The Smokehouse

Before refrigeration and canning were developed, salt curing and smoking were the only ways to preserve fish, poultry, beef, and pork, so almost every farm family had a smokehouse and many cities had commercial smokehouses that sold smoked meats. A smokehouse was a building where meat or fish was cured with smoke, and the finished product might be stored there for a year or more; even when smoke was not used, such a building was sometimes still called a smoke house, while meat house was also a common term. The lower interior walls of both meat houses and smokehouses were marked by heavy salt deposits on the wood, while the upper areas of smokehouses were blackened by smoke; a meat house had a solid wood floor, but a smokehouse had a brick pit in the center of the dirt floor or sometimes a broken or discarded cast-iron pot for the fire. These structures served both as meat smokers and storage facilities, and communal smokers, like shared bread ovens, supplied many families because such facilities were too expensive for one household to own. Their main purpose was preservation rather than flavor, achieved through salt curing and prolonged cold smoking that took about two weeks or more, after which the meat continued to hang in another area, sometimes for up to two years, losing more moisture and taking on more smoke. The meat was not cooked to an internal temperature of 160° F because that would have required a stronger fire and filled the building with flames, and before refrigeration this method represented state-of-the-art meat technology. In nineteenth century Texas, smokehouses were important for preserving meat for long periods, especially after winter hog butchering, and the logs for this example came from a storage building given by Jimmy Weedon of the Harvey Community.

Bryan, Texas · United States