18th Century Egg Preservation

[minoanmiss]

"The Top 6 Historical Egg Preservation Techniques!" (Watch on YouTube)

acelightning turned me on to this guy. I adore his plump cheeks and cheerful smile and clear explanations!

Comments

[bikergeek]

Useful skills for the zombie post global warming apocalypse.

[minoanmiss]

Stockpile quicklime!

[acelightning]

And SciShow (I love Hank Green, too - I've always been attracted to tall skinny geeky guys) explains why we shouldn't need to preserve our eggs. I don't know why American hens aren't vaccinated against salmonella, because that's also the biggest risk in handling raw poultry (or not cooking it enough).

Incidentally, have you ever eaten really fresh eggs, like no more than a few days old? I have some friends who started keeping chickens, because one of them is so allergic to soy that he can't eat the meat, milk, or eggs of any animal that's been raised on soy-based feed, which means he can't eat any commercial protein foods. They fed the chickens on cracked corn, table scraps, and what the chickens foraged for themselves in the hen yard. My friends served me scrambled eggs for breakfast, and the difference in flavor was so startling - I had trouble accepting that these had anything in common with supermarket eggs. I know where there are a few small farms near me that sell fresh eggs, if I want to be bothered going out of my way to get them, and chickens hardly lay any eggs at all in the winter. (Commercial "egg factories" have artificial light timing and heated barns to trick the chickens into laying eggs all year.)

Jon Townsend is a really interesting person. Apart from all facets of historical reconstruction, his other hobby is amateur radio!

[minoanmiss]

I have been fortunate enough to have really fresh eggs. My maternal grandmother kept hens for eggs and meat, and I just thought eggs in Jamaica tasted better than in New York the way oranges and bananas tasted better. And when I was at the Academy I made friends with a family who kept chicks and ducks and brought me my first duck eggs, with luminously orange yolks and incomparable richness. A really good egg can hold the whole world in it, can't it?

[acelightning]

My family once drove to Florida because that's where my grandfather was dying. Just inside the Florida state line there was a "welcome to Florida" visitors' center. They had a machine that squeezed oranges, and every visitor got a free glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. I was startled by how much better it tasted than the stuff from a cardboard container.

I've never had the courage to try a duck egg - especially the Chinese ones that are preserved and aged and all that. But in many cultures, an egg is considered a symbol of the Universe...

[gingicat]

My challah recipe calls for three eggs and two egg yolks. When MM's student brought her duck eggs, I tested it and discovered that one chicken egg plus one duck egg is the same as that.

[acelightning]

I got a copy of The Sioux Chef - Indigenous Kitchen for a winter holiday gift last year. Any recipe that includes eggs refer to duck eggs, because most Native Americans didn't keep chickens. The book says that if you can't get duck eggs, use extra-large chicken eggs, but they urge the reader to try to get duck eggs for the flavor.

[minoanmiss]

Actually, fresh duck eggs taste just like chicken eggs but richer (because their yolk is not only larger overall but proportionately larger). I don't like preserved duck eggs, which are really sulfurous and rubbery, but such is life.

Ah, fresh orange juice...

[acelightning]

If the ducks are fed some kind of "duck chow", I'd expect that they'd taste like chicken eggs. But if the dugs forage on the bottom of a pond, I'd expect them to taste very different. And I'm just not brave enough to try Asian preserved duck eggs, no matter how much good luck they're supposed to cause.

Grandma-food things: people used to have hand-held citrus juicers (they usually had one side that was big enough for an orange, and the other side was small enough for a lemon), and when they wanted a glass of orange juice they'd take a fresh orange and juice it into a glass. That's basically what the machine in the Florida tourist-info stop was doing. So people used to drink fresh-squeezed orange juice all the time. Then during World War 2, the citrus industry developed new ways to keep some of the fresh-squeezed flavor in packaged juice to send to the troops. And we all helped our moms stir frozen concentrate into a pitcher of water, or poured our OJ from a bottle or a cardboard container. (Frozen orange juice concentrate is useful in cooking.)

[minoanmiss]

Oh, when I was a kid those handheld juicers were all over the place in Jamaica. I remember operating my paternal grandmother's a few times.

[acelightning]

YOu can still buy the stamped-metal kind, if not the pressed-glass kind. You might find them in an Asian grocery store's "housewares" department.

Townends

[dialecticdreamer]

Try his mushroom ketchup recipe- well worth doing and DRY the mushrooms and spices afterward for an extra flavor kick in other dishes. Fantastic stuff.

[cjsmith]

oooo! saving to read later

[eller]

That's... fascinating. O_O I'm just glad I can always get fresh eggs where I live!

[oracne]

Neato!!!

[purlewe]

I have loved watching him build things. I watched him build an outdoor oven once. He has such enthusiasm and happiness. (I will admit that when i watched the oven episode I was reminded that he does the style of re-enactment that i used to do as a kid and the company he represents and the items they sold were at the event I used to work. I always considered their items of the top most quality and I was pleased that they are making videos now to share info of the time period.)

This was the oven ep I loved: https://youtu.be/i0foHjPVbP4