Originally Posted by
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.