Canning vegetables begins in a similar fashion. Again, start by washing, but wash more thoroughly than with freezing. All errant garden dirt must be removed. Huge amounts of labor are required, so much that canning may never be practical for some hard-core city survivors.
Blanch cleaned vegetables at a rolling boil for 10 minutes. Do not cool as when vegetables are frozen. Place still piping-hot vegetables in quart canning jars. Pack the jars as tightly as possible, adding one teaspoon of salt and filling to the top with boiling water.
Process the jars in an open water bath for 4 hours at a rolling boil or in a pressure cooker 1½ hours. All vegetables processed in an open water bath must be cooked 10 additional minutes in an open pan before serving. Most vegetables take on a pretty bedraggled look by the end of processing.
Successfully placing canning lids on jars takes practice. Break new lids apart and place them in a shallow pan of boiling water. Boil for 10 minutes. Wipe the rim of each filled canning jar with a clean (freshly washed), dampened cloth to remove debris and grease. Remove the lids one at a time from the boiling water and place firmly on canning jars. There are two sizes of lids, little and big. Big-mouthed jars are generally surplus mayonnaise jars or whatnot, which quickly break in service. Initially a generous supply of each size lid is required. Lids are not reusable.
Cinch the lids down firmly with brass retainer rings made expressly for this purpose. When the contents of the jar boils in the boiling water bath, all air in the jar will be driven out. On cooling, the lids draw down on the jars, sealing them.
Hanging
It is a very old-fashioned method, but fresh meat can be hung and preserved for several weeks to 2 months in cool to modestly cold climates. How cold? Cool enough that no bugs are out. Generally about 38 to 40 degrees, max.
Hang the halved carcasses in a cool, draft-free area away from traffic and warmth of the living area. Gritty, airborne dust on the meat is not particularly nice. Throw a light bedsheet-weight cover on hanging meat to keep it clean.
In about 10 days the meat will become discolored to a very deep red or even maroon. Surface mold will form. Neither of these harms the edibility of the meat in the least. Toward the last the meat may even start to smell a bit. It’s OK, but just hurry up with the eating, freezing, or drying before it gets much worse.
Will city survivors have a place to hang meat? Maybe out on a porch or balcony. Experience indicates that life will get extremely cramped in some apartments. It will definitely not be like the normal routines we currently enjoy. Hanging meat may not be possible, but it won’t even be an option if you don’t know about the method.
Jerking
Outside of freezing, jerking meat is certainly the simplest, easiest, safest, and perhaps most nutritious method of adding shelf life to very perishable products. This fact was dramatically brought home to me while watching allegedly primitive rural Africans quickly, easily process as many as four 400- to 500-pound critters per day into dried meat. They called it biltong. Performance of this wondrous deed was done without equipment or supplies. Butcher knives and a wild thorn bush rack were their most sophisticated equipment.
Little or no difference exists between jerky and biltong, except that the latter tends to be made from ostrich, oryx, or giraffe meat. Rural Africans produce their jerky by hanging sliced pieces of meat on a thorn bush out in the direct sun in places where dust is minimal and gentle winds blow. The rule to follow in making jerky is that although use of some modern accouterments adds to processing efficiencies and perhaps aesthetics, only heat and air movement are really necessary to produce a nutritious, delicious, satisfactory product.
Marinating jerky meat isn’t entirely necessary, but most survivors pretreat their surplus meat before starting the actual jerking process. These homemade marinating concoctions range from powdering with fine-ground pepper to soaking in a water, pepper, and salt mixture, to using Norcestershire sauce to using plain old honey and pepper.
Some folks don’t like any of these, and fortunately these are not a requirement for good jerky. Others enjoy the peppery, salty taste these condiments carry into the meat.
We do know that fine-ground pepper and salt soaked into jerky both adds taste and reduces the chore of keeping pesky blowflies at bay till heat levels rise and the meat is sufficiently dry to avoid being fly-blown. Under nonemergency conditions, similar results can be achieved by starting the jerky out for a few minutes in a microwave. Or the entire job can be done on a kitchen range. By whatever source of heat. be cautious that the process proceeds sufficiently slowly that the meat dries rather than cooks.
Sanitation, always a problem when producing jerky, is better accomplished by working in the kitchen. Some natural gas and bottled gas ranges or burners may be operational, but it’s best not to count on these in a real witty-gritty survival situation.
Unless it is summer in northern latitudes or winter in southern Texas or Arizona, outdoor temperatures will not be suitable for natural jerky production. No problem! Large quantities of excellent jerky have been made around an open fire with snow on the surrounding ground. It would have seemed easier working on the ground level, but some survivors in Kuwait City and in Beirut cracked the concrete in their high-rise apartments when they built open fires on the bare cement floor. If it comes to that, find an old steel sheet, car fender, or whatever to protect the floor.
They are gone now, but at one time we shared the use of a set of two old steel bedsprings. Frequently we erected these in an inverted V over an open fire forming a kind of reusable drying rack. A rack could have been built out of wood, but the bedsprings were slick and easy.
Over the years, hundreds of pounds of fish, ducks, rabbits, and pheasants, as well as deer, elk, and moose meat were processed over these makeshift racks. City survivors will probably cure rat, cat, dog, and perhaps fish, geese, ducks, and pigeons on their racks. Something similar could be scroungeable in almost any city.
Believe it or not, tough, old, wild fat-free meat makes the best jerky. Far better than fatty, marbled, store-bought steaks or meat of virtually any kind. Any fatty, greasy meat, other than some fish, produces a sticky, rancid, foul-tasting, smelly end product. Fatty fish should be smoked or dried rather than jerked. Generally, fish such as carp, suckers, Kokanee, and dog salmon turn out OK to pretty good when smoked.
Commence the jerky enterprise by cutting thin, lean strips of meat from large cuts taken from the whole carcass. Meat bound for the jerky rack should be sliced no more than ½-inch thick. This is a time consuming and often difficult task. Slice across the grain, or at a minimum on the bias across the muscle. Otherwise the finished product may end up tougher than old wang leather.
Plain old charcoal-fired kettle-type barbecue pots or even gas grills work well to jerk meat. Place only three to five live briquettes in the grill. Set gas fires as low as possible. Open all vents, especially in the cover, so that heat from the fire circulates dry, fresh air into the kettle while simultaneously pushing moisture laden air out the top.
Recall again that jerky requires small, gentle heat and air movement. Temperatures of about 175 degrees are about right for those with both thermometer and a by-the-book approach to jerky making.
