Well... I gotta thank you for putting me up to this. If nothing else, its been a few very interesting days, full of remembering a LOT of things and connecting with some folks I havent talked in quite some time:) All in all, I did learn the recipe and the way the meat was stored long term. Here is goes:
Beat up and roll out the strips of completely fat and any membrane free meat into 2.5-3 finger's wide strips and make them as thin as possible. Try not to rip them too much - the stuff gotta be placed as flat as possible on as wide as possible area. The best meats are those that are quite lean to begin with - chiken, beef, rabbit etc. Pork is not advisable. Perfectly doable, but you really gotta know what you are doing, otherwise it may not be safe.
So far nothing new to what I said earlier. One interesting thing that was mentioned several times is this - if grandma wasnt too sure about the weather's conditions, she used to soak a woolen mitten and place it in the morning on the rack. If it was completely dry by supper, the weather was good enough for drying meat.
The interesting part is how they stored it. Once the meat was dried (strips are completely dry, snap and crumble in your hand like a potato chips would), they'd crumble the strips into a fingernail size flakes, pack them into clay jars (something like this one -
http://kod-ua.com.ua/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/%D0%93%D0%9B%D0%95%D0%A7%D0%98%D0%9A-3-%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0.jpg), leaving about two finger's space in on top of the jar. The empty space would be filled with dry hay, usually from rye, then sealed with about a finger's thick layer of tallow, covered with a cloth cap and then closed with the jar's lid. Aparently, this way the meat would sit in the earthen cellar as long as you'd like, but no one really remembered it being there for longer than about half a year. Probably would be ok longer, but everyone agreed that by mid spring, the meat that was prepared in the summer was gone, or just about gone.
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Born, raised and schooled in Ukraine, family moved to Toronto in 1996 and I've been actively living and working in both countries from late 2000s or thereabouts.
