ottawa foodies

nordicfoodlab.org

Food enhanced by ageing in the earth.

"Peat bogs are, by their nature, cold, wet places; almost no oxygen circulates in the millennia-old build-up of plant material, which creates highly acidic conditions (our site had a pH of 3.5). Sphagnum moss bogs have remarkable preservation properties, the mechanisms of which are poorly understood (7). Early food preservation methods have been researched extensively by Daniel C. Fisher, in relation to the preservation of meat. In an attempt to recreate techniques used by paleoamericans in North America, Fisher sunk various meats into a frozen pond and a peat bog. A key finding from his research is that after one year, bacterial counts on the submerged meats were comparable to control samples which had been left in a freezer for the same amount of time (8). In fact, suitable foods can probably be aged in many types of soil: salt-rich that will provide dehydration, very cold/freezing that will freeze foods or slow degradation, or, as in our case, anaerobic and acidic conditions to prevent microbial action and oxidation. To our canny ancestors, this preserving characteristic provided an ideal place to bury foods (9)."

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The Chinese age salted eggs, distilled alcohol and other things in amphora buried in the ground. I guess this is a similar method from Ireland and Scotland.

The article also had this list:

Buried foods around the world

banana bread (Ethiopia, banana dough),

buried eggs (China, eggs),

davuke (Fiji, bread fruit);

formaggio di Fossa (Italy, cheese);

ghee (India, clarified butter);

gravadlax (Scandinavia, salmon);

gubenkraut (Austria, cabbage);

hákarl (Greenland, Greenland shark);

igunaq (Inuit Arctic, walrus);

kiviak (Greenland, auks in a seal skin):

lutefisk (Scandinavia, white fish);

muktuk (Alaska, seal flipper);

reindeer’s stomach (Sápmi, Sweden, stomach with contents);

rue tallow (Faroe Islands & Iceland, sheep’s tallow);

sealskin poke (Alaska, meat/dried fish with seal fat);

smen (Morocco, clarified butter);

surmjølk/myrmjølk (Norway, milk);

Fascinating stuff! Thanks for sharing, Francis. :-)

Very neat stuff. I wish it had said how the butter tasted, and whether it tasted like it did when it went in, or if it tasted more like cultured butter after.

They said the early samples absorbed flavors from the earth (new meaning to the word terroir ?), and the larger block sampled at a year and a half tasted good.

I was thinking, people back then probably had an average lifespan of . . . oh 35 years ? If you bury the butter for 7 years, that's a significant portion of your lifetime. Just from that, I think it must have been good.

This might explain why finding bog butter is not uncommon . . . people buried it, but stuff happened and they didn't survive to enjoy their treasure.