The Amish Keep Meat Fresh All Summer Without a Fridge — The 200-Year-Old Method

The Amish Keep Meat Fresh All Summer Without a Fridge — The 200-Year-Old Method the Grocery Store Won't Teach You For about seven dollars — coarse salt, pork fat and a stoneware crock — I keep November's pork on my cellar floor clear through August with no refrigerator, and it has never made a soul at my table sick. My name is Mammi Sarah, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Forty years keeping house, seven children raised, a husband buried. My mother kept a crock of sausage under white lard down the cellar steps and sent me down with a spoon to fetch supper. You were taught that cold is what saves meat. It is not. Meat spoils from air, water and time, and a refrigerator fights only one of the three — which is why yours goes slimy in a week. And nobody gets rich teaching you to fill a crock once a year. I'll show you the salt, the rendering, the two inches of fat, the cool spot, and the one mistake that ruins a good crock. ⚠️ Food done wrong can hurt a person. It works whole, not in pieces: cooked through, salted properly, packed hot with no air, drowned under lard, kept at fifty to fifty-five degrees. If the fat has cracked or the smell is wrong, do not taste it. Meat is cheaper than a doctor. Tell me in the comments where you live, and whether anybody in your family ever kept meat under lard. I read every one. 🔔 Subscribe for more of the old ways — next time, what my grandmother did with a clay pot, a cloth and a shady spot by the back door.