Salt Pork Stew - Campfire Survival Food

Imagine you're on a two-month expedition into the wilderness and all you have to eat is salt pork, dried peas, and ship's biscuit. This is the life of the French Voyageurs in the late 18th century. They're living a life where they're going into the frontier constantly. Going with large boats, large canoes, and going into the frontier to trade for furs with the Native Americans. Rivers and lakes of this time period were the superhighways. They're the way that people can get into the deep frontier in North America to access these markets that they would never be able to get to in any other way. They're using birchbark canoes. They're also using bateaus made of regular wooden planks. They're being manned by these Voyageurs and boatmen. And it takes a special kind of person to be able to do this job. You can imagine going into the frontier. It's hard enough to live in the woods, but you also have to paddle or work these boats 12 and 16 hours a day. Some of the most difficult physical labor possible in a very dangerous environment. Our French Canadian Voyageurs are from Quebec, and yet the area they're working within extends much further west, further south, and even further north. The region in which they're working in is huge. They are the long-haul truckers of the late 18th century. Their travels could take them easily 1,000 miles into the wilderness. There are different boats for different jobs, but there are many things that are happening on the frontier. People are taking goods out, sometimes taking people out. At times they're ferrying people across rivers or across large lakes. And it's an arduous job. Now, you're doing this job, and you don't have a lot of room for provision. But you have to take along enough to survive upon completely. The food you bring along has to meet a lot of different requirements. It has to be something that's very dense, has a lot of energy in it, is easy to keep in an edible form. It can't be damaged by temperature or a little bit of dampness. It takes a special kind of food to fuel this journey. Your cooking equipment is also a major problem. You can't bring along an entire stove and 14 pots and dishes to do this. It has to be all happening in one pot. So what meets all these requirements? There's a wonderful journal from 1795 by Isaac Weld, and he travels through the United States and in Lower Canada, and he gives us a wonderful description of this particular setting. He says, on setting out, each man is furnished with a certain allowance of salted pork, biscuit, peas and brandy. The peas and biscuit they boil with some pork into a porridge, and a large vessel full of it is generally kept at the head of the bateau for the use of the crew when they stop in the course of the day. These men are surviving on this one dish that they make once a day. They boil up salt pork with peas and ship's biscuit into this solid sort of porridge that they can therefore sample all throughout the day to keep them going. Can you imagine this pot full of green, strange porridge in the front of your boat, and whenever you get hungry, you go up and you fill up your bowl, you eat that, and you get right back to work. This might seem like a strange food for us today, and it is to a certain extent. Imagine your boat or your canoe has barrels of salt pork in it, and salt pork is exactly that and nothing else. It is pork that is submerged in salt, and we're using the entire pig at times. You might even find a hog's head in your barrel of salt pork. It's not just a particular cut, but the entire animal. Salt pork was a huge industry in the 18th century because this provision was so important not only for sailors on the ocean, but for inland provision like for our voyageurs or just regular households. Some people are surviving on salt pork the entire year, shunning fresh provisions because they could sell those off at a better price. Salt pork is prepared by butchering your hog and lightly salting the meat, letting all the blood drain out of it. The salt is packed around every single piece, and it's tightly put into a barrel. And this salt pork can last for up to a year, possibly longer. There are a few references in the 18th century to people eating their salt pork raw. They basically just knock all the salt off of it and eat it as it is, but that's an emergency kind of setting. I definitely wouldn't suggest that for anyone. Most of our recipes in the 18th century use salt pork, and they soak it in fresh water, changing the water several times to make it less salty. This dish is easy to prepare, but it does have several steps to it. First off, we're going to start off with our salt pork. Our salt pork has to be soaked. And I'm going to soak this salt pork overnight and then cut it up into nice gobbets, a small edible bite-sized piece. This recipe is made to cook up and serve in one vessel. So we're going to start off with cold water, add our salt pork to it, and bring it to a boil. Once that's brought to a boil, we're going to put in our also soaked dried peas. And here we're going to be using split peas. They might have had whole peas. There are times when they might have used beans instead. Again, we have to get those pre-soaked also. Once our pork and our peas are boiling in our vessel, we're just going to leave that boil for an hour or so. And once that's started to break up, then we add our ship's biscuit. And this is going to give us another nice texture in here. The ship's biscuit is another important component to this, and it's going to add a lot of calories to it. It is one of those classic ship's provisions and provision that can be used for a long time, as long as it's kept dry. And here we're going to pound it up into bits. We could pound the ship's biscuit all the way up into a flour and just use it as a thickener, but we're going to leave these chunks a little bigger, and that will give us a nice texture and feel. It doesn't need to boil too long once it's got the ship's biscuit in it. Normally, about 20 minutes, a half hour. We don't want to get those ship's biscuits so they're too soft. If you've been on the channel before, you know we've talked about pemmican. And pemmican is really important for the same set of people. But this pemmican is what comes in after this dish. Pemmican actually replaces salt pork in so much of the provision of the voyeurs and the people that are doing that kind of a job. Pemmican is even more dense and more powerful of food to bring along. But salt pork is what there was before pemmican was really discovered to be even better. Isaac Weld, who wrote this text, also describes our voyeurs in great detail. And he gives us some wonderful pictures talking about how they like to sing as they canoe along, about how they sleep at night. They just sleep on the grass with their short blankets. They don't have a blanket that covers themselves. And even when it rains, they just sleep out in the rain. And they really enjoy their job. Even though it's hard, it probably doesn't pay well. Certainly the food doesn't look necessarily delicious. But they would much rather be doing this job than being a simple farmer. It's very interesting to compare the voyeurs to something like the cowboys. The heyday of the cowboy is only like a 10 or a 15 year time period. Whereas voyeurs were important from the middle of the 17th century to the middle of the 19th century. An almost 200 year time span when these men working in the frontier were an important part of the economy. When trains and other kinds of transport become popular in the middle of the 19th century, the occupation of the voyeurs disappears. Our voyeur stew is ready to try out. It's still nice and hot. And you know, it doesn't necessarily look terribly appetizing. But I'll bet after a day of canoeing in the wilderness, this would hit the spot. Wow. It's really got some wonderful flavors. You don't need any seasoning or salt. There's enough salt that comes in with the salt pork. The ship's biscuit has still got a wonderful texture in here. It might not look appetizing, but it's very, very good.