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Hello, all.
Recently at an event, sitting around the fire for the obligatory pipe-smoking fat-chew & flatulence competition, my company commander mentioned how he'd like to do a 'package from home' thing at an event sometime soon, and the subject of food from home came up. Well, in the process of the discussion, he mentioned a practice he'd read about (someday I'd like to get a look at his original sources--they seem much more extensive than mine) where the folks at home were able to actually send eggs. He said they'd pack them in a sturdy little crock to avoid breakage there in the box, packed in lard, and the eggs would stay fresh. Apparently he doubted the utility of such a practice, until he went to the 'womenfolk' at the place where he worked. At the time he was the blacksmith at Conner Prairie, the 1840s village just north of Indy. The women there, apparently, told him that it does indeed work. One of them even demonstrated it for him, taking a few eggs and putting them in a small stone crock, then filling the remaining space with lard. After a period of some days she retrieved the eggs and they were fine.
After him telling me this, I remembered my Grandpa telling me that his grandmother stored her eggs like that whenever she had a surplus of them. He said that the spoilage of eggs is usually due to the porous nature of the shell, and that by 'sealing' up the eggs with a surrounding of lard, they keep much longer. Has anyone else ever run across reference to this practice with 'from home' boxes? We were thinking of using it whenever we got around to having a 'care package', 'mail call' type thing, but I just wondered if anyone else had encountered the practice before, and try to establish a provenance for it from more than one source. It makes sense, the more I think of it, and GG Grandma was definitely 'period' herself--Grandpa's Dad was born in '64.
Recently at an event, sitting around the fire for the obligatory pipe-smoking fat-chew & flatulence competition, my company commander mentioned how he'd like to do a 'package from home' thing at an event sometime soon, and the subject of food from home came up. Well, in the process of the discussion, he mentioned a practice he'd read about (someday I'd like to get a look at his original sources--they seem much more extensive than mine) where the folks at home were able to actually send eggs. He said they'd pack them in a sturdy little crock to avoid breakage there in the box, packed in lard, and the eggs would stay fresh. Apparently he doubted the utility of such a practice, until he went to the 'womenfolk' at the place where he worked. At the time he was the blacksmith at Conner Prairie, the 1840s village just north of Indy. The women there, apparently, told him that it does indeed work. One of them even demonstrated it for him, taking a few eggs and putting them in a small stone crock, then filling the remaining space with lard. After a period of some days she retrieved the eggs and they were fine.
After him telling me this, I remembered my Grandpa telling me that his grandmother stored her eggs like that whenever she had a surplus of them. He said that the spoilage of eggs is usually due to the porous nature of the shell, and that by 'sealing' up the eggs with a surrounding of lard, they keep much longer. Has anyone else ever run across reference to this practice with 'from home' boxes? We were thinking of using it whenever we got around to having a 'care package', 'mail call' type thing, but I just wondered if anyone else had encountered the practice before, and try to establish a provenance for it from more than one source. It makes sense, the more I think of it, and GG Grandma was definitely 'period' herself--Grandpa's Dad was born in '64.
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