FermenteaWhere food goes to change
Source-linked articles on foods, ingredients, traditions and equipment.
A fish smoker designed in Senegal has come to women's groups in Papua New Guinea's Sepik through the UN's food agency. The public record holds one measured result, a 50 percent cut in fuel, and a good deal of context from Africa and Asia.
On Manoka Island, women smoke fish over mangrove wood. In a project-reported trial, a brick smoker used a third less wood than the rack house and a metal one almost nine-tenths less. The trial reports no measure of the smoke.
In Myanmar's Kale Township, smoking a batch of rohu took 12–14 hours. A brick kiln from Senegal cut that to 7 and used a third of the fuel. Whether the fish are safer is still unmeasured.
In August 1992 an expedition found Negidal smokehouses still in use on the Lower Amur. One recorded shelter, a shallow fire pit under a bark-covered pole frame, opens onto a salmon people's food and a river short of fish.
Monnickendam had 34 smokehouses in the 1930s. The dam that turned the Zuiderzee fresh took the herring away, and the eel stayed. What the records say about the trade, and where they disagree.
Women at Matombi smoke and sell manzi, a fish no source identifies. Pointe-Noire’s drum ovens were described in 1989; the carcinogens in smoke were measured only in Ghana.
Usipa weigh about five grams, and the rainy-season catch will not wait for the sun. A 2019 beach trial on Lake Malawi weighed the wood, time, money and taste of three kilns and a frying pan.
Most written accounts of Māori fish preservation describe drying and steaming. Smoke appears with eels, in a whānau learning story and in a Hauraki recipe. Here is what each record shows, and what it leaves out.