In the days of olde, fat and wax were used to deal jars for canned goods.
I found a most interesting recipe on preserving garden peas, which involved parboiling them to kill the natural degenerative bacteria in the vegetables, drying them, and the sealing them in jars with mutton fat to preserve them.
It is of note in almost a comedy these recipes make modern eyes go wide with the amount of fat in them. That fat content was there as people used to have to really work for a living in manual labor, and they required all of that fat content for calories in order to survive.
It was like the swam meat ball recipe, which a little swan with a whole lot of bacon lard and butter.
I do wonder of the flavor of sheep flavored grease peas, boiled in butter and then topped with butter.
It was how the not so distant past survived when you had to keep warm in winter and work yourself to death in the summer. People needed calories and it was never fat content that killed them.
To keep Green Peas till Christmas:—Shell what quantity you please of young peas; put them in the pot when the water boils; let them have four or five warms; then first pour them into a colander, and then spread a cloth on a table, and put them on that, and dry them well in it:have bottles ready dry'd, and fill them to the necks, and pour over them melted mutton-fat, and cork them down very close, that no air come to them: set them in your cellar, and when you use them, put them into boiling water, with a spoonful of fine sugar, and a good piece of butter: and when they are enough, drain and butter them.
agtG
