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Meat Potting: An Almost Forgotten Skill Worth Rediscovering: That Old Tradition

The document discusses the traditional skill of potting meat to preserve extra meat from slaughtered animals. Meat would be cooked, packed into jars or crocks, and covered in fat to prevent decomposition. Families would dig into the preserved meat throughout the winter, recooking it to ensure safety before eating.

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41 views2 pages

Meat Potting: An Almost Forgotten Skill Worth Rediscovering: That Old Tradition

The document discusses the traditional skill of potting meat to preserve extra meat from slaughtered animals. Meat would be cooked, packed into jars or crocks, and covered in fat to prevent decomposition. Families would dig into the preserved meat throughout the winter, recooking it to ensure safety before eating.

Uploaded by

Uniss
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Meat Potting: An Almost Forgotten Skill Worth

Rediscovering
When people slaughtered their own animals, the amount of meat produced was usually
much more than could be eaten before the meat began to rot. People evolved other
methods for saving this extra meat for later too, such as dry curing and smoking. Potting
meat was another means of storing food, and that old tradition lives on today in several
parts of the United States.

Early potted meat usually involved the meat of one animal only, most commonly pork. Meat
might be ground, or not, and then cooked. The most common method was to use chunks of
meat well cooked.

The fat from these chunks of meat was saved and poured onto and around the meat,
usually in large jars or in a large crock pot and the fat would help keep the meat from
decomposition. Some people added spices to the meat, or made sausages from it, so the
meat preserved this way had more flavor. As much meat as possible was pressed into the
jars so that they formed a compressed, relatively soft end product. This is how we did it. I
remember when early in the morning dad killed a pig and started cutting it up. He gave the
pieces to mom who had the wood stove in the kitchen hot and ready to cook. She started
frying the pork and prepared the 10 gallon crock pot. This pot was about 18 inches in
diameter and 24 inches deep. Mother washed it, and got it just as clean as she could get it.
As the pork fried, it gave off lots of grease. She took some of this very hot grease and
poured it into the bottom of the crock, sealing and sterilizing the bottom. Then she put the
meat she had just finished cooking down onto this

 grease.

As she continued to cook throughout the day she added the well fried meat and covered it
with the hot fat that came from the cooking process. By the evening the pig was all fried-up
and in the pot, covered over with a nice layer of lard that had hardened. As the days passed
by, we dug down into the lard to where the meat was, pulled out what we needed, and put
it in the frying pan. We cooked it a second time to kill any bacteria that could have possibly
gotten into it. Doing this not only re-sterilized the meat for eating, but melted off all the
excess fat. The meat was taken out of the pan and the fat was poured back into the pot to
seal up the hole we had just made getting the meat out.

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