Taste of Life: Meat curing in Poona
As per the author, the booklet was written for European gardeners and Indian farmers in the Bombay, Madras, and Bengal Presidencies
Food heritage plays an important role in championing food security. But food and drink rarely make their way into the archives. As a result, we are deprived of looking at the past through the lens of food. The failure to preserve archival documents related to food is one of the reasons food history is not being utilised to critically analyse socio-political changes, economic and agrarian developments, globalisation, gender, race, caste, and class.
A few years ago, while the old building of the magnificent Connemara Public Library in Chennai was being renovated, I found a crumbly old booklet, hidden among the stacks of books waiting to be put on the shelves again. Titled “Meat Curing in the Presidencies” and written by “an Agriculturist in Chittoor”, it was self-published in Poona in 1890. The author had arrived in India from the USA in 1872 and had lived in Bombay, Chittoor, Madras, and Poona. He wrote the book while living in Poona during 1882-88. I wonder if he was associated with American Missionaries since the places he lived had a strong presence of the American Mission. Frequent references in the booklet to the advisories of the Department of Agriculture in the USA and literature published in Wisconsin and Iowa indicate that he was in touch with agrarian activities in his native land.
As per the author, the booklet was written for European gardeners and Indian farmers in the Bombay, Madras, and Bengal Presidencies. But it was written in English, so it must have been largely useless to the Indian farmers. It originally contained thirty-eight pages, of which twenty-one remained in the copy I came across. The first section elaborated upon the importance of curing meat in India. The second contained techniques and recipes for curing, smoking, and pickling of meat sorted according to regions, climates, and availability of meat.
While few texts like the “Manasollasa” (12th century AD) and “Kshemakutuhala” (16th century AD) mentioned cured and smoked meats, the techniques of preserving meat and fish went largely undocumented owing to the religious rules and taboos concerning meat eating. The food culture and habits of the meat-eating communities were rarely discussed until Shahu Patole wrote the exemplary “Anna He Apurnabrahma”, recently translated into English by Bhushan Korgaonkar.
The British firmly believed that curing meat was something that was not understood by Indians at all. Strangely, I have hardly come across any manuals written by the British in India aimed at instructing about curing meat. Cookbooks written in Colonial India by Europeans instructed readers to use bacon and ham in several recipes. They included a few recipes for pickling. But they were mostly silent about methods to preserve meat.
The Colonizers enjoyed hog-hunting around Poona. The hog was sometimes cured or smoked, instead of being cooked in the “curry”. The animal slaughtered and the meat cooled, it was ready to cut up. This done, the best way to preserve the meat was by rubbing well with salt, putting the pieces in a box and using mittens to rub them. But curing was not a usual practice. The animal was cooked and eaten at or near the hunting site and the leftovers were distributed among the helpers.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the British in India imported bacon and ham from Europe. There were some Portuguese, Goan, and Italian butchers in the Presidencies who cured meat for them. However, the demand far outweighed the supply.
For the few enterprising butchers and farmers curing and pickling meat in the Bombay Presidency, November was a very busy month. The early Saxon inhabitants of England called November “Blott monath”, or slaughter month, because, in those primitive days, winter food was so scarce in England, that it was usual to kill and salt the great part of their winter meat in this month; they also called it “Wint” month, or “wind month”.
According to the author of the booklet, Poona was an ideal place for processing meat in November. During the winter there was a hoar frost on the ground, where thin ice was formed; the nights were never hot; it was contiguous to rivers, and it seemed to be one of the healthiest places in India. He however felt that the conditions were not being used to advantage by Indian farmers.
Home curing of meats was considered important in the successful farm economy in late nineteenth-century America. The US Department of Agriculture promoted the thought that the farm should, as far as possible, produce its supplies. It urged that one of the first steps the farmer should take toward profitable farming was to provide ample living for himself and those dependent upon him, produced upon his soil and by his labour; the meats of the farm should be produced on the farm as well. The farmer was told that he rippled his resources by too great a reliance upon the grocery and the meat market and that it was an absurdity in economics that the farmer should grow cattle and hogs ship them to a distant market, allow a host of people to make a living and even large fortunes out of them, and then buy them back for the sustenance of his own family.
Indian agricultural economy and religious rules and notions surrounding meat intersected to keep away the Indian farmers from raising cattle for meat. The booklet did not take this into account. It mentioned that the author would be glad to see every European family become its own purveyor of meats and urged Indian farmers to take up the curing of meat on a large scale. It cited an example of a European farmer living in the village of Manjri near Poona who sold meat pickles and ham. He had built a smokehouse on his farm. The meat was cured on his farm and was available to his customers in December every year.
The booklet tried to attune its readers to meat available in their localities and enticed consumers to support local food producers. It provided detailed recipes for curing, smoking, and pickling meat. More about this next week.
Chinmay Damle is a research scientist and food enthusiast. He writes here on Pune’s food culture. He can be contacted at chinmay.damle@gmail.com
