really need to smoke anything because we can get fresh food.

But I think we like that flavour a lot, so we do it intentionally.

We know just a random example in ancient Rome, people had botellas, which are sausages, and they sold them out on the streets.

But these would have been preserved by hanging up in the fireplace and just letting the cold smoke go over.

There's two very different ways of using smoke.

There's, you know, hot smoking will actually cook the food,

And in that case, it's not going to be preserved.

If you cold smoke, it preserves the phenols and the sort of aldehydes and things that penetrate the meat, create this sort of reddish bark.

Have you ever seen on a really good barbecue or on a smoked sausage or something?

And that's what preserves it.

And that's what prevents the bugs getting in.

And it's antioxidants, so the fat doesn't go bad.

And of course, no one in the past knew this at all.

But when they record selling smoked X, Y, and Z in a text,

You're assuming they knew what they were doing, you know.

And there are directions, but by the time you get to the early modern period in cookbooks, there's definitely directions on how to do this.

Yeah, it's very clear that once people can get fresh food, and this means railroads mostly, and refrigerator cars, and literally the food chain that can carry fresh food to people, there's really no reason to smoke food anymore.

And canning, of course, is part of that whole thing, canned meat.

was very important.