These days historians really are trying as a discipline to move away from great men and great events. That said, there are several reasons why these sorts of details are hard to find:
When training as an historian, so much emphasis is put on making an argument. This technology was important because. That event was important because. What were the causes of x? What were the consequences of y? And we’re also trained to look at detail and say, “So what? How does that advance my argument?” And if the answer is “It doesn’t, I just thought it was interesting,” that’s what gets cut when we go over wordcount (we always go over wordcount).
The exception to this is the technique called ‘thick description,’ which I assume we stole from anthropology or possibly sociology. Thick description is a technique for historical writing that piles on all of the details, in the belief that you need as much context as possible in order to understand an historical event or decision.
If we have the sources—and a lot of the time we do—historians can and often do go into great detail about the daily life of people in whatever time at whatever place. But this sort of detail, while commonly included in historical writing, is not usually easy to find. It’s supporting evidence for some other point, not the point itself, which means it won’t be in the keywords or title. So, I know Peter Wilson’s doorstopper Europe’s Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Year’s War has quite a lot of information about the organisation, weaponry, food, payment and clothing of the armies involved, and the occasions on which they lost their shoes or resorted to cannibalism, but that’s because I’ve read it. It’s not going to show up as the first result in a search for any of those things.
Then there are the paywalls. There’s some great stuff stuck behind some hefty paywalls. Enough said on that one, though if you have a university library account you might be in luck.
Rather than looking for histories and articles, try going to the sources. There are a lot of online databases with digitised sources and historical texts. Recipe books, household tips and travel writing are often very good for specific details. So are military intelligence reports, particularly for terrain and speed.
Most university and research libraries have library guides—libguides—which are intended to point researchers in the right direction for sources.
Add terms like ‘primary sources’ ‘database’ ‘libguides’ to your search strings: ‘primary sources recipe books’ or ‘historical travel writing database’ or ‘historical agricultural guidebooks’ or ‘libguides architectural history.’
‘Experimental archaeology’ is a subdiscipline dedicated to replicating historical crafting techniques.
And of course gutenberg.org, hathitrust.org and archive.org have many digitised books, periodicals and pamphlets.
If you are looking for scholarly articles, try scholar.google.com and academia.edu – the latter often has articles uploaded that you can read for free. It does have a search function but you can also do a google search ‘site:academia.edu [your keywords here]’
Then there’s search engine techniques. The first thing I’d suggest is what I think of as ‘broaden and backstop.’ You break down the question in bits. So for egrets:
‘Egret recipe’ gave me a recipe for ‘Heron Rosted’ from 15th century England which suggests roasting a heron in the same method as a crane (one must look elsewhere for how to roast a crane) and serving with a sauce of ‘gynger, vynegre & Mustard.’ ‘Egret distribution’ gives me Wikipedia, which tells me egrets migrate, so their availability in Poland will depend on the time of year. ‘egret weight’ tells me the little egret is about 310g, so one egret would probably only feed one person. And ‘taboo eating egret’ tells me that eating egrets was taboo in Irish and Bantu culture, but brings me nothing specifically about Poland, suggesting that it at least wouldn’t have been seen as sacrilege to eat an egret there.
‘Stonecarving tools archaeology’ gives me the website ‘The Art of Making in Antiquity: Stoneworking in the Roman world’, with many essays and videos on the processes involved.
‘Medieval soap recipes’ led me to the works of Susan Verberg, who has collected, tried and published a number of soap recipes, including medicinal, cosmetic and laundry soap, explaining the purpose of each ingredient.
For my own fiction research, I’ve spent a lot of time on wikipedia looking up the geographic distribution and common names of various animals & plants. I spent a lot of time looking at anthropological texts from the nineteenth century about Māori and Pasifika myths, legends and cultural practices. A lot of it is written by terribly superior 19th century White Academica, but the information is still useful. The New Zealand Electronic Texts Collection–a database run by Victoria University–has an extensive collection of digitised texts. I’ve also looked at a lot of early twentieth century labour history, trying to develop a rhetoric for a fictional group of radical political activists, and here as well I’ve had more luck looking at pamphlets published by early twentieth century radicals than at history books.
Or some slightly more in-depth information about salt mining: