ABSTRACT
Meat smoking began in prehistoric times, and was likely a by-product of an attempt to preserve meat. As with all scienti‘c discoveries, people in prehistoric times may have studied how different types of wood imparted desirable, or more notably undesirable Žavors, and how temperature (cold-versus hot-smoking) affected shelf-life. In the 1930s, Ostertag and Young (1934) hypothesized that the preservative effect of smoking was a result of muscle ‘ber shrinkage and an increase in interstitial space. Jensen (1943) and Draudt (1963) reasoned that the surface microbial load was reduced due to the bacteriostatic compounds from the smoke, such as resins, phenols, aldehydes, and aromatic hydrocarbons.
