Curing (food preservation)
Curing can be traced back to antiquity, and was the primary method of preserving meat and fish until the late 19th century.
While meat-preservation processes like curing were mainly developed in order to prevent disease and to increase food security, the advent of modern preservation methods mean that in most developed countries today[update], curing is instead mainly practiced for its cultural value and desirable impact on the texture and taste of food.
Salt-curing processes were developed in antiquity[9] in order to ensure food safety without relying on then unknown anti-bacterial agents.
Curing significantly increases the length of time meat remains edible, by making it inhospitable to the growth of microbes.
[15] Nitrates and nitrites extend shelf life,[citation needed] help kill bacteria, produce a characteristic flavor and give meat a pink or red color.
[17][21] The use of nitrites in food preservation is highly controversial[22] due to the potential for the formation of nitroso-compounds such as nitrosamines, N-nitrosamides and nitrosyl-heme.
[16] The meat industry considers nitrites irreplaceable because they speed up curing and improve color while retarding the growth of Clostridium botulinum,[17] the bacteria that causes botulism.
Botulism, however, is an extremely rare disease (less than 1000 cases per year reported worldwide) and is almost always associated with home preparations of preserved food.
Consumer Reports and the Center for Science in the Public Interest filed a formal request to the USDA to change the labeling requirements in 2019.
[33] In North America, hardwoods such as hickory, mesquite, and maple are commonly used for smoking, as are the wood from fruit trees such as apple, cherry, and plum, and even corncobs.
In particular, by analyzing entrecôtes of frozen beef during 270 days at −20 °C (−4 °F), scientists found an important phospholipase that accompanies the loss of some unsaturated fat n-3 and n-6, which are already low in the flesh of ruminants.
[37][38][21] A survival technique since prehistory, the preservation of meat has become, over the centuries, a topic of political, economic, and social importance worldwide.
The Roman gourmet Apicius speaks of a sausage-making technique involving œnogaros (a mixture of the fermented fish sauce garum with oil or wine).
[42] In Ethiopia, according to Pliny,[45][clarification needed] and in Libya according to Saint Jerome, the Acridophages (literally, the locust-eaters) salted and smoked the crickets which arrived at their settlements in the spring in great swarms and which constituted, it was said, their sole food.
The first French recipe, written in verse by Gace de La Bigne, mentions in the same pâté three great partridges, six fat quail, and a dozen larks.
Bartolomeo Sacchi, called Platine, prefect of the Vatican Library, gives the recipe for a pâté of wild beasts: the flesh, after being boiled with salt and vinegar, was larded and placed inside an envelope of spiced fat, with a mélange of pepper, cinnamon and pounded lard; one studded the fat with cloves until it was entirely covered, then placed it inside a pâte.
[49] In the same era, Pierre Belon notes that the inhabitants of Crete and Chios lightly salted then oven-dried entire hares, sheep, and roe deer cut into pieces, and that in Turkey, cattle and sheep, cut and minced rouelles, salted then dried, were eaten on voyages with onions and no other preparation.
[50] During the Age of Discovery, salt meat was one of the main foods for sailors on long voyages, for instance in the merchant marine or the navy.
The need to properly feed soldiers during long campaigns outside the country, such as in the Napoleonic Wars, and to nourish a constantly growing population often living in appalling conditions drove scientific research, but a confectioner, Nicolas Appert, in 1795 developed through experimentation a method which became universal and in one language bears his name: airtight storage, called appertisation in French.
With the spread of appertisation, the 19th-century world entered the era of the "food industry", which developed new products such as canned salt meat (for example corned beef).
In France, the summer of 1857 was so hot that most butchers refused to slaughter animals and charcutiers lost considerable amounts of meat, due to inadequate conservation methods.
A member of the Academy of Medicine and his son issued a 34-page summary of works completed by 1857, which proposed some solutions: not less than 91 texts exist, of which 64 edited for only the years between 1851 and 1857.
For example, the appearance in the 1980s of preservation techniques under controlled atmosphere sparked a small revolution in the world's market for sheep meat: the lamb of New Zealand, one of the world's largest exporters of lamb, could henceforth be sold as fresh meat, since it could be preserved from 12 to 16 weeks, which was a sufficient duration for it to reach Europe by boat.
