18. Preserving fresh eggs without refrigeration
Until the advent of commercial refrigeration, eggs were seldom purchased in amounts which exceeded what was desired for immediate consumption. Many households raised their own chickens and produced their own eggs. In the absence of springhouses and other means of keeping them cool, many ideas about the preservation of eggs, which were checked for freshness by a process known as candling, were offered to consumers (candling was the process of observing the content within an egg using the light of a candle behind it). Most agreed that sealing the shell from being exposed to air lengthened the time an egg would remain fresh.
One method described in the first decade of the twentieth century sealed the eggs by burying them in table salt. The process required eggs to be freshly laid, and completely inserted into a box or tin filled with salt, which was then also sealed and stored where they would be kept dry, and as cool as possible. It was important that the entire egg was completely immersed in the salt, with no part of the shell exposed to the air. The cool and dry component of the process likely had more to do with the eggs remaining fresh for an extended period, if in fact, they did so at all.