Since discovering new sausages and new cheeses is a hobby of mine, and since I live in an area where I can stop by a European Foods shoppe and eyeball a completely new kind of sausage or dried up cheese, I do so now and again. A few days ago I picked up a hunk of Sujuk. Just tried it. Damned tasty stuff. Dried beef sausage.
Which got me thinking and poking and for the Googling I’ve done so far I cannot find a satisfactory answer so I turn to the Teeming Masses.
Why not dried sausage on long ocean voyages? It would have had lower salt content, and more spices to preserve the meat instead. It would have likely been more flavorful.
Plenty of articles on dried salted meat, hard tack, blah blah. But this method of making fairly hard very spicy sausage goes back, oh, a few thousand years. Like…4,000.
Why not have long strings of dried meats in casings instead of slabs of deeply salted ( gag) meat?
And, a corollary query: If one DID decide to provision for a year-long ocean voyage with unknown possibility for putting into port AND one was aware of the danger of Scurvy, why not use the dried herbal remedies for scurvy and grind up into a powder dried citrus fruits when making said sausage in casings? Would not enough Vitamin C survive the process to be of use on the high seas in preventing scurvy?
As noted, spices were expensive. Also, I’m not sure of their preservative qualities. ISTM that they’re more useful for masking the flavour of meat that might be ‘a bit beyond its use-by date’.
Up here, Landjägers are very popular. These are dried and smoked, and keep for a long time. Think of those pepperoni sticks you see at the checkout counter of a convenience store, but thicker, drier and not as greasy. They don’t need to be refrigerated, and you can carry them on your hikes for several days. I tend to buy them ten at a time (for the price break), but I don’t get around to eating all of them for a while. I’ll put them in the fridge, and they’ll stay there for weeks. After a while there will be spots of mold on the outside. These are easily cut off, and the sausage is fine. But that’s stored in a refrigerator for several weeks. In the damp environment of a ship, where it can often be very hot? I don’t know. Salami and many other sausages have mold growing on their skins, but ISTM that this is a specific variety of mold. I just don’t know if sausages would keep as long as salted beef, pork, or fish.
I don’t think this is all that mysterious. There is work involved in going from meat to sausage - grinding, mixing, other ingredients, stuffing, etc. Therefore sausage is more expensive than the original meat. Cheap wins.
**Why salted beef/pork and not sausages during the Golden Age of Naval Power? **
The answer is botulism, which wasn’t well understood until the 19th century. Botulism was known as the sausage disease and even the word has its roots in Latin word for sausage which is botulus.
Botulism is not a problem with dried or salted whole meats and fish but when the meat is ground the bacteria find a nice environment inside the sausage. Nitrates are now used to prevent the problem. Spices help with flavor but do not prevent botulism.
Iv’e read a number of books about 18th and 19th century explorers. Dosen’t make me any kind of expert. But it sure does make me hungry.
Scurvy was a real proplem. The Franklin expidition trying to find the northwest passage tried canned food for the first time. It was badly prepared and full of lead and under cooked.
To the OP, sausage and such does last a bit. Now I’m hungry again.
I think the problem with scurvy was that they didn’t really use the scientific method, and just because Dr. Mountebank’s herbal scurvy cure seemed to work, it may well have been that the patients were eating onions or peas or something else with vitamin C in them at the same time.
It took until the mid18th century for someoneto actually do controlled experiments that proved citrus fruit had a pronounced antiscorbutic effect.
Despite all that, vitamin C itself wasn’t actually discovered until shockingly recently- 1933 or so.