That's interesting! I was treating it with all the caution normally given to anecdotal claims but it seems that it's actually viable.
For the record, I don't have any doubt that you can use electricity to stun/kill fish but I did doubt whether a car battery would have enough amperage to achieve it.

As for older rations from bygone wars, this is a good resource. : https://youtu.be/E7_f-jmmGdQ his channel is a gold mine.

There are a series of youtube videos entitled "18th Century Cooking", highly informative about rustic cooking as well as food preservation techniques. Well worth the time, and the recipes are great!

Ooh, thanx

Rendering Fat in The Apocalypse
 

Just because the nukes have flown and the world has "gone to pot" doesn't mean you can no longer enjoy your favorite fried foods or candle light dinners. All you need to do is "Render" some animal fat. Rendered fat will also be necessary for making Confit and other forms of preservation including the Wet Salt Infusion of certain meats. So here's how our ancestors have made Lard, Candle Wax, and other oils since the Stone Age.

Dry Rendering Fat:

1. You must first prepare the fat by cutting off ALL OTHER TISSUES including skin, muscle, or tendons from the fat. Thoroughly clean the fat to prevent bacteria from contaminating your future lard.

2. Cut Fat into small cubes or chunks to better distribute heat.

3. Place the fat in a pot over a heat source NOT hotter than 250F/121C (200F/93C will be more appropriate for some leaner fats). Let cook while stirring frequently until brown "cracklings" occur. This should take 1D3 hours in game time to occur.

4. Remove the material from heat when you have brown "cracklings" laying in clear rendered fat. Strain the "cracklings" (which are edible and can be used as ingredients in cooking, especially for sauces or gravy). Place the now rendered Lard in an appropriate container.

Wet Rendering Fat:

Follow all of the steps for Dry Rendering but add in 0.1L of clean Water per Kilogram of fat. Wet rendering is less likely to burn but takes longer (1D3+1 hours) and there will be NO "cracklings" as a byproduct.

Rendered fat will have a volume of 40% to 60% (1d3+3) of the precooked fat's weight (ie rendering 100 kilograms nets 40 to 60 Kilograms of lard). Add 1 to the volume roll for Wet Rendering.

Rendering Fat is a task of Routine(1.5 X Skill): Survival or Easy(2 X Skill): Cooking.

an animal will have 1/10th its yield in meat as fat in Kilograms (ie 50kg of animal meat will yield 5kg of fat to render. Gm's may wish to modify the amounts of Fat and totals of Rendered Fat for leaner animals (like deer) versus more Fat-laden animals (like pigs) in game.

As always, use what you will and ignore the rest.

Swag.

I knew I subscribed to the right threads

On Cracklens
 

DO NOT, I repeat do not eat too many at a sitting or yell be sitten in the out house for a day and a half.

I know 'cause my grandpa and uncle in north La rendered ( as they called it) when we cut hogs every year in October.
Oh man a 13 year old at the table where the cracklens were laid out to drain bit of salt and some biscutes from breakfast.
I got ta go now

Dry Rendering plus 1
 

Swag, years ago in our more adventurous lives, Mrs Carp and I set about making tallow candles. On the first attempt, we cut up the suet as small as possible. It was still an onerous task to get that stuff rendered.
Take Two: the second butcher we went to asked us what we wanted the beef fat for, thinking we were making bird feeders. When we told him and explained how difficult it was, he told us he would _grind_ it for us for free.
D'oh! The second round went much easier, though the cracklings were like tiny gravel.

Hand-driven meat grinders can be found at any decent flea market and occasionally at thrift stores. I have two or maybe three in my cupboard (along with 5 manual pasta machines --don't ask:o). They are also for sale at large sporting goods stores like Cabellas, Bass Pro Shoppes, Field and Stream Stores, etc, in the hunting/smoking/game processing gear sections.

Using a jack, one can motorize the hand grinder by tying it to a vehicle's wheel, like some third worlders do for power generation.

During the hard rationing times in the UK during WW2
 

I too have found that rendering certain meats is very hard due to the "leaner" nature of that meat. Beef, muskrat, bison, and goat meat fall into that category. I would grind those meats too.

Pig, beaver, racoon or bear will have sufficient fat to render more easily (although I wouldn't render coon, muskrat or possum for food, only for candle tallow).

Seals or whales would be the easiest of all to render.

Eventually we got our tallow and moulded our candles. Some of the remaining tallow, however went into our soapmaking project. We made a few classic fails like pouring the molten soap into an aluminum baking pan to cool. (that was the end of that pan--the lye ate up the aluminum surface horrifically) And we had one batch that we just couldn't get to set up and harden, so we threw it out. Only to be told, when we described the lack of success to a fellow reenactor, that "soft soap" is highly prized and a valuable camp cleaning material. D'oh!

For those of you who know, this link won't tell you anything new but for those of us who didn't know, or only had a "sorta idea" of rendering fat, this link is really useful (particularly when you read some of the comments as well)
http://www.theprairiehomestead.com/2...ef-tallow.html

So I think we've covered the basics for food once the MREs run out, but what about before hand? Here lately I've been binge watching YouTube videos about MREs, specifically older ones, and its crazy to see what holds up and what doesn't. Ive seen Korean war b2 units be perfect, and 1989 MREs be totally ruined. And I'd imagine after things have gone quite far down hill, the last few shipments of supplies will have whatever rations are available, on the off chance there's still something edible. Just as the gear and weapons issued would also start coming from the bottom of the barrel (ei Vietnam era). So any rations you find would be a gamble, anywhere from being nauseous, having diarrhea, to straight up food poisoning and botulism. One more avenue for illness. I'm thinking about a table for rations, both pact and NATO, for likelihood of expiration and severity of spoilage, based on age and menu contents.

I agree. We need a Food Contamination Table. I'll put together a list of poisons and illnesses common to spoiled food like my Water Contamination Table.

Excited!

Any progress?

One of my hobbies is visiting Native American archeological sites, and quite a few of them have books on what was eaten, with some including recipes. As long as there's someone to identify the plants, that sort of book would be useful.

Sorry man, between work and my own campaign, I got distracted. I have some handwritten house rules I'll put up as soon as I get more time to type them. I've covered:
-Spoilage checks (1D20) based on time, temperature, and storage method (canning, sun drying, smoking, salting, etc...)
-Chemical/radiological contamination.
-And a chart listing the possible illnesses and side effects of spoiled foods.

It is similar to the one I posted for water purification.

No rush at all, just didn't want to let a good idea fade.

Hello, this thread finally pushed me to stop browsing and make an account!

Anyways we have come up with a lot of great uses for salt, but how were global supplies of salt in 1997? And I've heard there are some primitive ways people can extract salt, but would it be enough to preserve their own meats?
And would mass production of salt be possible? I've heard that for a decently long time in human history salt was almost as precious as gold. Would we go back to those times?

Thanks for any helpful information, this thread has been great.

It takes around 1 bushel of salt (55 pounds) to preserve 500 pounds of pork, and 1.25 bushels to preserve 500 pounds of beef.

There's a very good map of salt deposits in the United States at the Salt Institute.

During the Civil War, one of the major Confederate sources of salt was Saltville, Virginia. In a complex of 300 buildings with 38 furnaces and 2,600 kettles to boil briny water, it produced 4 million bushels of salt in 1864. In Florida, Apalachee and St. Andrews Bay were major salt producers; when the Union raided the latter, they recorded destroying 198 saltworks in just 7 miles of beach.

My mother and stepfather established and are now on the board of directors of a commercial salt field.

Kinda makes Israel with the Dead Sea valuable to their neighbors.. Ironically, I suppose. The Morton Salt complex is off of Interstate 80 west of Salt Lake City, Utah and can be seen in Google Earth. Might be a bit radioactive. Salt mines are still thriving world wide in the U.S., Peru, and some others.

Salt, Vinegar, and smoke along with canning jars and canning lids would have be a regular habit.

Lucky for the Portuguese that Bacaloa (salt cod) has been a staple for centuries.

Not especially. The Dead Sea's salt is only about 30% sodium chloride, and it has a lot of bromide salts, which are toxic (in small doses, it's an anti-epileptic. In large doses, it causes hallucination, seizures, and coma).

Speaking of coastal nations and salt fish, seawater's a decent way to get salt. A gallon of seawater evaporating will provide around 4.5 ounces of salt, so around 196 gallons of water will provide a bushel of salt. That sounds like a lot, but if you can set up evaporative pools, it's not too hard to mass produce. If it needs to be done quicker, it can be actively boiled, but that's likely to be prohibitively fuel-intensive for a post-apoc group. Although I could see coastal groups placing a pot of seawater over the fire whenever they're warming themselves in the winter, to harvest the salt.

Setting up moveable plastic sheeting over the pools, weighted in the center to make a depression, with a collection bucket under the drip point would harvest pure, evaporated water as a byproduct of salt evaporation. It would probably also enhance the evaporative process, speeding it along.

True, a solar still would make for a useful secondary product. It won't produce much, relatively speaking, but having distilled water available can be useful. It might also help if mirrors could be set up to reflect additional sunlight on the pools to increase temperature. Another option for desert areas near the sea is a seawater greenhouse.

Welcome aboard sir! You should surf the forum thread map and add your own thoughts to the threads there.

There is a very large salt mine that actually travels under lake Erie. In fact, I was just there a couple of days ago getting "replenishment salt" for a PA municipality that burned up it's supply salting the roads during our last storm.

The access to it is under Cleveland, right? Another probable storage facility, like the salt cave in Kansas (Missouri?) that was a strategic storage point for years.

Fairport Harbor, about 30 miles east of Cleveland. There was a nucleon decay detector located there 1982-1991 that was momentarily famous in 1987 for detecting 8 neutrinos from Supernova 1987A.