Something you've NEVER thought about: 16th century food storage?

[MonsieuRoberts]

So I was thinking about how a pizza I ordered earlier was cooling down in the fridge, and how it would take a few hours to go from lukewarm to what you'd typically call "fridge pizza", and a question occurred to me;

If I were sitting around somewhere in Europe in the 1600s (Note that my estimate for a relevant time period here might be WAY off) and I had a bowl of stew I didn't finish, what could I do with it? Where would I put it, if I didn't want to throw it away?

-No electricity means no fridges or chilled storage. Would I even have a pantry? Weren't a lot of low-middle class houses kind of small unless you were living on a farm/priory/working for someone rich?
-While there probably was something like a cold cellar for long term storage, maybe owned by a merchant trader or something, I can't imagine people were buying ice blocks back then to keep things cool.
-What kind of foods did people in the 1600s have in their homes? What kind of groceries would a 16th century person buy?
-Did the concept of eating out exist back then? Surely there were places of entertainment you'd go to, a play or a bar or whatever, but did they serve much beyond wine, beer & peanuts?
-If I were a lower class 1600s dude, what kind of things would be on my "shopping list" for food? I have to imagine it would mostly be stuff like potatoes, beans, grains etc.
-Where did people keep their fish and meats, and what kind of people even stored food? How did they store them? Did they cure them, pickle them, stick 'em in barrels etc?
-Were fruits something you either bought from a market or ate off a tree?
-Were leftovers basically slop for the pigs and the poor, if there were any leftovers to begin with?

If you can't tell by now, I recognized that I knew absolutely nothing about this subject, and just kept thinking myself further and further toward newer questions. How did people stock up on food and maintain a pantry in these earlier centuries? I KNOW that there were lots of meats, fruits, veggies, even pastries and desserts, but I've never EVER thought about or learned about how people stored it all.

I wonder what the Egyptians did, they seemed to be pretty cutting-edge and experimental. I'll check out Wikipedia later, but I'm curious about if anyone here knows how our forefathers kept their food from rotting away in days.

[Hiricine]

Food storage---

Lots of grains, that were dried. Think of your rice, pasta, flour, sugar in your kitchen. It basically lasts forever. One of the reasons that Europeans don't develop a lot of the diseases of lifestyle that other races do is because of millennia of exposure to high-carb diets that didn't exist in other parts of the world that didn't have winters.

Spices and salt- ever wonder why you hear so much about the "Spice" trade? You're right on with the "pickling" thing, you could preserve meats by heavily salting them, though meat (especially cows) was a bit of a luxury.

Eating out really did exist, in a very small perspective. The perspective you are looking at is from a modern society where there are large cities that about half of people live in today. The reality is that until the 1900's over 80-85% of people lived and worked on farms their entire lives. You have to take into account the idea of supporting yourself by having a job in the city and buying your own goods would have seemed like a pipe dream to your average person. Most people didn't even have to store food except for winter, since they just grew it every day.

[Deleted]

They could make compote from fruits, vegetables. If you use enough salt, you can preserve meat. In 1600s poor ppl probably did not leave any leftovers.

[Independent voter]

A long time ago, people here had "root cellars" basically holes dug in the ground. It's a lot cooler than above ground.

[Ravenblade]

It's simple. It was not too different to today. If they - for some reason - had leftovers they gave it to the lower servants and animals, otherwise they would eat it later, each house had a region where people dumped their waste. A place of horrible smell and likely a good breeding ground for diseases.

They did use cold storage but it was not sophisticated at first. Everyone knew cold and dry was the best way to conserve. For more delicate foods refrigeration was required, for that matter they did what the Romans did too: ice harvesting. It was stored away in caves and specially built houses. Later on chemical cooling was more commonly used by using certain salts, a method used by ancient Romans and the Arabs later too from which Europeans at the end of the Renaissance ultimately learned it. However it was more used to cool wines, beer and medical substances and not for common food. Buying special salts was hugely expensive at first so in common households spoiling food was the norm and often eaten still. However it became more common as a lot of these salts like saltpetre became more common as well, thanks to the more common use of gunpowder for which saltpetre was used as well.

[Revi]

Stuff was dried/salted/kept cool. A lot of methods varies by region, but those three were pretty much universal. It's why salt was so valuable.

[Elite Peon]

In those days everything you ate was fresh. By the way BILLIONS on this planet have no more technology than Europe had in the 1600's ....a vast number in this world do not have refrigeration or electricity to this day .

[Nutri]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_house_(building)

Ice houses or icehouses are buildings used to store ice throughout the year, commonly used prior to the invention of the refrigerator. Some were underground chambers, usually man-made, close to natural sources of winter ice such as freshwater lakes, but many were buildings with various types of insulation.

During the winter, ice and snow would be cut from lakes or rivers and taken into the ice house and packed with insulation, often straw or sawdust. It would remain frozen for many months, often until the following winter, and could be used as a source of ice during summer months. The main application of the ice was the storage of foods, but it could also be used simply to cool drinks, or allow ice-cream and sorbet desserts to be prepared.

A cuneiform tablet from c. 1780 BC records the construction of an icehouse in the northern Mesopotamian town of Terqa by Zimri-Lim, the King of Mari, "which never before had any king built."[2] In China, archaeologists have found remains of ice pits from the seventh century BC, and references suggest they were in use before 1100 BC. Alexander the Great around 300 BC stored snow in pits dug for that purpose. In Rome in the third century AD, snow was imported from the mountains, stored in straw-covered pits, and sold from snow shops. The ice formed in the bottom of the pits sold at a higher price than the snow on top.[3]

Get diggin' in your garden and store some ice. You are Prepared.

[Flarelaine]

So I was thinking about how a pizza I ordered earlier was cooling down in the fridge, and how it would take a few hours to go from lukewarm to what you'd typically call "fridge pizza", and a question occurred to me;

If I were sitting around somewhere in Europe in the 1600s (Note that my estimate for a relevant time period here might be WAY off) and I had a bowl of stew I didn't finish, what could I do with it? Where would I put it, if I didn't want to throw it away?

-No electricity means no fridges or chilled storage. Would I even have a pantry? Weren't a lot of low-middle class houses kind of small unless you were living on a farm/priory/working for someone rich?
-While there probably was something like a cold cellar for long term storage, maybe owned by a merchant trader or something, I can't imagine people were buying ice blocks back then to keep things cool.
-What kind of foods did people in the 1600s have in their homes? What kind of groceries would a 16th century person buy?
-Did the concept of eating out exist back then? Surely there were places of entertainment you'd go to, a play or a bar or whatever, but did they serve much beyond wine, beer & peanuts?
-If I were a lower class 1600s dude, what kind of things would be on my "shopping list" for food? I have to imagine it would mostly be stuff like potatoes, beans, grains etc.
-Where did people keep their fish and meats, and what kind of people even stored food? How did they store them? Did they cure them, pickle them, stick 'em in barrels etc?
-Were fruits something you either bought from a market or ate off a tree?
-Were leftovers basically slop for the pigs and the poor, if there were any leftovers to begin with?

If you can't tell by now, I recognized that I knew absolutely nothing about this subject, and just kept thinking myself further and further toward newer questions. How did people stock up on food and maintain a pantry in these earlier centuries? I KNOW that there were lots of meats, fruits, veggies, even pastries and desserts, but I've never EVER thought about or learned about how people stored it all.

I wonder what the Egyptians did, they seemed to be pretty cutting-edge and experimental. I'll check out Wikipedia later, but I'm curious about if anyone here knows how our forefathers kept their food from rotting away in days.

I think you could take a pantry for granted. It only provides storage, no cooling, though.

A cellar is a better shot. I doubt people were buying ice blocks, but a cellar with thick earthen walls keeps stuff cool naturally. If you take some snow or ice from your own garden and move it to a cellar, it will keep for months.

I believe most people would not buy groceries. Especially "lower class 1600s dudes"; that practically means peasant which in turn means you eat what you grow. Otherwise, beans, peas and grains are mostly right. Potatoes did not really spread until the next century. Fish and meats were salted, dried, cured.

Oh, and although spices were a luxury at this time in Europe, they had an important role beyond making stuff hot: preservation. There is a reason hot climates have hot foods.

[Doctor Amadeus]

So I was thinking about how a pizza I ordered earlier was cooling down in the fridge, and how it would take a few hours to go from lukewarm to what you'd typically call "fridge pizza", and a question occurred to me;

Funny how that can happen

If I were sitting around somewhere in Europe in the 1600s and I had a bowl of stew I didn't finish, what could I do with it? Where would I put it, if I didn't want to throw it away?

You wouldn't throw it away you would store it, or more importantly you wouldn't have likely made more than you could eat because waste was a deal that could kill you.

-No electricity means no fridges or chilled storage. Would I even have a pantry?

No, well not unless you were very wealthy and even then you better pray you were in the right areas with that money.

-While there probably was something like a cold cellar for long term storage, maybe owned by a merchant trader or something, I can't imagine people were buying ice blocks back then to keep things cool.

Well where you get meat, fish and dairy would be different and how you could enjoy that, however the diet of someone in the 16 Century would likey kill someone like yourself or me or really most living now, that pizza you just is the result of industry bringing a lot of parts together along with technology to do it.

Food was harvested and produced locally, meat itself was a delicacy, most was stored exactly how you described via certain kinds of containers or cellars, not like a cooler per say, they also used things like salt to kill bacteria and make the meat last longer.

But make no mistake the meat you would have even if you were rich wouldn't be much like what you have now, if you could stomach that shit, you very well could become ill just trying to consume it.

-What kind of foods did people in the 1600s have in their homes? What kind of groceries would a 16th century person buy?

Same as we pretty much have today except back then simple things like where you moved what kinds of skills you had to provide for yourself because make no mistake if you didn't take your adult years seriously and you freely roamed to the wrong areas, you would freely be fucked.

SO as such you generally planned accordingly, families were important especially large ones, basically you would hunt, fish, and grow crops if you couldn't do of the prior you better have skill in a small town or big of a town as you could to work or trade for whatever you could, thus the need to have or learn a trade back then.

So to answer your question they would get meat probably about weakly some kind of protein to store, they cooked it and stored it in containers. Typically away from pest.

-Did the concept of eating out exist back then? Surely there were places of entertainment you'd go to, a play or a bar or whatever, but did they serve much beyond wine, beer & peanuts?

Yep they had restaurants or inns rather sure. Wine, yeah depended on the region, beer same thing, Peanuts more than likely.

-If I were a lower class 1600s dude, what kind of things would be on my "shopping list" for food?

hahaha NO! If you were lower class you wouldn't have a list so to speak you would have supplies, like flower, wood, potatoes, carrots if you were lucky that was pretty much it, seasonings and salt perhaps, probably sugar depending on where you were.

I have to imagine it would mostly be stuff like potatoes, beans, grains etc.

Yes, these would be pretty much staples so yes fruits and veggies could be pretty fucking expensive and rare.

-Where did people keep their fish and meats, and what kind of people even stored food? How did they store them? Did they cure them, pickle them, stick 'em in barrels etc?

Smokers, special compartments and, some cured yes, pickle probably yes, barrels also yep

-Were fruits something you either bought from a market or ate off a tree?

Depends on the region in the midwest apples yes, perhaps, but oranges eh you might have an issue, or limes you would not have the buffet you have now not even if you were rich, transporting goods from a distances cost a shit load. Especially perishables.

-Were leftovers basically slop for the pigs and the poor, if there were any leftovers to begin with?

FUCK NO! You ate the slop, that is otherwise known as soup and casseroles and what not, again you lived differently, you killed an animal which was common you ate everything probably including the testicles, to eyeballs.

Slop as you refer to it typically consisted of grains and other perishables no longer edible for human consumption, that has gone bad or was going bad along with water other kinds of misure typically special food for their diets.

If you can't tell by now, I recognized that I knew absolutely nothing about this subject, and just kept thinking myself further and further toward newer questions. How did people stock up on food and maintain a pantry in these earlier centuries?

You sound pretty knowledgeable so far, maybe just not used to thinking about it and neither would anybody else who hasn't especially that era, who will know more than me and most too, I would imagine, but if you can imagine the time you are talking about and what was happening or around you will figure out most pretty easily.

I KNOW that there were lots of meats, fruits, veggies, even pastries and desserts, but I've never EVER thought about or learned about how people stored it all.

Yes parties were made from flower, and along with sugar, it was a pretty easy thing to make with whatever region you were from and could farm or trade for.

I wonder what the Egyptians did, they seemed to be pretty cutting-edge and experimental. I'll check out Wikipedia later, but I'm curious about if anyone here knows how our forefathers kept their food from rotting away in days.

Probably less than you might expect, Egypt is mostly a desert going back even to then, sooo yeah but the great thing was is they were geographically like in the heart of the cross roads between some of the most populated regions. So they had the ability to trade a bit for many kinds of goods and services :P

[Charge me Doctor]

Dig down deep enough, it's quite cold down there, reinforce your pit with wood/stone. Throw your potatoes in there and cover it up properly - bam, a fridge.

[Polyxo]

While I don't know about a bowl of stew, with a pot of stew cooking, you could always just keep it going indefinitely. There's stuff called perpetual stew, where you just keep cooking it forever, eat from it whenever, and just throw in whatever you had.

[Slant]

So I was thinking about how a pizza I ordered earlier was cooling down in the fridge, and how it would take a few hours to go from lukewarm to what you'd typically call "fridge pizza", and a question occurred to me;

If I were sitting around somewhere in Europe in the 1600s (Note that my estimate for a relevant time period here might be WAY off) and I had a bowl of stew I didn't finish, what could I do with it? Where would I put it, if I didn't want to throw it away?

-No electricity means no fridges or chilled storage. Would I even have a pantry? Weren't a lot of low-middle class houses kind of small unless you were living on a farm/priory/working for someone rich?
-While there probably was something like a cold cellar for long term storage, maybe owned by a merchant trader or something, I can't imagine people were buying ice blocks back then to keep things cool.
-What kind of foods did people in the 1600s have in their homes? What kind of groceries would a 16th century person buy?
-Did the concept of eating out exist back then? Surely there were places of entertainment you'd go to, a play or a bar or whatever, but did they serve much beyond wine, beer & peanuts?
-If I were a lower class 1600s dude, what kind of things would be on my "shopping list" for food? I have to imagine it would mostly be stuff like potatoes, beans, grains etc.
-Where did people keep their fish and meats, and what kind of people even stored food? How did they store them? Did they cure them, pickle them, stick 'em in barrels etc?
-Were fruits something you either bought from a market or ate off a tree?
-Were leftovers basically slop for the pigs and the poor, if there were any leftovers to begin with?

If you can't tell by now, I recognized that I knew absolutely nothing about this subject, and just kept thinking myself further and further toward newer questions. How did people stock up on food and maintain a pantry in these earlier centuries? I KNOW that there were lots of meats, fruits, veggies, even pastries and desserts, but I've never EVER thought about or learned about how people stored it all.

I wonder what the Egyptians did, they seemed to be pretty cutting-edge and experimental. I'll check out Wikipedia later, but I'm curious about if anyone here knows how our forefathers kept their food from rotting away in days.

A lot of the food you eat is prepared in a special way mainly because that's how it was done in the olden times to preserve it. Pickling, smoking etc. The rest was given to the pigs. And if you lived in the 1600s, having "too much food" was rarely on the top of your list of things to worry about. Labor was manual, exhausting labor in those days. And the working folks usually didn't have enough food as it was to "not finish food". The main reason for preservation of food was not the daily "how do I keep it fresh to eat it tomorrow?" but rather "How do I keep this fresh to last through the entire winter?"

This is where grain storage and smoking meat comes into play. And pickling veggies. Fish can also be conserved in very salty solutions and of course, being smoked. In winter, temperatures make it easier to just keep shit cool.

The main goal here is to prevent bacteria from destroying your food. Cold temps and salty environments are the two main helpers here. And keeping stuff dry, like Hiricine says.

[Kaleredar]

You wouldn't not finish your bowl of stew. People didn't have food to waste in the 1600s to just go and grab whatever they wanted whenever they wanted.


Also, you wonder why so many "traditional" foods are things that have been fermented forever and a half and smell like death but are technically edible? Because way back whensies people would store whatever food they could scrap together in whatever means they had possible and, if they lived to tell the tale after eating it, had a new way to stave off starvation for that much longer.


Almost all food that wasn't eaten fresh would have been salted and packed or jarred (meats, fruits, vegetables, etc) and likely stored in a cellar if one was available, probably dug into the ground where it was cool. That would have been true of almost every culture, anywhere in the world, for several hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

[FuxieDK]

Leftovers didn't really exist, back in the days... But ingredients had to be stored for time, prior to use..

You salted food, to pull the water out of meat/fish, making it possible to last months to years (depending on surrounding humidity)..
When you need to eat it, you let it soak in water for a couple of hours, maybe a day.

This is why, salt was called "white gold".. It was extremely valuable and hard to produce.

[Shelly]

In those days everything you ate was fresh. By the way BILLIONS on this planet have no more technology than Europe had in the 1600's ....a vast number in this world do not have refrigeration or electricity to this day .

HA! No they didn't.

Smoking, drying, pickling, fermenting and cold storage. All have been listed already.

Salt pork, salted fish, fermented fish sauces, buttermilk in the root cellar, soup stocks left with a fat cap still on to keep air out and it from going rancid.

Oh and people died a lot of bad food and bad water.

Constipation was a huge issue as well.

[Slant]

Haha, no.

Salted meat/fish was a stable. Huge amounts of ice were cut from lakes/sea during February~ and it could be stored in ice cellars where it was covered with thick layers of saw dust to keep it from melting. The ice could stay frozen all up to October.

That's the bit that always fascinates me. How they actually manage to insulate shit so well that ice can be held on storage until next winter. That's all kinds of awesome, considering how much money we spend on modern tech to achieve something that's barely any better.

[Donald Hellscream]

I know that everything that could be preserved via curing would be preserved, since salted food basicly lasts forever.

This was especially a thing for sailors as they'd be on the sea for extended periods of time and as such needed food that wouldn't expire throughout their trip.

[Slant]

I know that everything that could be preserved via curing would be preserved, since salted food basicly lasts forever.

This was especially a thing for sailors as they'd be on the sea for extended periods of time and as such needed food that wouldn't expire throughout their trip.

"Forever" is perhaps a bit too optimistic. Mould is still a thing, even when smoked or salted. The only thing you can reliably prevent is rotting.

[MonsieuRoberts]

I guess I really discounted the longevity provided by salting your food. Well, discounted is the wrong word, I simply didn't recognize how long it would keep your food preserved. And why would I? I don't salt and preserve anything haha.

Cool to read about the ingenuity of people having the foresight to take snow and ice and insulate it in a shed or underground thousands upon thousands of years in the past. 1700 BC is a long fucking time ago! And yet, some things haven't changed much.

And I suppose I already knew that everyone had to grow their own food. Not many options when you have no money, can barely make any money, possess acres of land and aren't born into a wealthy family. Fief kingdoms and all that, I'm getting grade 8 social studies flashbacks.