Green olives are preserved by various curing methods including being treated with lye or brining. And various foods are also preserved in olive oil, like anchovies and other fish.
And maybe a nephew of Pratchett’s dwarf bread.
Butter. And, taking it a step further, bog butter. Though you don’t see that so often these days. Not where I shop, anyways.
j
Honey is, I think, the ultimate preserved food – you don’t have to do anything, and it keeps forever. They’ve found ancient Egyptian honey. It’ll also preserve other things, provided it can penetrate to all parts of the thing preserved (otherwise you end up with a putrefying mass under the honey).
Of course, there are lots of sun-dried vegetables and herbs that will keep a long time – think of sun-dried tomatoes, dried chiles, mushrooms, and so on. You don’t need a modern dessicator or freeze-drier to make these – just let them dry in the sun until most of the water is gone from them Think of all those garlands of such things you see in old stores or native villages.
And there’s always Hakarl – Greenland shark that has been buried for several months to ferment, then hung up to dry. (although apparently modern hakarl is made in a less traumatic way). The fermentation is necessary because Greenland Shark has dangerously high levels of urea, and is poisonous if eaten fresh. The fernmentation reduces this, much of it turning into ammonia, and resulting in something hat merely makes novice eaters throw up. I’m not sure how long it keeps once it’s dried, but I’m guessing a long time.
In fact, they still have some left of the very first shark preserved this way!
And if you turn the butter into ghee, it will last indefinitely at room temperature.
How about some rotten birds stuffed in a seal skin?
Any of the edible molds and fungus: dried mushrooms, huitlacoche (corn smut), natto, tempeh.
On most of that stuff, I always wonder who took the first bite? Extreme hunger is a powerful motivator!
~VOW
No matter how long you leave it, hakarl will never get any worse.
Do grains count? Keep moisture and bugs out of rice, it’ll last a long time. I thing even with the bugs, it’ll be cool to eat-- extra protein!
I have no idea if this is true or not, but somewhere I read that lutefisk is now more popular in Minnesota than it is in Norway. Supposedly in Norway lutefisk was considered “poor people’s food”, and thus people wouldn’t eat it unless they really had to. The Norwegians who immigrated to the US mostly were those poor people, so they were the ones who felt nostalgic for the lutefisk they ate back in the old country and introduced it to the Upper Midwest.
“Never underestimate the courage of the French. It was they who discovered that snails are edible.”
A while ago, there was a thread that speculated on the origins of cooking. One poster imagined a group of prehistoric children playing around, and accidentally dropping their food into the fire, and the mother rolling her eyes and saying, “You spoiled it; you eat it.”
Another poster imagined a group of male teenagers sitting around the fire and saying, “I dare you to eat that.”
Confit is a different method of preservation then has been mentioed. I’m not sure how acient it is though.
Confit is basically a kind of potted meat, in which hot cooked meat is covered in a layer of fat and allowed to cool. The fat keeps out bacteria and prevents spoilage. According to this, the method dates from at least the medieval period.
There’s a question that has always fascinated me - how in the world did people 7000 years ago reach the level of knowledge to render olives edible?
“OK, Phil. These olives are way too bitter to eat, so let’s soak them for a couple of days in water that’s been strained through our campfire ashes. Then we’ll toss them into a bucket of sea water and leave them for a year or two. Then we’ll have something to put in our martinis!”
Dried and cured sausages haven’t been mentioned yet. I think that the ancient Romans had sausages?
We tend to think of ham as just pork, but I’ve seen references to mutton ham in books from the 1800s and early 1900s and it probably goes back much farther than that.
madsircool mentioned “dried salami-type things” earlier. But he didn’t expand that to include cured sausages. Or does “salami” cover that?
Oy, 'dey watched the birdies do it. 'Dat’s how a lot of foods be discovered, init?
Isn’t charcuterie the umbrella term for all the preserved meat products?
Salami is just one kind of salt-cured fermented, air-dried sausage. There are many other kinds.And sausages can also be preserved by being smoked.