Came across this recipe for smoked pork on the Medievalcooker.com site
This is an excerpt from Das Kuchbuch der Sabina Welserin, V. Armstrong (trans.).
To make smoked pork. Take a quarter of a pig and salt it especially well, so that it is entirely white with salt, and let the salt dissolve in a cellar. And when it is dissolved, then skim off the water and pour it over again, do that two or three times a day, and when it has laid in salt for four weeks, hang it up and smoke it fairly slowly, until it becomes thoroughly dry and fairly hard. Let it hang in the smoke for eight days, after which hang it in a chamber into which air comes. It keeps for the entire year.
This was circa 1500, no refrigeration unless you count hauling ice into caves.
