Chapter 212: Screaming, Stomping and Gnashing of Teeth

By: Emmeran, 27 July 2022

Editor: nnpdad 28 July 2022

The tour of the warehouse and food stocks took up that entire afternoon, just watching the processing of the sun-dried fruits and vegetables took the better part of a half-hour. Granted that was a half-hour also spent snacking on fresh sun-dried raisins; it was a personal sacrifice for the greater good and all that.

Every bit of it was labor intensive work. You didn’t just hang things out to dry and then forget about them, you had to bring the racks out of storage every morning and return them at night. Constantly monitoring the humidity was key and technology helped us there.

I had a small box of cheap thermometer/hydrometers from one of the farm stores I shopped at, costing something like four bucks each. Those were cheap and handy when camping and hunting in any century. Normally I’d hand one out to every tent and have one in the general camp area. Now they were being deployed with care into all of the storage locations where we needed them.

Sometimes the simplest of technological advances turned out to be the most useful - the can opener being a perfect example. Though canning started before the Napoleonic wars, a decent can opener wasn’t invented until the 1920’s. The first design for the pocket version known in the United States as the P38/P51 appeared in Popular Mechanics magazine. Before that it was pretty much a man, a can and his knife, not exactly the safest way to open a can.

Of course we didn’t have the resources for canning yet so, once dried, everything was stored in barrels or clay pots. The clay lid would be sealed with the least amount of wax possible and then with liquified lard, tallow or some other oil pooled over that to keep the seal air tight. In controlled temperatures the fully rendered lard or tallow would stay good for more than a year.

The capper to all the storage was the testing that was going on. One of the previously enslaved ladies was walking around testing the pH and fluid density of the pickling brine and saline storage and charting the results. I could see the hidden hand of our resident chemical engineer at work and truly appreciated it. The pickled items needed to be checked often anyway; you had to press the food down and insure the weights were keeping everything well underwater so nothing could introduce bacteria to the stored food.