Ancient Agriculture: Drying and Curing
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318410023_The_history_of_using_solar_energy
Water constitutes a large proportion of a food's weight and allows for that food to decompose much easier, so dehydrated food provides a lighter weight source of food year round even before settled agriculture that is relatively safe from bacteria, yeast, and mold. Dehydrating food is one of the oldest ways of preserving foods, with the earliest evidence going back to 12,000 BCE. The earliest forms of food dehydration were likely leaving the food out in the sun in dry climates. Foods were often flattened or sliced and hung to dry to allow air to circulate and pull away moisture more thoroughly. Almost every ancient culture around the world dried nearly every type of food to preserve it, and some, like the ancient Egyptians, provided dried foods for the dead to have food in the afterlife.
Source: https://www.volpifoods.com/blog/history-of-curing-meat/
Curing comes in several forms and both preserves and flavors the foods, typically meat, fish, and vegetables, while drawing out moisture. Though drying is a type of curing, curing most often involves using something like smoke or salt, especially with meat and fish.
By Jan van der Crabben - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=304380
Smoking is a form of processing that can be used alone or with drying or salting as the smoke is antimicrobial and an antioxidant. The antioxidant property helps keep oily fish from going rancid, allowing it to be salted and then stored for weeks or months without modern refrigeration. It likely goes as far back as the Paleolithic period. There are two main types of smoking, cold and hot, with cold smoking being between 20-30 °C and does not cook the food, just infuses the smoke through the food, flavoring it. Often this is done after the food has been dried first, over a period of days, and salting can be done after to preserve the food. Hot smoking happens between 52-80 °C and can happen from 1-24 hours. Because of the higher temperature, foods that are hot smoked are safe to eat. Higher temperatures result in moisture and fat cooking away, resulting in the food shrinking, buckling, or splitting.
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Salting uses salt or brine, a salty solution, to preserve food as salt kills most bacteria, pathogenic organisms, and fungi by pulling water out of cells via osmosis, where water flows along a concentration gradient to higher to lower concentrations. Evidence of salt curing exists in the writings of the ancient Greeks, as in the writings of Diodore of Sicily in the 1st century BCE, who wrote in his Bibliotheca historica that the Cosséens, a group of nomadic shepherds made of 'warriors et de brigands' in the Persian mountains, 'salted the flesh of carnivorous animals'. The ancient Greeks also prepared salted meat and fish in a dish they called tarichos (τάριχος). The Romans called the dish salsamentum, a word that later included the sauces and spices as well as the salted fat used for its preparation. Sausage making, which also included salting the meat prior to making it. Salted meat was also traded across ancient Europe, with people like the Gauls exporting salt pork to the Romans, who would further process it.
