How they eat in the world where there's an actual Goddess in the kitchen

Food preservation: about clamping

A root clamp

 

In a culture possessing nearly-worldwide refrigerated transport, as well as transport from countries working with growing seasons very different from ours, it’s easy to wind up wondering how people ever got along without such things… especially as regarded storage of produce that had been harvested and needed to be kept through from harvest time until new food crops began to be available in the following year.

Fortunately, around the world for centuries now there’ve been solutions to this problem that don’t require magic-workers to function. (Though having such people around is obviously handy.) For root vegetables in particular, one approach has been a favorite in many cultures: storage of harvested vegetables in cool environments maintained by various kinds of natural insulation.

Probably the most widely-used of these, in climates like that of Northern Europe, has been the root clamp (or just plain “clamp”). These are built-up in-ground storage pits that keep the vegetables cool and dry for months at a time. When properly built and maintained, a clamp will hold the loss of the vegetables’ vital moisture (and nutrient value) to a minimum, while also protecting them for prolonged periods from extremes of weather and attacks by small animals and insect pests.

There’s a fair amount of information about the creation and management of clamps—as well as of simpler techniques such as storage in sand, or (where possible) ice-cooled underground storage buildings like root cellars—to be found online. Here are a few websites with discussions of the ins and outs of clamping.