Fulacht fiadh - meat and fish curing facility

A fulacht fiadh or fulacht fian  is a type of archaeological site found in Ireland. In England, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man they are known as burnt mounds. They commonly survive as a low horseshoe-shaped mound of charcoal-enriched soil and heat shattered stone with a slight depression at its center showing the position of a stone or wood lined pit. In legend, Fulachta Fiadh, which were also called Fulachta Fian,  were the cooking place of the Fianna. 

Fianna (singular fiann) were small, semi-independent warrior bands in Irish mythology. They are featured in the stories of the Fenian Cycle, where they are led by Fionn mac Cumhaill. The historical institution of the fiann is known from references in early medieval Irish law tracts. A fiann was made up of landless young men and women, often young aristocrats who had not yet come into their inheritance of land.

Geoffrey Keating, in his 17th-century History of Ireland, says that during the winter the fianna were quartered and fed by the nobility, during which time they would keep order on their behalf, but during the summer, from Beltaine to Samhain, they were obliged to live by hunting for food and for pelts to sell.

Now this is very interesting. If Fianna were "obliged" to live by hunting for food and for pelts to sell, they were basically full time, professional meat and fur hunters. 

Fulachtaí fiadh are usually found close to water sources, such as springs, rivers and streams, or waterlogged ground. One of the reasons for this could have been because in thick forests rivers and streams are the easiest ways in and out. So a hunting party would naturally follow the river and set camps on its banks, venturing into the forest to hunt and bringing their kill back to the camp to be processed, cooked and eaten or preserved and stored. These seasonal camps were reused year after year and this is what caused accumulation of burned stones. I spoke about this in more detail in my post "Fulacht fiadh - sweat lodge" and in my post "Banya".

But there is another reason why Ancient Irish hunters would set camps along rivers. Fish. And one fish in particular: salmon. We know that the Bronze Age Irish had been catching and eating salmon on large scales using massive fish traps and weirs. Indeed the oldest fish traps found in Europe were found in Ireland and were used for catching salmon 8000 years ago. 

Now salmon is a delicious fish so no wonder people have been catching it for food for so long. But as any other fish it is highly perishable. Fish can only last 12-15 hours in fresh condition after catching. So if the ancient Irish really did built fish traps to catch fish in large numbers, they must have had a way of preserving this fish for later use. 

It is exactly the same with meat. A dead animal starts rotting straight away. Especially during the warm period of the year, the meat left outside will get spoiled within hours, unless it is preserved. 

In cold and dry areas of Scandinavia, during spring months, it is possible to air dry fish in 3 to 4 days. 

Such dried fish would keep for a long time. Here is an excellent video showing how this is done. But even there, later in the year, during summer and autumn, when the weather gets warmer and more humid, fish needs to be cold smoke dried in order to preserve it. 

So if the ancient Irish used some method for preserving meat and fish it was probably smoking or smoke drying. Smoking can be done with or without salting. However if you salt the meat or fish before you smoke it, it will last much longer. 

I believe that the Bronze Age Irish were perfectly capable of doing both salting and drying meat and fish using fulachta fiadh. And this is how:

Fish first needs to be scaled, gutted and filleted. This can be done in the stream or river or lake.  

After the meat and fish was cleaned, and before it is salted, it needs to be cut into thin strips to enable deep salt penetration and proper aeration and smoke exposure. 

The meat and fish then need to be salted. Salting is an essential feature in smoking both meat and fish. The basic role of salt in curing is to dehydrate the meat and fish just enough so that bacteria cannot thrive. It also works as an antibacterial agent which kills bacteria on contact cleaning the surface of the the meat. Using the plant salts with high level of nitrates is even better, as the nitrates kill botulism bacteria, which normal salts can't. I talked about these special salts, and the possibility that the ancient Irish could have used them for food preservation in my post "Not all salts were made equal". Unsalted fish particularly will usually sour or spoil if kept at smoking temperatures for any length of time. 

There are two ways to salt-cure meat and fish.

Dry curing: Salt is rubbed over the meat.

Wet curing: Also known as brining, this involves soaking the meat in a brine, a strong solution of salt in water. 

Dry salting

Meat or fish pieces are rubbed with salt and placed into a dry fulacth fiadh trough. Once all the pieces are placed into the trough, they are covered with salt, then with stone plates or wooden planks and then stones are placed on top to press the content. You need to leave the meat in the salt for 2 weeks. Every few days the meat is repacked, the bottom pieces are put to the top...

Wet salting

To salt a lot of meat of fish, you need a lot of brine and to make a lot of brine you need a large tub. 

On the website of "the New Zealand digital library, hosted by the University of Waikato", we can find instructions how to salt and smoke fish using primitive techniques. In this instruction we can see a drawing showing a salting tank with dimensions: 

It is strikingly similar to the construction and dimensions of large fulach fiadh troughs.

So where would you make brine in a fulacht fiadh? In a trough of course. The bigger the better. You need to keep the fish or meat covered with brine throughout the brining period. A log can be floated on the brine to keep the fish or meat submersed, but what ever you are salting should not be packed so tightly that the brine cannot circulate around each piece.

The strength of the brine is a matter of preference. Brining duration depends on the type of smoking you want to do. One method of determining the ratio of water to salt is to put all the fish or meat you want to salt into the trough and then cover it with water. Then just keep adding salt to the water until no more salt will dissolve in it. You can test the concentration of the brine by dropping an egg into the water and adding salt until the object floats. 

The salting period is 3 weeks. 

The thing is for either type of salting, the trough would have to be covered with a wigwam, to protect it from rain. 

After the salting, birning is finished, the remaining salt in the brine can be reclaimed by boiling the brine in the trough using super heated stones. This is the exact same procedure used for extracting salt from brine that I described in my post about a possible use of fulachta fiadh as salt extraction facilities. 

Now that the fish or meat is salted, it needs to be quickly rinsed in fresh water and it can then be hang and smoked. 

The reason why smoking preservers food is predominantly because a number of wood (or peat) smoke compounds act as preservatives. Phenol and other phenolic compounds in wood smoke are both antioxidants, which slow rancidification of animal fats, and antimicrobials, which slow bacterial growth. Other antimicrobials in wood smoke include formaldehyde, acetic acid, and other organic acids, which give wood smoke a low pH—about 2.5. 


In order to be smoked the fish or meat needs to be hanged off some kind of frame or placed on some kind of rack which is then placed over a smoldering fire. 

There are two general methods of smoking: hot-smoking and cold-smoking. 

Hot-smoking (also called barbecuing or kippering) requires a short brining time and smoking temperatures of  52 to 80 °C and smoking duration between 15 minutes and 8 hours. Hot-smoked fish and meat are moist, lightly salted, and fully cooked, but they will keep at the 4.5 °C for only a few days at best. If hot smoking was used, the meat or fish had to be straight away taken to the nearest settlement for sale. 

A simple wooden rack like the one below is sufficient for short hot smoking. 

Cold-smoking requires a longer brining time, lower temperature of between 26-32°C and extended smoking time of one to five days or more of steady smoking). Cold-smoked fish and meat contain more salt and less moisture than hot-smoked fish. Once the fish has been sufficiently cured by smoke, it will keep at 4.5 degrees Celsius for several months. 

There is also a method of smoking that preserves fish and meat in such a way that it will keep for longer than several months in room temperature. 

Basically you need to sufficiently dehydrate it through prolonged process of smoke drying. First you need to thoroughly salt the fish or meat and then you need to press it to squeeze out excess moisture. Then you need to smoke it for four days to a week on continuously smoldering fire. The resulting product is only about one third its original weight, is quite firm and has a glossy surface. This dehydrated fish or meat will keep for an undetermined period, (not indefinite). This is the kind of smoke drying procedure still used by peasants in Serbia. Meat preserved like this can be kept hanging in airy dry place at room temperature for as long as you want. Fish preserved like this needs to be stored tightly wrapped, in a dry place, at low temperature. 

For long cold smoking, and particularly very long smoke drying, there is a risk that it might rain, and rain will completely spoil the fish or meat being smoked. This is why cold smoking needs to be done in a covered space, similar to a sweat lodge. Remember the design for sweat lodges I proposed was used by the ancient Irish in fulachta fiadh? Exactly the same type of hut can be used as a very efficient cold smoker. 

It is amazing how every part of the fulacht fiadh can be used for so many different things...

This type of preserving fish was recorded by the Lewis and Clark Expedition, also known as the Corps of Discovery Expedition. This was the first American expedition to cross what is now the western portion of the United States. It began near St. Louis, made its way westward, and passed through the continental divide to reach the Pacific coast. 

On the website "A history of the Grand Coulee Dam 1801 - 2001" we can read that Lewis and Clark reported that they had encountered Native Americans that dressed similarly to the Nez Perce near the Celilo Falls, who were all drying and pounding fish. Here Clark wrote that he also saw "Several Indians in canoes killing fish with gigs". Clark details the drying process when he wrote:

"On those islands of rocks as well as at and about their Lodges I observe great numbers of stacks of pounded salmon neatly preserved in the following manner, i. e. after being sufficiently dried it is pounded between two stones fine, and put in a spaces of basket neatly made of grass and rushes better than two feet long and one foot diameter, which basket is lined with the skin of salmon stretched and dried for the purpose, in this it is pressed down as hard as possible, when full they secure the loops of the basket that part very securely, and then on a dry situation they set those baskets the corded part up, their common custom is to set 7 as close as they can stand and 5 on the top of them, and secure them with mats which is raped around them and made fast with cords and covered also with mats, those 12 baskets of from 90 to 100 lbs. each form a stack. thus preserved those fish may be kept sound and sweet several years, as those people inform me, great quantities as they inform us are sold to the whites people who visit the mouth of this river as well as to the natives below"

I believe that if the ancient Irish used smoking to preserve fish and meet, they must have used some method of smoke drying very similar to the one described above. And they could have used fulachta fiadh for it. 

So, there you have it. Geoffrey Keating, in his 17th-century History of Ireland, says that during the winter the fianna were quartered and fed by the nobility, during which time they would keep order on their behalf, but during the summer, from Beltaine to Samhain, they were obliged to live by hunting for food and for pelts to sell. If the Fianna really lived from hunting for pelts to sell, they had to be able to preserve a huge surplus of meat they ended up with during the hunting season for the winter or at least for the duration of transport from the hunting camp to the customers in villages. To do that they had to cure the meat through smoking or salting and smoking.  And as we have seen Fulachta fiadh could have been used as efficient fish and meat curing facilities. 

Curing = Smoking

There is a Serbian proverb which says: "Ko se dima ne nadimi, taj se vatre ne nagreje". It means: "Who doesn't get smoked, doesn't get warm". The proverb simply states the fact that from the moment people started using fires inside roofed dwellings, the inside of these dwellings looked, pretty much permanently, like this:

Or like this:

The above two pictures were taken recently in Croatia, inside of two traditional houses with a built in hearths used for traditional cooking. Nice and cosy and smoky. 

The problem is that until very recently, houses had hearths and or stoves but didn't have chimneys.

This is a hearth in a reconstructed Iron Age round house.

This is a 19th century Serbian house from Dinara region:

This is a hearth in a 20th century house in Montenegro.

The smoke created by burning of wood or peat inside of the hearth or the oven had no other way of escaping except through the pores and openings in the roof or through the door. This would have filled the inside of the houses with smoke and would have made the houses from the outside look like they were on fire. You can see the smoke escaping through the roof and the door.

If you for instance approached an Iron Age roundhouse village, or any other village with thatched houses, you would have seen something like this:

Iron age village from "The Romano-British Peasant"

The fire in the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age and Medieval houses was pretty much never extinguished. It was constantly smouldering. Preserving of the house fire was one of the most important duties of the housewife. This means that the house was always smoky. Interestingly, the smoke permeating the roof actually protected the roof from rotting as it killed bacteria and moulds. A big problem in these archaeological parks today is that because there is no permanently smoking fire, the roofs rot away very quickly.

During the winter, I would guess, the house doors were shut, so even more smoke gathered inside of the house and slowly drifted upwards towards the roof. And up there, under the roof, on the supporting beams, people hang fish, meat and skins. Why? Well in the same way the smoke killed bacteria and molds in the thatch, it did the same with the bacteria and moulds in meat turning it into smoked meat.

 

This type of meat curing, preservation is still used today. This is a picture of an inside of the typical private smoke house from the Balkans. The meat is first covered in salt and left to absorb salt from 10 - 20 days and it is only then smoked. This makes the final product much more resistant to bacteria and therefore more durable.

The smoke from the hearths and ovens would also have helped preserve animal skins and turn them into smoked skins (buckskin, leather).

Buckskin is the soft, pliable, porous preserved hide of an animal which is used for making clothes and bedding. In order to make Buckskin from a raw hide, you first need to scrape the hide to remove any flesh remains. Then you need to tan the hide using any emulsified fat, such as egg yolks or the animal's brain mixed into water. After this you need to stretch and dry the hide which involves continuous pulling and stretching of the hide in all directions, which lubricates the fibers of the hide with the oil of the dressing, and ensures that the fibers stay lubricated. Finally, the dry skin which should now be totally supple and soft, has to be smoked, in order to make it washable and resistant to water.

You can see how this all fits inside of a typical Iron Age roundhouse on this picture:

So it turns out that, probably by chance, people realized that smoking meat and skins preserves them, protects them from rotting. No wonder then that smoke has been used to preserve and flavour food and treat leather since a very long time ago. How long time ago is long time ago? No one knows really, but I would venture to say that the intentional use of smoking for preserving food and skin was probably already used in late Paleolithic, early Mesolithic period of human history.

And here is where we come to linguistics. In English, the word for preserving meat and skin using smoking is "curing".

When we look up the word "cure" in the English Etymological Dictionary it tell us this:

"A process of preservation, as by smoking. In reference to fish, pork, etc., first recorded 1743."

So what was the process of curing meat using smoke called before 1743 I don't know. I would be grateful if someone would clarify this for me. Before 1743, the word "curing" was used with the meaning: 

"Act of healing or state of being healed; restoration to health from disease, or to soundness after injury, a method, device or medication that restores good health. first recorded in late 14c." 

The English word "cure" comes from Old French "curer" meaning "care, cure, healing, cure of souls", which comes from Latin "cura" ((archaic) coira, coera) meaning "care, concern, thought; trouble, solicitude; anxiety, grief, sorrow, attention, management, administration, charge, care, command, office, guardianship, medical attendance, healing, rearing, culture, care, an attendant, guardian, observer"

But where does this Latin word come from? Well, the English Etymological dictionary says: "a noun of unknown origin"...

Let's see if we can find the origin of this mysterious word. 

The original meaning of the verb "to care" was "to care for",  basically "to keep alive", "to preserve". We take care of someone or something that is dear to us, precious to us, and which is not able to take care of itself, like a child, a sick or wounded person, a young domestic animal. So what does "caring for" something or someone involve? Well basically it means keeping this something or someone dry, warm, feeding it, cleaning it, sheltering it from wind and rain, protecting it, making sure that nothing bad is done to it and that it doesn't do anything bad to itself and its surrounding (like wreck the place if what you care for are children or young animals). Basically "caring for" means keeping alive. The "caring for" something or someone is a full time job and requires staying in and around the shelter, house all the time. And this is why the "caring for" was always the job of women. They "cared for" children, sick and wounded and young animals. Men "took care of" jobs that needed to be done, flocks, crops, land, and later towns, states...but with male duties the original meaning of "care for" was gradually lost and was turned into passive "worry" or active "manage"...And this is what we are left with today pretty much. We "care" for so many things, we even occasionally "take care of" as thing or two, but we rarely "care for" anyone or anything. 

Anyway, in the past, apart from caring for children, sick and wounded and young animals, women cared for another very important thing: fire. Fire in the house hearth was one of the most precious things which had to be constantly cared for, and never ever be allowed to die. This behaviour has been recorded by ethnographers everywhere in Evroasia even in the 20th century, and it comes to us straight from the Paleolithic, and maybe even Mesolithic times, when people didn't know how to make fire. Fire had to be found, a natural fire from a thunder strike or a forest fire, and then carefully preserved by caring for it. The caring for fire was so important that it was elevated to a level of a religious duty. Every household would care for their own house fire, but temples would would also care for the village or town fire which also should never have been allowed to die. Even after people discovered reliable ways of making fire, this belief in sacredness of fire and caring for fire remained in beliefs related to heath fire. 

So how do you care for fire? Well in exactly the same way you care for children, sick and wounded and the young animals. Basically caring for fire means keeping fire dry, warm, feeding it wood, cleaning it from ash, sheltering it from wind and rain, protecting it, making sure that nothing bad is done to it and that it doesn't do anything bad to itself and its surrounding (like burn the place down). The most important part of caring for fire is feeding it wood, basically keeping the fire alive, keeping it burning. 

In Slavic languages we have a word "kur" which means "to burn, to smoke, to heat":

Proto-Slavic kur - to burn, to smoke, to heat.
Church-Slavonic: коурити, коурити (kouriti), krada - fireplace, hearth
Russian: кури́ть ‎(kurítʹ) - to smoke (tobacco etc.), to burn, produce smoke by burning something, to distil, куре́ние ‎(kurénije) - smoking, incense
Ukrainian: кури́ти (kuriti) - to burn, produce smoke by burning something
Bulgarian: ку́рна (kurna) - to light up
Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian: ку́рити (kuriti) - to burn, to heat, to kindle, to persuade
Slovenian: kúriti - to burn, heat up
Czech: kouřit - to burn, produce smoke by burning something
Slovakian: kúriť - to burn, produce smoke by burning something
Polish: kurzyć, kurzę - to burn, produce smoke by burning something
Lusatian: kurić, kuriś - to burn, produce smoke by burning something

This word has cognates in:

Lithuanian: kùrti - to kindle, light up, heat up (kuriti, goreti - "to burn" in Slavic languages); kuriù - to heat up (kuri, gori u- "burns in" in Slavic languages); karštas - hot (gori šta - "which burns" in Slavic languages); krosnis - oven
Latvian: kurt - heat (kuri, gori tu (to)- "burns there"  (that) in Slavic languages)
Finish: hurja - fierce, fiery (kuri, gori - "burns" in Slavic languages)
Gothic: haúri - coal (kuri, gori - "burns" in Slavic languages)
Old Norse: hyrr - fire (kuri, gori - "burns" in Slavic languages)
Norman, Old French, Middle French: cuire, cuyre - to cook (kuri, gori - "burns" in Slavic languages)

Latin: cremo - I consume or destroy by fire, burn, I burn something to ashes; cremate, I make a burnt offering (kurim, gorim - "I burn" in Slavic languages); carbo - charcoal, coal (gorivo - "fuel" in Slavic languages)

Sanskrit: कृष्ण ‎(kṛṣṇa) - burnt, black

The above Slavic word "kur" to burn is another variant of the Slavic word "gor" meaning to burn, about which I already wrote in my post about warmth, fire, sun. Like the word "kur" the root "gor" also has cognates in other Indoeuropean languages, but it seems to be best preserved in Slavic languages and Irish.

Here is just an example group from this cluster from Serbian and Irish:

Irish:

goraim -, I heat, warm, burn; bask; hatch.
gorim - warm

gor - warmth

garadh - warm 
goradh -  act of burning; blushing; heat; déan do ghoradh, take a shin heat, incubation, keeping warm
garamhail - useful, profitable, neighborly; warm, snug, friendly;
gorai - place where chicks come out of eggs
gríos - embers, hot ashes; heat; fire; pimples, blotches, spots or rash on the skin;
gríosach - aighe, pl. -acha, f., fire, burning embers; ashes containing small coals of fire; glowing
griosagh - fire

Serbian: 

gori - burns; goreti = gori ti = it burns, to burn
gorim - I am burning
gori - burns
grejan, grijan - heated, warm
gorionik - burner, torch
gorešnjak - big heat, hot weather
gorotina - what burns, burned place
gariti - to burn, to rush, to go fast
nagariti - put branches into the fire, feed the fire
garište - place where the fire used to burn
zgarište - something burned down

zgoreljak - something burned

So we have the Indoeuropean root word "cur, gor" meaning "to burn, to make and keep warm". Compare this to the Latin word "cur, coir" meaning to "care for" Is it possible that these two words are connected? And is it possible then that the verb "to cure" meaning "to preserve by smoking" is related to the word "kur, gor" meaning "to burn, to smoke"? I think so. What do you think?