Curing and Smoking

Curing and smoking have been important methods for preserving foods, especially protein foods, since prehistoric times. Before the days of modern preservation techniques such as canning, freezing, and refrigeration, curing and smoking, as well as drying, enabled people to store food in times of abundance for use in times of scarcity. Today we use these techniques for their contribution to flavor perhaps even more than for their preservative qualities. We smoke foods because we like the taste, not because we must in order to preserve them.