In New Mexico's early-day history, one can find scattered references to the ways those who came before us preserved their food. Although quite interesting in itself, the subject appears to have caught the attention of only a few writers and scholars.

That's too bad, because successful food preservation was key to survival of Indian and Hispanic cultures in this drought-prone land. Taking even a brief look at this can deepen our appreciation of those long-ago New Mexicans who had to struggle to secure every mouthful of food.

A major problem for them was how to save the products of the annual harvest not immediately consumed. The prehistoric pueblos for centuries had resorted to deep circular pits to store corn, beans and the seeds of squash and of cotton, the latter being occasionally ground and eaten.

To cap the pit, a layer of mud was applied over the opening, so that drying it provided a tight seal for the contents. That was usually enough to keep out rodents and insects.

The colonists arriving with Oñate in 1598 were astonished to find, beginning in the Socorro Valley, the Pueblo Indians' bountiful fields, which allowed them to store up six or seven years' supply of corn. The surplus grain, they noted, was "preserved in the ear underground or in closed rooms like silos."

The Spaniards brought with them their own customs, in the way of architecture, for food storage. The casa grande, or large house on the estancias, was apt to have a dispensa, that is, a pantry for keeping foods short term.

In the house, or even under the open portales, the family might keep a large wood chest (troje) with lockplate and key, serving as a grain box.

For long-term storage, two types of outbuildings existed. One was the soterrano, what we could call a root cellar, that received fresh produce raised on the farm. The other, a fuerte, was a building of thick horizontal logs, mainly housing butchered meat through the winter.

The soterrano had an excavated floor so that fruits and vegetables placed there in either sand or dry straw could benefit from the natural cooling of the earth.

Watermelons, however, did better when tied in yucca-leaf slings and suspended from beams supporting the soterrano's ceiling. Mamie Bernard, who hailed from Kansas City, in 1864 was served a New Mexico watermelon on Christmas Day that came from a root cellar. To her amazement, she found it "as fresh and crisp as if it had just been cut."

A common scene once shown on New Mexico postcards was the plazas of Santa Clara and San Juan pueblos just after the fall harvest. Brightly pictured were heaps of varied-colored corn, piled orange pumpkins, red chile ristras, muskmelons and orchard crops.

All were drying under the autumn sun, since that formerly was the most common method of food preservation.

Peaches and apples were always a big hit with children. Cut in half and placed in the sun atop adobe roofs or on wooden tables, they were transformed into a popular and durable winter treat.

Incidentally, in New Mexico a dried peach half went by the name orejón, derived from oreja, meaning ear, no doubt because the withered peach resembled a human one.

The drying process was also used in preserving meat, as jerky (cecinas). Whether of buffalo, deer, beef, sheep or goat, the product furnished a lightweight food high in nourishment.

Pork, on the other hand, did not readily lend itself to drying because of high fat content that turned rancid under the hot sun. Instead, New Mexicans would soak fresh pork in adobo, a red chile sauce flavored with garlic, oregano and salt that had fair keeping qualities as carne adobada.

One of my most valued informants on rural matters over the years has been Corina Santistevan of Ranchos de Taos. Adjacent to her family home is perhaps the oldest and best preserved fuerte in New Mexico.

She believes it was built in the late 1700s, still in the colonial period. When her ancestors acquired the property in the 1830s, the building was already mellow with age.

Mrs. Santistevan remembers that when she was a child, a side of beef would be hanging inside the fuerte during winters. It would stay frozen and slices of meat could be cut off as needed. Temperatures inside the structure remained fairly constant, just below freezing.

"Natural refrigeration," a huge advance in food preservation, was introduced in the middle 1800s when in winter water was diverted from the Santa Fe River into adjacent ponds. Block ice was cut from the frozen ponds and stored in insulated ice houses, to be sold to capital residents well into summer.

The earliest reference to "artificial refrigeration" I've seen for New Mexico was reported in 1904 at the Illinois Brewery in Socorro, which acquired the first ice machine in the territory.

It operated on the principle that certain chemicals could change to gasses with temperatures lower than the freezing point of water. That innovation never entirely displaced traditional practices of preserving food.

Historian Marc Simmons is author of numerous books on New Mexico and the Southwest. His column appears Saturdays.