Product Code Database
A smokehouse (North American) or smokery (British) is a building where meat or fish is cured with smoke. The finished product might be stored in the building, sometimes for a year or more. "Old Smokehouses". Wedlinydomowe.com. Accessed May 2010. Even when smoke is not used, such a building—typically a subsidiary building—is sometimes referred to as a "smokehouse". When smoke is not used, the term meathouse or meat house is common.
Prior to the widespread availability of mains electricity and freezers, meat was preserved by heavy salting. Hogs were slaughtered after the onset of cold weather, and hams and other pork products were salted and hung up or placed on a shelf to last into the following summer. Whether the meat should be smoked as well as salted is personal preference, frequently backed up with strong local or family custom.
As a preserved ham represents a big financial investment, smokehouses in the Carolinas and Virginia can frequently be identified by their framing, so closely spaced as to prevent forcible entry and theft. The lower interior walls of both meat houses and smoke houses are characterized by the extreme furring of the wood, caused by the salt.
The upper areas of smokehouses are blackened with smoke. A meat house has a solid wood floor, a smokehouse will have a brick pit in the center of the dirt floor, or sometimes a broken/cast-off cast iron pot, for the fire. Jefferson's smokehouse at Monticello is an integral part of the brick outbuildings. It has a conventional brick fireplace built into an exterior wall – its flue discharges into the smokehouse.
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