Pressed Meat: A Chinese Technology Set

By Eben van Tonder, 28 September 2026

Introduction

Every culture that dried thick cuts of meat faced the same difficulty. The surface dries quickly, while the core stays wet and begins to spoil. Pressing is one of the oldest answers to this difficulty. This article traces its origins through two products, Turkish pastirma and Bulgarian Pastarma govezhda, and sets out the evidence for the conclusion that the technology is Chinese.

In an earlier article I examined pressing in the history of biltong. That work rested on an 1891 Cape recipe in which beef was rubbed for three days with salt, brown sugar and saltpetre and then put under a press for one night before wind drying and chimney drying [1]. I compared the recipe with pastirma, a Turkish delicacy, where pressing the meat is an intermediate step between salting and drying. Both traditions deal with the same problem, which is how to keep thick cuts from spoiling before they have fully dried.

The comparison extends well beyond biltong and pastirma. The oldest written instructions for pressing meat are Chinese, and pressed meats also appear along the steppe and the Silk Road, in Anatolia and Bulgaria, in the Alps and Italy, in Africa and in the Americas. Pressing also changed the season in which thick cuts could be dried. Together these observations raise the question that this article addresses, namely whether pressing began as a Chinese technology that later spread west.

Chinese Priority

This article argues that pressing meat during drying is, in essence, a Chinese technology that travelled west along the Silk Road and reached Anatolia and Bulgaria first. These two regions hold the strongest living traditions of pressed dried meat, namely Turkish pastirma and Bulgarian Pastarma govezhda. Pressed meats further west and south, in the Alps and Italy, in southern Africa and in the Americas, suggest that the technique may have spread further, although independent discovery cannot be excluded for any of them.

The argument is a hypothesis. No document records the transfer from China to Anatolia, yet the hypothesis fits the dates, the routes and the documented techniques. It rests on inference from the facts available to us, and the strongest of these facts is the Chinese knowledge of collagen tissues, which links hides, glue, ink, meat and omasum in a single body of practice.

Pastirma and Pastarma Govezhda

Pastirma is the dried, pressed beef of Anatolia, and Kayseri is its best known centre [2]. In the FAO description, strips of beef are salted, piled for two days and air dried. They are then stacked and pressed under about one tonne for 12 hours, dried again, pressed a second time and dried once more, after which they are coated with a paste called çemen [3]. The finished product has an average water activity of 0.88 and a salt content of 4.5 to 6.0 percent [3]. By the 1500s pastirma was a speciality of the Ottoman palace kitchen [4].

Pastarma govezhda, or beef pastarma, is the Bulgarian counterpart. Its EU specification defines it as a pressed meat product made from uncomminuted fresh beef through salting, drying and pressing, in pieces of a flattened oblong shape. The same specification states that the word pastarma is of Turkic origin and means salted, pressed and dried meat [5, 6]. Drying and pressing are repeated until the product is ready, and each pressing lasts 12 to 24 hours [5, 6]. The product was registered as an EU Traditional Speciality Guaranteed in 2017 [5].

In both products pressing is a separate step between periods of drying, and it is repeated at least twice. This intermittent pressing is the feature that links them most closely to the Chinese record.

The Grounds for Chinese Priority

The case for a Chinese origin rests on four grounds.

First ground: the oldest written instructions are Chinese

Dried meat beaten and seasoned with ginger and cinnamon, called 鍛脩 (duan xiu, “beaten dried meat”), is named in the commentary of Zheng Xuan (127 to 200 CE) on the Zhou Li (“Rites of Zhou”), a text compiled by the late Warring States period (475 to 221 BCE) [7, 8]. The Qimin Yaoshu (“Essential Techniques for the Welfare of the People”), compiled around 533 to 544 CE, instructs that half dry meat be squeezed repeatedly by hand until it is firm and compact [7]. A household manual of the Southern Song (1127 to 1279) or the Yuan (1271 to 1368) presses salted meat under stone, hangs it, and presses it again whenever water appears [9].

Outside China, the record begins much later and is much thinner. Most of the early references also describe meat carried under a rider rather than meat pressed during drying, and several are doubtful. The oldest is the report of Ammianus Marcellinus, written around 390 CE, that the Huns placed raw meat between their thighs and the backs of their horses [10]. Scholars still debate whether this describes a food practice, a remedy for saddle sores or a literary convention [11]. The oldest detailed Western curing recipe is older still, but it contains no pressing step. Cato the Elder’s De Agri Cultura, written around 160 BCE, layers hams in salt in a jar, reverses them after five days, and then hangs, smokes and stores them without any press [12].

The Turkic verb basturmak, meaning to place something under a very heavy object, was recorded by Mahmud of Kashgar in the 1070s [4]. That is about 900 years after Zheng Xuan named beaten dried meat and more than 500 years after the Qimin Yaoshu instructed that half dry meat be squeezed by hand [7, 8].

The saddle story returns in Europe in the Life of Saint Louis by Jean de Joinville, written between 1305 and 1309. It describes Tartar horsemen placing meat between the saddle and the saddle cloth until the blood was pressed out, and then eating it raw [13, 14]. The Cambridge Medieval History suggests that such meat was in fact placed there to heal the horses’ saddle sores [15]. In the 17th century, the French engineer Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan repeated the account for the Tatars of the Polish and Ukrainian steppe [4, 16].

By the 1500s pastirma appears in the Ottoman palace kitchen under the name Pastama ı Kayseriyye (“Kayseri pastirma”), but no surviving instruction for its pressing is known from that period [4]. The oldest non Chinese written instructions for pressing meat during drying found in this study are the Cape biltong recipe of 1891 and the Bulgarian production standard of 1942 [1, 5]. The Qimin Yaoshu predates the first by about 1,350 years and the second by about 1,400 years.

Second ground: pressing was an established set of techniques in China

Pressing was familiar in China long before it was applied to meat. Builders compacted earth in thin rammed layers from the Longshan period onward [17, 18, 19]. Sandbags served as a heavy and adjustable load by 203 BCE [20, 21]. By the 6th century the Qimin Yaoshu treated the wine press as the model for dewatering, pressed salted fish on stone boards, and pressed boned pork overnight under a board and heavy weights [7, 22]. The meat recipes therefore drew on long familiarity with applying load to a wet mass.

Third ground: a practical grasp of the principles of drying

The Chinese sources show a practical grasp of the principles that pressing serves. The Qimin Yaoshu, compiled around 533 to 544 CE, also gives a recipe for ink. Chinese ink was not a liquid but a small, hard cake. It was made from fine soot bound with animal glue, which was itself made by boiling hides, and the writer ground the cake with water on an inkstone before use. The wet paste of soot and glue had to be dried into solid cakes, so ink making faced the same problem as meat drying. The recipe limits each cake to two or three liang, a traditional Chinese unit of weight, and permits production only in the second and ninth months. It warns that the ink spoils in warm weather, dries poorly in cold weather and breaks apart when exposed to wind [23]. Breaking in wind is the failure that case hardening causes in meat, where the surface dries faster than the core can follow [3]. The same book fixes the months for making dried meat and names firmness and compaction as the aim of squeezing it [7]. None of these texts states a theory of diffusion or water activity. They show, however, that Chinese craftsmen understood the control of moisture, the limit on thickness and the danger of uneven drying in practice for centuries.

Fourth ground: one body of knowledge for collagen tissues

The fourth ground ties the other three together. The same 6th century manual that squeezes drying meat also boils cattle, buffalo and pig hides into glue, binds ink with that glue, and cleans omasum for the kitchen [7, 24]. Glue cakes and meat strips are dried in the same seasons, cut or kept thin for the same reason, threaded on cords at the same half dry stage, and named with the same word for that stage, 浥浥 (yiyi, “half dry”) [7, 24]. The same work presses boiled, collagen rich head meat under heavy timbers and wedged boards [22]. Hide, glue, head meat and omasum are all collagen rich tissues [25, 26]. The Chinese record therefore shows a single practical knowledge of how collagen tissues behave when they are boiled, dried and pressed. This link is the centre of the argument and is set out in full in the section on collagen below.

How the Argument Is Built

The article builds the case in six steps. The opening sections set out the thesis and describe the two products at its western end. The next major section presents the Chinese record. It begins with the older technologies of dewatering and weighting, follows the dried meat texts from the Western Zhou to the Song or Yuan summer recipe, and shows through sandbags, rammed earth, ink and tiles that the principles behind pressing were familiar across Chinese crafts. It then sets out the collagen link between hides, glue, ink, meat and omasum, and ends with the Chinese record of offal and omasum.

The section on the westward line follows the technique from China to the west. It begins with the value that the Central Asian Turks placed on drying, moves through the steppe and the Turkic vocabulary to Anatolian pastirma and pressed omasum, and then sets out the road, trade and cultural ties that bind Turkey and Bulgaria. It ends with a staged line of transmission in which each link is graded by the strength of its evidence.

The section on further spread or independent discovery examines pressed meats in the Alps, Italy, southern Africa and the Americas. The section on modern science explains what pressing does, what it cannot do and why its benefits made it worth adopting. The final section shows how pressing widened the drying season, draws the evidence together and states the conclusion.

The Chinese Record

The oldest written instructions for pressing meat during drying are Chinese. They belong to a long Chinese tradition of dewatering food and materials, which began well before the first texts on dried meat.

Early Dewatering Technologies in China and the Tarim Basin

Pressing meat did not arise in isolation. Before and alongside it, the peoples of China and the Tarim Basin were already removing water from other foods and materials, and they already used weights such as stones and sandbags. Several of these technologies predate or parallel the earliest meat pressing and may have supplied the idea.

Dairy in the Bronze Age Tarim Basin, c. 2000 to 1500 BCE

The oldest dehydrated food in the region is dairy. The Xiaohe cemetery in the Tarim Basin was used between about 4000 and 3500 years before present [27]. Its mummies were buried with kefir cheese, and ancient DNA from this cheese, about 3,500 years old, shows that it was made with kefir grains [28]. The same study found that kefir spread from Xinjiang into inland East Asia [28]. Cheesemaking separates curd from whey and so concentrates food by removing water. The sources do not show whether the Xiaohe curd was pressed. The finding still places a pastoral dewatering technology in the Tarim Basin, on the later Silk Road, more than a thousand years before the first Chinese texts on dried meat.

Sandbags as weights, Western Han, 3rd century BCE

Sand filled bags were an established Chinese technology by the end of the 3rd century BCE. The Shiji (“Records of the Grand Historian”) of Sima Qian, completed around 91 BCE, records that at the Wei River in 203 BCE the general Han Xin had more than ten thousand bags filled with sand in one night and used them to dam the upper course of the river [20, 21]. When the enemy army was halfway across, he had the sandbag dam broken and the released water cut the army in two [20, 21]. The passage does not concern food. It shows, however, that filling bags with sand to create a heavy, movable and adjustable load was known in China more than two thousand years ago.

Pressing fermented mash, documented by the 6th century CE

Pressing liquid out of fermented mash was a standard technique by the 6th century. The Qimin Yaoshu instructs that certain vinegars be pressed out in hair cloth bags in the tenth month using the method for pressing wine (如壓酒法, ru ya jiu fa, “as in the method for pressing wine”) [7]. The same book presses salted fish on stone boards to drive out the water [7]. Wine pressing thus served as the model technology for dewatering. A thousand years later, the Tiangong Kaiwu (“The Exploitation of the Works of Nature”) of 1637, written at the end of the Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644), still compared the pressing of paper to the wine press [29, 30]. Stacked wet sheets were pressed under a board tightened with rope and a stick until all the water ran out, and the sheets were then dried over heat. Coarse papers were simply pressed to remove water and dried in the sun [29, 30].

Pressed tea, 8th century CE

Tea shows the same sequence of pressing followed by drying. In the Chajing (“The Classic of Tea”), written by Lu Yu (733 to 804) during the Tang dynasty (618 to 907), tea is picked, steamed, pounded, pressed, dried, threaded and sealed [31]. The pressing step (拍之, pai zhi, “pat and press it”) used iron moulds called 规 (gui, “mould”), which shaped and compacted the tea, and Lu Yu notes that steamed and pressed tea comes out flat and even [31]. The Chajing is about two centuries younger than the Qimin Yaoshu, so tea cannot have inspired meat pressing. It shows, however, that the logic of compaction before drying ran through Chinese food technology.

Salting and pressing vegetables, late 19th century

The same principle is still used in Chinese vegetable preservation. Fuling zhacai (榨菜, zha cai, “pressed vegetable”), the pressed mustard stem of Chongqing, is made by a traditional method known as three saltings and three pressings (三腌三榨, san yan san zha, “three saltings, three pressings”), which Qiu Shou’an developed more than a hundred years ago [32]. Salting draws water out and pressing removes it, and the cycle is repeated three times. The method is recent, so it cannot be a source for meat pressing. It shows, however, that repeated salting and pressing is still in use in China for dewatering food.

These technologies show that removing water by pressure, and applying heavy loads with stones and sandbags, were familiar in China and the Tarim Basin. The oldest firm evidence for pressing a food to remove liquid is the wine and vinegar press of the 6th century Qimin Yaoshu. Dairy dewatering in the Bronze Age Tarim Basin and sandbag weights in the Western Han are much older. The idea that one of these technologies sparked meat pressing is plausible but not demonstrated.

Dried Meat and Mechanical Work in Chronological Order

The Chinese record of dried meat covers nearly three thousand years. The sources below are arranged by date, so that the development from pounding and beating to squeezing and pressing under stone can be followed.

Western Zhou, c. 1046 to 771 BCE: dried meat in the Yijing

The oldest reference is in the Yijing (“Book of Changes”). The third line of hexagram 21, 噬嗑 (shi he, “biting through”), speaks of biting dried meat and meeting poison [33]. The line texts took shape in the Western Zhou, so dried meat was known in China by at least the early first millennium BCE.

Zhou institutions, text compiled by the Warring States period (475 to 221 BCE): the Zhou Li

The Zhou Li lists an official called the 腊人 (la ren, “officer of dried meats”) who was responsible for the palace’s dried meats [8]. In Zheng Xuan’s commentary on these products, 脯 (fu, “dried meat”) is thin sliced dried meat, and 鍛脩 (duan xiu, “beaten dried meat”) is dried meat beaten and seasoned with ginger and cinnamon [7, 8]. The Zhou Li describes the institutions of the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046 to 256 BCE), although the text itself was compiled by the late Warring States period.

Spring and Autumn period, 5th century BCE: dried meat in the Analects

Dried meat also had social and economic value. A bundle of ten strips was called 束脩 (shu xiu, “a bundle of dried meat”), and Confucius (551 to 479 BCE) said that he had never refused teaching to anyone who brought such a bundle [34].

Western Han, 1st century BCE: pounded meat in the Li Ji

The Li Ji (“Book of Rites”), compiled during the Western Han (206 BCE to 9 CE), records a product called 熬 (ao, “fire dried meat”) among the delicacies of the court [35]. Beef was pounded, stripped of its membrane, spread on woven reed mats, sprinkled with ground cinnamon and ginger, salted and dried. Mutton, elk, deer and river deer were treated in the same way. For a moist dish the meat was soaked and cooked with meat sauce, and for a dry dish it was pounded again and eaten [35]. Zheng Xuan later explained that this product was prepared over a fire and resembled the fire dried meat of his own day [35].

Eastern Han, 25 to 220 CE: the commentators

The Han commentators explain the terms. Zheng Xuan (127 to 200 CE) distinguished thin sliced dried meat, dried meat beaten and seasoned with ginger and cinnamon, and small animals dried whole [7]. Pounding and beating before or during drying were therefore well established by the 2nd century CE.

Northern Wei and Eastern Wei, c. 533 to 544 CE: the Qimin Yaoshu

The Qimin Yaoshu, compiled by Jia Sixie, gives the oldest surviving instruction for pressing meat repeatedly during drying. Its recipe for five flavour dried meat (五味脯, wu wei fu, “five flavour dried meat”) names the production months and the meats. The meat is made in the first, second, ninth and tenth months from beef, mutton, roe deer, deer, wild boar or pork [7]. The strips are threaded on cords and dried in the shade under the north eaves. When they are half dry, the maker squeezes them repeatedly by hand until firm and compact (條脯浥浥時，數以手搦令堅實, “when the strips are half dry, squeeze them repeatedly by hand to make them firm and compact”) [7]. The modern commentary explains 搦 (nuo, “squeeze”) as squeezing or pinching together [7].

The same chapter uses a tool for the same step. For the plain dried meat meant to last through summer, made best in the twelfth month, the half dry pieces are beaten lightly with a wooden rod until firm, but not so hard that the meat breaks apart [7]. The commentary identifies this beating with the beaten dried meat described by Zheng Xuan about 350 years earlier [7]. The recipe for salted fish uses board pressing. The salted pieces are placed in a basket on a flat stone board and pressed to remove water, a step called 逐水 (zhu shui, “driving out the water”) [7].

Book 9 of the same work shows that board pressing of meat itself was an established kitchen operation in the 6th century. In one roasting recipe, a small boned pig is spread evenly, covered with a filling of minced fat pork and duck, skewered, covered with bamboo leaves and a board, and pressed under heavy objects overnight before it is roasted the next morning (以板覆上，重物迮之。得一宿, “cover it with a board and press it with heavy objects for one night”) [22]. A recipe quoted from the older cookbook Shici (食次, “Order of Dishes”) goes further. Boiled meat from beef and deer heads is chopped, steamed with pork trotters and seasonings, and wrapped in bundles of grass. The bundles are pressed flat under large timbers, and the text adds that the heavier the weight, the better. In summer, small bundles are instead clamped between boards, two boards on each side, bound with rope, and tightened by driving long, thin wedges between the boards, in the manner of wedging a cart axle, until no more wedge can be driven in [22]. The editor of the modern annotated text glosses 迮 (ze, “press”) as pressing or squeezing [22]. These recipes are not dried meat recipes. They show, however, that board pressing under weight and wedge pressing between boards were established meat processing operations in 6th century China, long before the wooden panel presses recorded in Anatolia and Bulgaria.

Tang (618 to 907) to Qing (1644 to 1912): the law on cattle

Chinese law shaped which animals were dried. Article 203 of the Tang Code punished the deliberate killing of official or private horses and cattle with one and a half years of penal servitude, and an owner who killed his own horse or ox received one year [36, 37]. The Qing Code still punished the private slaughter of one’s own horses and cattle with a hundred strokes and confiscated the sinews, horns and hides [38]. The Chinese recipes therefore used pork, mutton, venison, poultry and fish as often as beef, and pressing in China was a technique for meat in general rather than for beef in particular.

Southern Song (1127 to 1279) or Yuan (1271 to 1368): intermittent stone pressing in summer

The Pujiang Wushi Zhongkui Lu (“Household Cooking Record of Madam Wu of Pujiang”) is a household manual written by a woman of the Wu family of Pujiang, and editions attribute it either to the Southern Song or to the Yuan [9]. Its method for salting meat in the summer months (夏月淹肉法, xiayue yan rou fa, “method for salting meat in summer”) is the closest Chinese parallel to pastirma. The meat is rubbed with hot roasted salt until soft and even and placed in a vat. It is pressed under a stone overnight and then hung. If traces of water appear, it is pressed dry again under a large stone and hung in a windy place, after which it does not spoil [9]. The sequence of salting, pressing, hanging and pressing again is the same intermittent pressing that defines pastirma, and the recipe is explicitly meant for summer.

Liang (502 to 557) legend and Ming (1368 to 1644) record: Nanjing pressed duck

Nanjing pressed salted duck is the best known Chinese pressed meat of the later imperial period. The Nanjing Local Chronicles Office notes a tradition that the product was created under Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty, about 1,400 years ago, but it treats this only as a report [39]. The first reliable evidence dates from the Ming, when a Nanjing rhyme listed salted pressed duck among the famous products of the city, and the Chronicles Office concludes that it was regarded as the leading local product by the Ming at the latest [39]. The product is made in a winter and a spring version, and its name reflects its compact meat and its dry, pressed, plank like form [40]. Its processing stages, from salting and brining to air drying, have been studied in the Chinese meat science literature [41, 42].

Present day: sandbags on omasum

Heavy loads remain in use in present day Chinese production. In a present day omasum processing operation observed by the author, 28 sandbags of 50 kg each, a total of 1,400 kg, were placed on a batch of about 400 kg of product. This is a load of roughly 3.5 kg for every kilogram of product. Sandbags perform the same function as the stones of the Song or Yuan recipe, but they offer two practical advantages. They adapt to an uneven stack and spread the load over the whole surface, and they can be added or removed one at a time to adjust the pressure. These advantages follow from the mechanics of the method and have not been tested experimentally. No ancient Chinese text, and no published source from any other region, was found that describes sandbags used to press meat or offal. The practice is therefore documented here for the first time from direct observation. The sandbag itself, however, is attested in China from 203 BCE [20, 21]. It was this observation on omasum that first raised the question of a Chinese origin for pressing, and it led to the collagen link set out below.

Sandbags and the Cross Fertilisation of Techniques

The sandbag shows how techniques move between fields. Craftsmen, soldiers, engineers and food producers have always borrowed tools and principles from one another, and this exchange continues today. A load that dams a river, consolidates a soft foundation or presses the whey from a cheese can press the water from meat. The written record of such transfers is thin, because practical know how passes by example rather than by text, but the absence of a record does not show the absence of a practice.

Hydraulic and military engineering, 203 BCE

The first documented use of sandbags in China is hydraulic. At the Wei River in 203 BCE, Han Xin had more than ten thousand bags filled with sand and used them to dam the river, then released the water against the enemy army [20, 21]. The sandbag is here already a modular load, which can be made from local material, moved, stacked and removed as needed.

Soil consolidation, 20th century to the present

Modern civil engineering uses sand and soil loads to squeeze water from the ground, and the physics is the same as in pressing meat. When a load is placed on soft, saturated clay, the clay settles only as its pore water is expelled, and this slow process is called consolidation [43]. Engineers place a surcharge about 10 percent heavier than the final design load and leave it until consolidation is nearly complete [43]. They also install vertical drains, because shortening the drainage path lets the water escape faster, and Barron set out the classical theory of this radial drainage in 1948 [44]. The mathematical theory of consolidation was set out by Karl Terzaghi in 1925, and it treats the escape of water under load as a diffusion problem [45]. Recent laboratory work on clay from Nanjing tested soilbags combined with staged surcharge preloading and measured the resulting settlement, water discharge and loss of water content [46].

The parallel with meat is close. In both cases a load drives water out, and the rate depends on the length of the path the water must travel. In soil engineering, staged loading is used to promote consolidation. Pastirma is pressed in stages between drying periods [3], Bündnerfleisch is pressed two to four times [47], and soft ground is preloaded in stages [46].

Compaction, thin sections and controlled drying in Chinese crafts

Chinese craft texts show the same engineering principles that govern pressed meat, namely compaction, limited thickness and control of the drying rate. Three examples cover four thousand years.

Rammed earth, Longshan culture to the Shang dynasty (c. 3000 to 1046 BCE). Rammed earth compacts soil so that the voids in it close and the mass becomes firmer, and Chinese builders used it for city walls four to five thousand years ago [17]. The walls of the early Shang city at Zhengzhou enclose a rectangle almost 7 km long, and each rammed layer still shows the marks of the rammers on its surface [18]. Over time the ramming tools changed from heavy river stones to bundled rods and small wooden rammers, which reduced the contact area and made compaction more effective [19]. This is densification rather than the squeezing of water from a salted material, but it shows an understanding from the Neolithic onward that pressure applied in thin layers makes a mass dense and stable.

Ink cakes in the Qimin Yaoshu (c. 533 to 544 CE). The same book that instructs the squeezing of half dry meat also gives the rules for making ink, and these rules contain all three principles [23]. The mixture of soot, glue and additives is pounded in an iron mortar thirty thousand times, and more is better. Ink may be made only in the second and ninth months, because in warm weather it spoils, in cold weather it is hard to dry, and exposed to wind it breaks apart. Each cake may weigh no more than two or three liang, and the text calls this the great secret of ink making, better small than large [23]. Wind dries the surface faster than the interior, which is the same failure as case hardening in meat, and the limit on size keeps the path from core to surface short. Jia Sixie thus describes, in one book, the compaction, the limited thickness and the controlled drying of both ink and meat.

Roof tiles in the Tiangong Kaiwu (1637, late Ming). Song Yingxing describes how clay is trodden and stacked into a block, from which a wire bow cuts a slice three fen thick, about one centimetre, that is lifted like a sheet of paper and wrapped around a cylindrical mould [30, 48]. When the slice is slightly dry, it is released and splits into four tiles, and only after the blanks have dried are they stacked in the kiln and fired [30, 48]. Drying proceeds in stages at controlled thickness before any heat is applied, because a wet core under a hard, fired surface would fail.

None of these texts states a general theory. Together they show that Chinese craftsmen knew long before the physics was written down that pressure consolidates a wet mass, that thin pieces dry more reliably than thick ones, that drying too quickly at the surface causes failure, and that drying succeeds best in the right season and in stages. The squeezing of meat in the Qimin Yaoshu and the stone pressing of the Song or Yuan summer recipe apply the same knowledge to meat.

Weighted pressing of other foods

Food technology uses the same principle with loose weights. Japanese tsukemono are pressed under pickle stones of one to two kilograms or more, which extract water from salted vegetables [49]. Cheesemakers press whey from curds, and the pressure determines the hardness, texture and shape of the cheese [50]. Fuling zhacai is pressed three times between saltings [32]. The weight may be a stone, a board, a screw or a bag, depending on what is available.

Salted fish shows the closest parallels to meat. In the traditional Chinese method for coastal salted fish, whole fish are laid head down in a tank or barrel in alternating layers of fish and salt, and when the tank is full it is weighted with stones, which keeps the fish straight and the skin intact [51]. In Anhui, fish for the fermented stinky mandarin fish are pressed under heavy weights in the container to force out water [52]. In the Atlantic salt cod industry, split fish are press piled after the first drying so that moisture is equalised between pieces of different thickness [53]. Pressing has the same purpose in pastirma and Bündnerfleisch.

A search for sandbags used to dehydrate any food, whether meat, fish, vegetables, soybean curd or cheese, found no published record. The documented weights are stones, weighted boards, screws and springs. The sandbag on omasum therefore remains, on present evidence, a practice known from direct observation, and its link to engineering use is the most plausible explanation for its presence.

The sandbag in present day pressing

The present day Chinese practice of pressing omasum under sandbags, described above, connects these examples. The sandbag is an ancient Chinese tool [20, 21], soil engineering shows that bagged loads expel water efficiently [46], and food producers have long pressed with loose weights [49, 50]. When and where sandbags first entered the pressing of meat and offal is unknown. The most likely route is borrowing from flood defence and construction, where sandbags are cheap, portable and familiar, and where their capacity to shape themselves to an uneven surface is well known. This route is an interpretation, and field enquiry among Chinese processors and in regional archives would be needed to confirm it.

Collagen: The Link Between Hides, Glue, Ink, Meat and Omasum

The strongest single link in the Chinese record is collagen, the structural protein of skin, tendon, bone and the connective tissue of the digestive tract. Chinese craftsmen boiled collagen rich hides into glue, bound their ink with that glue, dried glue and ink under the same rules as meat, and pressed cooked, collagen rich meat into firm blocks. Omasum, the organ at the centre of the present day sandbag practice, is itself a collagen rich tissue. The sections below set out this link in order.

Glue from hides in the Qimin Yaoshu (c. 533 to 544 CE)

Chapter 90 of the Qimin Yaoshu gives the method for boiling glue (煮膠, zhu jiao, “boiling glue”), and chapter 91, on brushes and ink, follows directly [24]. The best raw materials are the hides of yellow cattle, water buffalo and pigs, while donkey, horse, camel and mule hides are second choice. Old shoes, soles, boots and broken saddles may also be boiled, provided the leather is raw and not rotten [24]. Fatty hides, and hides that have already been salted and cooked, are useless, and the text compares them to wrought iron, which can never be melted and cast again [24]. This is a precise practical knowledge of which collagen tissues yield glue and which processing destroys that capacity.

The hides are soaked for four or five days, washed, cut into pieces and boiled without removing the hair. The glue is ready when the last drop from the ladle shows a slight stickiness, and it is then strained and left to set overnight in a covered room [24].

One set of drying rules for glue, ink, dairy and meat

The glue chapter reads almost like the dried meat chapter. Four rules are shared, and together they show that the author treated these products as one family of drying problems.

Season. Glue may be boiled only in the second, third, ninth and tenth months, because in heat it does not set into cakes and in cold it freezes and loses its stickiness [24]. Ink may be made only in the second and ninth months [23], and dried meat in the first, second, ninth and tenth months [7].

Thickness. The set glue is cut into cakes as thin as possible. Thin cakes dry easily and take on an amber colour, while hard, thick pieces dry with difficulty and turn dark [24]. Ink cakes may weigh no more than two or three liang [23]. Meat strips are threaded on cords and squeezed, and in pastirma and the Song or Yuan recipe they are pressed flat [7, 9].

Protected drying. The glue cakes are laid on the lowest of three layers of mats. The two upper layers give shade and keep off frost and dew, because the set glue still holds water and melts in the sun, while dew makes it hard to dry [24]. The cakes see only the cool early morning sun, and in rain they are moved under a roof [24]. Ink is kept out of the wind so that it does not break apart [23]. The aim in both cases is to prevent the surface from failing before the interior has dried, the same failure that case hardening causes in meat [3].

The half dry stage. After four or five days, when the glue cakes are half dry, 浥浥時 (yiyi shi, “at the half dry stage”), they are threaded on cords and hung in the sun [24]. The dried meat recipe uses the same phrase for the moment when the meat strips, already threaded on cords, are squeezed by hand until firm [7]. The same term appears for strained curd, which is formed into balls when half dry [54]. In one book, one word marks the critical point of drying for glue, meat and dairy.

Pressing cooked collagen: the head meat of the Shici

The Shici recipe quoted in Book 9 of the Qimin Yaoshu brings pressing and collagen together in one operation [22]. Its raw materials are the heads of cattle and deer and the trotters of pigs, which are among the most collagen rich parts of the carcass. The meat is boiled, cut fine, steamed until extremely soft, wrapped in grass, pressed flat under large timbers with as much weight as possible, or clamped between wedged boards, and hung in a well to cool [22]. When collagen is boiled until very soft it is converted to gelatin, which sets as it cools and binds the pressed mass into a firm block. The recipe does not explain this mechanism, which is an interpretation from modern food science. It shows, however, that 6th century Chinese cooks deliberately pressed collagen rich meat under heavy weight to shape and set it, in the same book that boils hides into glue.

Glue and seasonal staging in the Kaogongji (Warring States, 475 to 221 BCE)

The knowledge is older than the Qimin Yaoshu. The Kaogongji (考工記, “Record of Trades”), the section on crafts in the Zhou Li, lists six glues used in bow making, from deer, horse, ox, rat, fish and rhinoceros, and describes the colour of each [55]. It also staggers the work on the bow by season. The wood is split in winter, the horn is soaked in spring, the sinew is worked in summer, the three materials are joined in autumn, and the bow is set in the cold [55]. The same classic that records omasum (脾析, pi xi, “beef omasum”) as a preserved ritual food [8] therefore also records glues from animal tissue and the seasonal staging of work with collagen materials. Medicinal glues were known in the same period. The Shennong Bencao Jing (“Divine Farmer’s Classic of Materia Medica”) records a white glue boiled from deer antler, and the Mingyi Bielu (“Supplementary Records of Famous Physicians”) of the Han to Wei period records that the medicinal glue of Dong’e was made by boiling cattle hide [56]. Tao Hongjing (456 to 536) distinguished a clear, thin glue for calligraphy and painting from thicker glues for medicine and for joining objects [56].

Omasum as a collagen tissue

Omasum belongs to the same class of materials. The walls of the ruminant stomachs are composed of smooth muscle and connective tissue, and the folds of the omasum contain smooth muscle and connective tissue under a keratinised mucous membrane with small cornified papillae [25]. The omasum is built of laminae of several orders, like the leaves of a book [26]. Beef tripe in general has been found to contain 20.1 percent collagen and 1.0 percent elastin [57]. For a craftsman who knew hides from glue boiling, omasum would have presented a familiar material, a thin, collagen rich sheet that holds water and must be dried evenly.

The same hands

The Qimin Yaoshu is a manual for the management of a rural estate. Glue boiling, ink making, dairy work, the preparation of omasum for the kitchen and the drying and pressing of meat all appear in it as tasks of the same household economy [7, 22, 24]. The book does not name the workers who performed each task. It is nevertheless consistent with the source that the people who boiled hides into glue, dried glue cakes under shading mats and threaded them at the half dry stage were the same people, or worked beside the people, who salted, squeezed and pressed meat and cleaned omasum.

What the collagen link shows

The collagen link brings the separate strands of the Chinese record together. It shows a single, documented practical knowledge of collagen tissues in 6th century China, which covers boiling, setting, thin cutting, protected drying, the critical half dry stage, and pressing under heavy weight. It connects the hides that became glue, the glue that bound ink, the head meat that was pressed into blocks, the meat strips that were squeezed during drying, and omasum. No other ancient tradition examined in this study has left such a record.

The link has one limit. No surviving text states that omasum resembles skin, or that glue makers applied their knowledge to offal. Hide glue is collagen already converted to gelatin by long boiling, while raw or salted omasum holds native collagen, which behaves differently until it is heated. The link is therefore the strongest evidence in the Chinese case, but it remains an inference from shared materials, shared rules and a shared household economy rather than a recorded transfer. The Bencao Gangmu (“Compendium of Materia Medica”) of Li Shizhen (1578), under its entries for beef stomach and ox hide glue, and the Tiangong Kaiwu (1637), in its chapter on bows and the glues used for them, are the most likely places to find an explicit statement.

Offal and Omasum in the Chinese Record

Offal appears in the early Chinese food record. The Li Ji includes an organ dish among the court delicacies, a liver wrapped in caul fat and roasted [35]. The Qimin Yaoshu records a salted preserve made from the intestines, stomachs and swim bladders of fish, sealed and set in the sun for twenty days in summer and up to a hundred days in winter [7].

Omasum itself was a preserved ritual food in Zhou China. The Zhou Li records that the official in charge of preserved foods filled the ritual vessels for food offerings with, among other items, 脾析 (pi xi, “beef omasum”) [8]. The Han commentator Zheng Sinong (died 83 CE) explained this term as beef omasum [8]. Zheng Xuan then classified it as one of the five 齏 (ji, “finely cut preserves”), together with calamus root, large clams, pork ribs and young cattail shoots [8]. A modern study of Chinese fermented sauces reads it as a preparation of beef omasum among the preserved foods of the Zhou court [58]. Zheng Xuan also noted that meat for these preserves was first dried and then chopped, mixed with millet ferment and salt, soaked in good wine and sealed in jars for a hundred days [8]. Whether omasum passed through the drying step is not stated.

Later sources name the organ repeatedly. The Shuowen (“Explaining Graphs and Analysing Characters”) of Xu Shen, completed around 100 to 121 CE in the Eastern Han, defines 胘 (xian, “omasum”) as beef omasum, and the Qimin Yaoshu uses cattle and sheep omasum fresh, cleaned white, cut into strips and briefly simmered in salt and fermented bean liquid [7]. None of these sources describes omasum being pressed. The Chinese record shows that omasum was preserved for ritual use in the Zhou period and that organs in general were dried, but it does not directly connect omasum to the pressing techniques used for muscle meat. The collagen link set out above supplies the indirect connection.

Contemporary Chinese market sources record a colour preference that is important for omasum today. Popular food and consumer sites state that omasum from cattle raised on commercial feed is yellowish, while omasum from animals fed on grain crops and forage is black [59, 60]. Fresh omasum is black on its surface, and white omasum has been bleached [60]. A consumer article explains that snow white omasum has usually had its membrane removed and then been treated with hydrogen peroxide or another bleaching agent [61]. These are popular rather than scholarly sources. They are, however, the best record of how the present Chinese market judges omasum colour, and they suggest that Chinese consumers associate a naturally black, unbleached omasum with fresh, forage fed raw material.

The Westward Line

Pressure on meat is reported among the steppe peoples from late antiquity, and pressed meat later appears in Anatolia and Bulgaria. Pastirma, Bulgarian pastarma and Turkish pressed omasum lie at the western end of a possible line of transmission from China.

Drying as the Foundation of Settlement

Drying was not a minor kitchen skill among the Central Asian Turks. Cingil (2019) reports that the Turks used an area’s suitability for drying meat as a criterion for settlement [4, 62]. They hung meat in a tree and observed how long it took to dry or whether it decayed. If the meat stayed in good condition for a long time, they settled there, and Emir Timur (1336 to 1405) reportedly chose Samarkand by this method [4]. A people who selected cities by the behaviour of drying meat had every reason to find ways of making drying faster and safer. Pressing is probably the simplest of those ways, because it needs only hands, boards, stones or bags of sand.

The Steppe and the Turkic Record

Mechanical pressure on meat is reported among the steppe peoples from late antiquity. Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 330 to 395), writing around 390 CE, reported that the Huns warmed raw meat by placing it between their thighs and the backs of their horses [10]. Cingil (2019) regards this as the earliest reference to pastirma [4, 62]. The passage must be read with caution. A specialist volume on the food customs of the conquering Hungarians and other nomadic peoples takes its title from this quotation, and its reviewers note that it remains an open question whether nomads kept meat under the saddle as food, used it to treat saddle sores on their horses, or whether the report is a literary myth [11]. The passage is therefore what Ammianus reported, not a verified ethnographic observation. Pressure under the rider is also not the board pressing of later pastirma.

The Turkic vocabulary follows later. In the 1070s Mahmud of Kashgar recorded the verb basturmak, meaning to place something under a very heavy object, and described spiced meat dried in autumn and stored until spring [4]. The name pastırma still has this meaning of pressing [4].

Anatolia: Pastirma

Pastirma remains the reference product for board pressing under heavy weight. In the FAO description, the salted strips are piled for two days and then air dried for two to three days in summer or 15 to 20 days in winter [3]. They are stacked 30 cm high and pressed under about one tonne for 12 hours. After a further two to three days of drying they are pressed again for 12 hours and finally air dried for 5 to 10 days before the çemen coating is applied [3]. Modern research descriptions follow the same sequence, with the çemen paste applied after the second pressing [63]. The finished product has an average water activity of 0.88 and a salt content between 4.5 and 6.0 percent [3].

Recent studies isolate pressing as a distinct stage. Hastaoğlu and Vural sampled pastirma after salting, after the first drying, after pressing and after the second drying, under both natural and controlled conditions, and found that salting, pressing and drying all affected pH, with drying having the largest effect [64]. Kırkyol and Akköse followed the product through curing, first drying, second drying and the final stage and found that moisture and water activity fell throughout production while hardness, cohesiveness and chewiness increased [65]. In a traditional plant in Erzurum, the first pressing lasted 20 hours at 10 °C, the meat was then dried for five days at 18 to 22 °C, and a second, shorter pressing of 1.5 to 2 hours followed at 20 to 22 °C [66].

Pastirma is a speciality of Kayseri. The traditional season there runs from mid September to the end of autumn, when clear skies, low humidity and mild winds favour drying and maturing [2]. By the 1500s pastirma was a speciality of the Ottoman palace kitchen under the name Pastama ı Kayseriyye [4].

Turkey: Pressed Omasum

Omasum is also pressed in Turkey, but no historical source on this practice was found. The anatomy of the organ and the chemistry of salt suggest that pressing may be even more important for omasum than for muscle meat.

Why omasum needs pressing more than meat

Muscle and omasum begin from opposite microbiological positions. Deep skeletal muscle from healthy animals is generally considered essentially sterile, while most initial carcass contamination is surface associated [67]. The omasum, by contrast, is a colonised organ. Sequencing of the contents of the bovine rumen, reticulum and omasum has characterised a diverse bacterial community in the omasum [68]. In yaks, prokaryote diversity was higher in the reticulum and omasum than in the rumen and abomasum, and all four compartments contained high levels of bacteria, methanogens, protozoa and anaerobic fungi [69]. The omasum is built of laminae of several orders, like the leaves of a book, and in the living animal ingesta lies between them [26].

A piece of beef hung in a tree on a windy day therefore has an advantage that omasum lacks. Its interior is sterile, its contamination is on the outside, and wind dries that outside quickly. The dry surface inhibits microbial growth while salt diffuses into the sterile core. Omasum has no sterile core. Every leaf surface has the microbial load of the forestomach, and the leaves lie against each other, enclosing wet spaces that wind cannot reach. Surface salting and washing in brine reach the outer faces of the leaves, but water and microbes held in the folds remain, and the retained water dilutes whatever salt reaches it. This is an interpretation from the anatomy and the microbiology, not a documented historical explanation.

Pressing solves this problem. Each leaf of omasum is thin, so salt penetrates it quickly, and diffusion is not the main problem. The main problem is free liquid trapped between the leaves. Pressing squeezes that liquid out, brings salt into contact with every surface and flattens the stack into a form that can dry evenly. For muscle, pressing mainly speeds drying and prevents case hardening. For omasum, it removes the wet, contaminated spaces in which spoilage would begin. On this reasoning, pressing is likely to have been more critical for omasum than for meat.

How salt lowers water activity before the water is gone

Salt protects meat long before pressing and drying have removed much water. Water activity depends on the concentration of salt in the water phase of the meat, and studies of meat report a linear relationship between water activity and the salt content of that water phase [70]. Salt therefore lowers water activity by dissolving in the water that is already present, without any water being removed. A one molal sodium chloride solution has a water activity of about 0.967, and a saturated solution has a water activity of about 0.755 [71]. A 22 percent salt solution has been measured at 0.86 [72].

Pastirma shows the effect directly. During 48 hours of curing, water activity fell from 0.985 to 0.942, while moisture fell only from 74.56 to 66.64 percent [73]. Most of the early protection therefore comes from salt entering the water phase, not from water leaving the meat. Salt is also most concentrated at the surface, where the microorganisms are, so the surface is protected first while the sterile interior of muscle waits for salt to diffuse inward. Pressing then shortens that inward path and removes the dilute brine that salting draws out of the tissue.

In omasum the same chemistry works against the producer if liquid remains trapped. Liquid held between the leaves dilutes the salt, and a dilute brine keeps a high water activity. Pressing out that liquid allows the salt that remains to reach the concentrations at which it protects. This is why salting and pressing belong together, and why salting alone, or washing in brine alone, is unlikely to have been enough for omasum.

Origin of omasum pressing

The most likely explanation is that omasum pressing was adapted from the established practice for muscle meat. The Chinese record supports this in two ways. Omasum was a preserved ritual food in Zhou China, and the collagen link shows that Chinese craftsmen dealt with hides, glue, pressed head meat, dried meat and omasum within one body of practical knowledge. The principles that pressing applies were more fully understood and recorded in China than anywhere else in antiquity. A Chinese origin for the pressing of omasum, which moved west together with the pressing of meat, is therefore a reasonable hypothesis. The present day sandbag pressing of omasum in China shows that the practice is still alive at the eastern end of the route. Turkish trade archives, guild records and interviews with omasum processors, together with Chinese regional sources, would be needed to test the hypothesis.

Turkey and Bulgaria: Geography, Culture and the Silk Road

Turkey and Bulgaria share the pressed meat tradition because they share a border, a road system and a long common history. Four connections explain how a technique could pass between them and why it is still used on both sides.

Geographical closeness

The two countries meet in Thrace, and a single ancient road binds them. The Roman military road from Singidunum (Belgrade) to Constantinople (Istanbul) ran through Serdica (Sofia), Philippopolis (Plovdiv) and Adrianopolis (Edirne) [74]. Konstantin Jireček, the founder of Balkan historical studies, devoted a monograph to this road and its mountain passes in 1877 [74]. Plovdiv and Edirne, the main towns of the Bulgarian and Turkish sides of Thrace, therefore lay on the same highway for almost two thousand years.

The Silk Road through Anatolia and Thrace

The Silk Road did not end in Asia. UNESCO lists Kayseri, Konya, Sivas, Istanbul and Edirne among the Anatolian centres on the Silk Road routes, and records that the Seljuks built caravanserais along these roads to keep trade secure [75]. Konya and Kayseri were the main departure and arrival points of caravans in Seljuk Anatolia, and the Sultan Han on the Kayseri to Sivas road appears as a toll station in the 14th century merchant manual of Francesco Pegolotti [76]. Kayseri, the home of Turkish pastirma, thus stood on the same trade network that continued through Istanbul and Edirne into the Bulgarian lands.

Cultural ties

The cultural ties are older than the Ottoman conquest. Bulgaria takes its name from the Bulgars, a nomadic people of skilled horsemen from the steppe north of the Black Sea [77]. Many scholars regarded them as a Turkic people of Central Asian origin, although modern genetic research points to western Eurasian affiliations [77]. In 681 CE the Byzantine Empire recognised the state that Khan Asparukh founded south of the Danube [77]. The founders of Bulgaria therefore came from the same steppe world in which pressure on meat under the rider was reported.

Byzantium formed a second shared layer. Both the Bulgarian lands and Anatolia were Byzantine for centuries, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America states that the Ottomans adopted a Byzantine cured beef called paston, which they called pastırma [78]. Andrew Dalby’s study of Byzantine food discusses paston and related salted products [79].

Ottoman rule formed the third layer. The Ottomans took Plovdiv in the 1360s [80], and Bulgaria remained under Ottoman rule until 1878. Bulgarian pastarma takes its name from the Turkish word, and the product is pressed several times in wooden panel presses during drying, as in Anatolia [81]. Pastarma govezhda was registered as an EU Traditional Speciality Guaranteed in 2017 [5].

A documented Bulgarian technical lineage

The EU registration dossier records a twentieth century technical lineage. The specification defines Pastarma govezhda as a pressed meat product made from uncomminuted fresh beef through salting, drying and pressing, in pieces of a flattened oblong shape, and it states that the word pastarma is of Turkic origin and means salted, pressed and dried meat [5, 6]. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, handcrafted production took place seasonally in natural drying chambers in mountain regions with suitable weather [5]. The first production and trade standards were published in 1942 by the Supreme Institute of Veterinary Hygiene and Control of Animal Products [6]. In describing the process, Dr M. Yordanov and T. Girginov recorded that drying and pressing are repeated until the product is completely ready, and that traditional producers described the finished product as baked [5]. The current specification sets each pressing at 12 to 24 hours [6]. Bulgaria thus has a documented continuity of repeated drying and pressing from the traditional mountain producers to the modern protected product.

Points of technology transfer

Four points of transfer are possible, and they are not mutually exclusive. The first is the arrival of the Bulgars in 681, which brought steppe horsemen with steppe food customs into the Balkans four centuries before the Seljuks reached Anatolia. The second is Kayseri and the other caravan hubs of Seljuk Anatolia in the 12th and 13th centuries, where Turkic, Byzantine, Armenian and Persian traders met. The third is the Ottoman advance into Thrace in the 14th century, when armies, administrators and settlers moved along the road from Edirne to Plovdiv and brought Anatolian food practice with them. The fourth is the Byzantine substrate on both sides, which may have supplied a salted beef tradition that Turkic pressing then reshaped.

The likely mechanism is movement of people rather than transmission of texts. Pressing requires no written instruction, only the example of a neighbour, a soldier or a trader. The evidence therefore favours a gradual spread by armies, caravans and settlers along the Thracian road and the Anatolian caravan routes. This reconstruction fits the geography and the dates, although no single document records the transfer itself.

A Possible Line from China to Turkey and Bulgaria

The documented evidence allows a possible line of transmission to be drawn. Each link differs in strength, and the gaps are marked.

Stage 1. Tarim Basin, c. 2000 to 1500 BCE. Pastoralists at Xiaohe made kefir cheese, the oldest evidence of food dewatering in the region [27, 28]. Evidence: strong for dairy dewatering, none for meat pressing.

Stage 2. Zhou and Han China, c. 1000 BCE to 220 CE. Dried meat appears in the Yijing of the Western Zhou [33]. The Zhou Li, the Li Ji and the Han commentators describe pounding and beating meat before or during drying [7, 8, 35], the Kaogongji records six animal glues and the seasonal staging of work with them [55], and sandbags are attested as weights in 203 BCE [20, 21]. Evidence: strong.

Stage 3. The steppe, 4th century CE. Ammianus Marcellinus reported that the Huns placed raw meat between their thighs and the backs of their horses [10]. Whether this was a food practice, a veterinary remedy or a literary convention remains open [11]. Evidence: weak to moderate. Pressure under the rider differs from board pressing.

Stage 4. Northern China under the Northern Wei (386 to 534) and Eastern Wei (534 to 550). The Qimin Yaoshu records repeated hand squeezing during drying, rod beating, the pressing of salted fish on stone boards, the pressing of cooked head meat under timbers and wedged boards, and glue and ink made under the same drying rules as meat [7, 22, 23, 24]. The Northern Wei was founded by the Tuoba Xianbei, a steppe people, so this stage marks a meeting point of Chinese and steppe cultures. Evidence: strong for the technique. The direction of influence between Chinese and Xianbei remains open.

Stage 5. The Tarim Basin and Kashgar, 6th to 11th centuries. The Göktürk Khaganate (552 to 744) and the Uyghur Khaganate (744 to 840) ruled the steppe in close contact with Sui (581 to 618) and Tang (618 to 907) China. Turfan has yielded 113 fragments of Chinese classics, including four of the Li Ji, which shows that Chinese texts on ritual food circulated in the oasis cities [82]. Byzantine gold coins found at Turfan, and references to Byzantium in the Dunhuang documents, show that the same route reached the eastern Mediterranean [83]. In the 1070s Mahmud of Kashgar recorded basturmak, to place under a very heavy object [4]. Evidence: the route is documented, but no source yet shows pressed dried meat in the Tarim oases. This is the main gap.

Stage 6. Anatolia, 11th to 16th centuries. After Manzikert in 1071 the Seljuks brought Turkic traditions into Anatolia and built caravanserais on the Silk Road through Kayseri and Konya [75, 76]. There they met the curing practice of the Byzantine Empire (330 to 1453) [78]. By the 1500s pastirma was a speciality of the Ottoman palace kitchen [4]. Evidence: strong for the product, moderate for the Byzantine link.

Stage 7. Thrace and Bulgaria, 681 CE and from the 1360s. The Bulgars brought steppe customs south of the Danube in 681 [77]. From the 1360s Ottoman armies and administrators moved into Thrace along the old Roman road [74, 80]. Bulgarian pastarma now has the Turkish name and the Anatolian method of repeated pressing in wooden presses, documented in Bulgarian standards since 1942 [5, 6]. Evidence: strong for the Ottoman link, speculative for the Bulgar link.

No other ancient tradition has left so explicit a record of how drying works. The Chinese sources describe compaction, limited thickness, controlled drying, seasonal production and intermittent pressing across meat, fish, glue, ink, tiles and earth, and they bind hides, glue, pressed head meat, dried meat and omasum into one knowledge of collagen tissues, many centuries before comparable descriptions appear elsewhere. On this basis, the likely origin of the pressing of pastirma, and with it the pressing of omasum, can be hypothesised to be Chinese. Two points limit this line. The Turkic word is built on a native root meaning to press, not on a Chinese loanword [4]. Pressing is also simple enough to arise independently, as charque and Cape biltong may show. The line is therefore a hypothesis that fits the dates and the routes rather than a proven transmission. Uyghur, Sogdian and Chinese documents from Turfan and Dunhuang are the most likely place to find the missing evidence.

Further Spread or Independent Discovery

Pressing also appears far from the Silk Road, in the Alps and Italy, in southern Africa and in the Americas. For none of these traditions is a link to China documented. They may represent further spread of the technique, influence through other routes, or independent discovery of the same principle. In each case they show that pressing solves a general problem of drying thick cuts, and they indicate the conditions under which it is useful.

The Alps and Italy: Bündnerfleisch and San Daniele

Bündnerfleisch has been registered as a Swiss protected geographical indication since 24 September 1999, and its specification requires that salting, drying and pressing take place in the canton of Graubünden [84]. After curing, the pieces are first hung at 1 to 10 °C and then dried at 12 to 18 °C for three to six months, losing 45 to 55 percent of their weight [47]. During drying the pieces are pressed two to four times for about three days each. The pressing gives the typical rectangular shape, distributes moisture evenly and prevents an overly hard and dry rim, although a few small producers do not press [47].

San Daniele is a true ham. After salting, the legs are cleaned of residual salt and pressed, which gives the meat a texture suited to ageing and produces the typical guitar shape [85]. The pressing may be done by hand or by machine, and it allows salt to penetrate further into the leg [85].

Southern Africa: Biltong and Bokkoms

The origin of the South African examples is uncertain. They may be independent discoveries of the same principle, they may represent technology that diffused southward, or they may reflect influences from other cultures that had discovered pressing themselves. The Cape was a station of the Dutch East India Company from 1652 and was linked by sea to its Asian trade, so European and Asian influences are both possible. The sources do not allow a decision between these routes.

The 1891 Cape recipe remains the direct evidence of pressing in biltong [1]. The frontier context suggests simple methods, such as meat laid on planks and weighted with stones overnight, meat layered in barrels or crates under heavy lids, and strips placed under saddles [1]. Modern biltong uses strips of 1 to 2 cm that are packed firmly into a container, dipped in hot water and vinegar, and dried [3]. The move to thinner strips probably made pressing unnecessary, because thin strips dry evenly without it.

Pressing is still used in South Africa for fish. On the West Coast, bokkoms are made from harders (mullet) that are layered with coarse salt in a brick or stone tank filled with strong brine [86]. On the second day, a press of weighted wood is placed on the fish in the tank, and the fish are then strung up in bunches and dried in the sun and wind [86]. The local tourism authority describes the product as harders that are brined, pressed and sun dried, and calls it the oldest delicacy of the West Coast [87]. Bokkoms are therefore made in present day South Africa with the same sequence of salting, pressing and drying that the 1891 Cape recipe records for beef.

Sub Saharan Africa Beyond the Cape

Outside South Africa no documented tradition of pressing dried meat was found in sub Saharan Africa. The recorded dried meats rely on thin cuts and direct sun. Nigerian kilishi, for example, is cut into slices of about 0.5 cm and dried in the sun before a groundnut paste is applied and the product is dried again [3].

Climate explains much of this pattern. The FAO gives warm, dry air of about 30 percent humidity with small differences between day and night temperatures as optimal for drying meat [3]. In the hot, dry Sahel, thin slices reach a stable state quickly and dry evenly without pressing. Humid regions face the opposite problem, and there the FAO treats smoking as the measure for wet weather and humid climates [3]. Pressing cannot help in such conditions, because it moves water inside the meat but cannot release it into saturated air. It therefore fits a middle zone of thick cuts dried slowly under moderate or cool conditions, such as northern Chinese winters, Anatolian autumns, Alpine drying lofts and Cape winters.

The Americas: Charque and Pemmican

Brazilian charque is the clearest case of pressing in the Americas. Beef pieces no more than 5 cm thick are layered with salt in piles about 1 m high, covered with wooden planks and pressed with heavy stones [3]. The pile is restacked with fresh salt every day for five days. Before drying, the pieces may also pass through wooden rollers or a special press to squeeze out surplus moisture and flatten the slabs [3]. Pressing and salting therefore run together, whereas pastirma presses between drying periods. Charque and the related carne de sol are the subject of a full FAO technical monograph [88]. Charque is an intermediate moisture meat with a water activity of 0.70 to 0.75, and microbial counts fall gradually during its processing and storage [89].

Plains pemmican used compaction of the finished product rather than pressing of whole muscle. In 1810 David Thompson described bison meat that was dried, smoked and pounded fine, mixed with melted fat and closely packed into bags about four inches thick [90]. A later account adds that the hot mixture was poured into buffalo hide bags holding a hundred pounds and compressed as it cooled before the bags were sewn shut [91].

Pressing in the Light of Modern Science

The historical sources describe what producers did and, occasionally, what they aimed for. Modern meat science explains why the technique works. This explanation was not available to the Chinese, Turkic or Anatolian producers who developed and carried the practice, and it is therefore presented separately from the historical record.

What Pressing Does

Salt moves into meat mainly by diffusion, and the time needed to reach the centre increases with the square of the distance [92]. In pastirma, salt diffusion during curing has been measured and modelled with Fick’s second law [73]. Flattening a piece therefore shortens the path to its core disproportionately.

Pressing also solves a drying problem. The FAO manual on meat preservation states that successful drying depends on a balance between evaporation at the surface and the migration of water from deeper layers [3]. If the surface dries too quickly while the interior remains moist, the dry surface inhibits further evaporation, and spoilage can begin in the areas that stay wet [3]. The Bündnerfleisch tradition states the solution directly. Pressing during drying distributes moisture evenly through the meat and prevents the formation of an overly hard and dry rim [47].

The gradient between a dry surface and a wet core has been measured directly in dried beef. In biltong pieces about 1.9 cm thick, dried for up to eight days at 22 to 25 °C and 55 percent relative humidity, the outer surface had a water activity of 0.80 to 0.81, while the innermost portion had 0.89 to 0.90 [93]. Chopped samples that mixed both portions gave intermediate values of 0.84 to 0.86, and the authors therefore used the interior as the most conservative measurement [93]. A difference of about 0.09 in water activity within a piece less than two centimetres thick is the problem that intermittent pressing addresses. Biltong processing and its drying variables have been reviewed in detail by Jones and colleagues [94].

Pressing also removes water and supports stability. In a study of pastirma made with 3, 6 and 9 percent salt, the drying, pressing and çemen coating stages together reduced moisture, water activity and microbial counts [95]. For San Daniele ham, the production specification names further effects. Pressing gives the legs their final guitar shape, stimulates drainage of the femoral vein and its branches, and settles the fat in relation to the lean [85].

Collagen adds a further dimension. Glue, ink and pressed head meat all show that collagen rich materials shrink, harden and crack if their surfaces dry faster than their interiors, which is why the Qimin Yaoshu protected glue cakes from sun, wind and dew and limited their thickness [23, 24]. Omasum, as a collagen rich tissue, shares this behaviour, and pressing addresses it by keeping the material thin and its moisture even.

What Pressing Does Not Do

Pressing has clear limits, and these limits explain where the technique appears and where it does not.

1. It does not evaporate water. Evaporation depends on the vapour pressure gradient between the meat surface and the surrounding air, while air movement accelerates water removal.
2. It does not overcome high humidity, because in saturated air the water it brings to the surface stays there.
3. It does not replace salt, which still has to penetrate the meat before spoilage begins.
4. It does not prevent mould. Surface moisture brought up by pressing can even favour mould when drying conditions are poor.
5. It does not kill pathogens. Safety still depends on salt, water activity and time.
6. It does little for thin cuts, because the diffusion advantage shrinks as thickness falls.

The Benefits of Pressing in Modern Understanding

The benefits listed below are largely a modern understanding. The producers who developed and carried the technique did not have the concepts of diffusion, water activity or microbial growth. The historical sources state the aims of pressing only in practical terms, such as making meat firm and compact [7] or keeping salted meat from spoiling in summer [9]. Most of the explanations that follow therefore come from modern meat science and technical manuals. Some benefits are stated in the historical or technical sources, while others follow from the physics of drying, and each is marked accordingly.

1. Faster drying. The FAO schedule for pastirma gives air drying times of two to three days in summer against 15 to 20 days in winter, with pressing under about one tonne between the drying stages [3]. Pressing keeps the pieces thin, so the path for water to leave the core stays short. Documented.

2. Prevention of case hardening. The FAO warns that drying too fast forms a hard rind that hinders evaporation from deeper layers and leaves a softer, wetter centre that is more susceptible to spoilage [3]. In Bündnerfleisch, pressing is described as the step that prevents such a hard, dry rim and distributes moisture evenly [47]. Documented.

3. Extension of the drying season. Heat speeds drying but increases the risk of case hardening. Pressing controls that risk, so producers could use the faster drying of warmer months. A Chinese recipe for salting meat in summer, dated to the Southern Song (1127 to 1279) or the Yuan (1271 to 1368), relies on this step [9]. Documented in China.

4. Firmness and compaction. The Qimin Yaoshu, compiled around 533 to 544 CE at the end of the Northern Wei dynasty (386 to 534) and in the early Eastern Wei (534 to 550), states the purpose of squeezing half dry meat directly. The aim is to make it firm and compact [7]. Documented.

5. Removal of blood, brine and free fluid. Pressing stimulates drainage of the femoral vein in San Daniele [85], and in charque it squeezes out surplus moisture before drying [3]. Documented.

6. Lower water activity and better salt distribution. Pressing forms part of the stages that lower moisture, water activity and microbial counts in pastirma [95], and it allows salt to penetrate further into the San Daniele leg [85]. Documented.

7. Shape for storage, transport and trade. Flat, even pieces stack and pack efficiently. Bündnerfleisch owes its rectangular shape to pressing [47], and Nanjing pressed duck takes its name from its compact, plank like form [40]. For caravan and saddle transport, flat and compact pieces would have been an advantage. The shapes are documented, and the transport advantage is an interpretation.

8. Simplicity. Pressing requires no fuel and no equipment beyond hands, boards, stones or sandbags. It was therefore open to herders, farmers and frontier settlers alike. Interpretation.

These benefits explain, in modern terms, why the technique spread and persisted. A technique that speeds drying, prevents spoilage at the core, extends the season, improves the cure and yields a product that is easy to transport would be kept wherever it arrived and adopted wherever thick cuts had to be dried, particularly because it costs almost nothing. The same benefits also explain why pressing could be discovered more than once, and this is the main limit on the thesis of a single Chinese origin.

Season and Conclusion

The evidence from China, Anatolia, the Alps and the Americas indicates that pressing changed the season in which thick cuts could be dried. This final section presents that evidence, shows how the sections of the article build the case, and draws the argument together.

Pressing and the Season of Production

Traditional drying calendars favour the cool months. In Kayseri the pastirma season runs from mid September to the end of autumn [2]. Mahmud of Kashgar already placed meat drying in autumn in the 1070s [4]. The Qimin Yaoshu follows a similar calendar in the 6th century, with dried meat made in the first, second, ninth and tenth months and the keeping product made best in the twelfth month [7]. Its glue follows almost the same calendar, the second, third, ninth and tenth months [24]. Cold weather slows spoilage while the meat dries.

Pressing made production outside the cool season possible. The clearest historical evidence is the Chinese summer recipe of the Pujiang Wushi Zhongkui Lu, in which the meat is pressed under stone, hung, and pressed again whenever water appears, after which it keeps without spoiling [9]. Pressing is the step that turns this into a summer method, because it removes the water that would otherwise remain in the meat during warm weather. Modern pastirma shows the same effect, since its first drying stage lasts two to three days in summer against 15 to 20 days in winter [3]. Charque supports the same reading, because it is dried in the Brazilian sun after salting under planks and stones [3].

The historical conclusion is that pressing widened the season in which thick cuts could be dried safely. Without pressing, warm weather dries the surface faster than the core can follow, and the result is case hardening with a moist interior. With pressing, the producer can use the faster drying of warmer months while controlling the gradient that heat creates.

How the Evidence Builds the Case

The sections of the article support the thesis in sequence. The Chinese record establishes priority. It contains the oldest instructions for squeezing and pressing meat during drying [7, 9], and it places them within a much older body of Chinese techniques for compaction, weighting and dewatering [17, 20, 21, 23]. Above all, it shows through the collagen link that hides, glue, ink, pressed head meat, dried meat and omasum were handled in 6th century China within one body of practical knowledge [22, 24].

The westward line establishes a route and a destination. The Silk Road linked northern China, the Tarim oases, Kayseri and Edirne [75, 76, 82, 83]. Mahmud of Kashgar recorded a Turkic verb meaning to place under a very heavy object in the 1070s [4]. Anatolia and Bulgaria, at the western end of this route, hold the strongest living traditions of intermittent pressing [3, 5, 6].

The traditions of further spread or independent discovery show how far the practice reaches, and it also marks the main limit of the thesis, because pressing is simple enough to have been discovered more than once. Modern science explains why a technique first grasped in practical terms was worth carrying and keeping, and the seasonal evidence shows the same effect in China, Anatolia and Brazil.

The chain has one clear gap. No source yet shows pressed dried meat in the Tarim oases between the Qimin Yaoshu and Mahmud of Kashgar, and the Turkic word is built on a native root rather than on a Chinese loanword [4]. A Chinese origin of the pressing of pastirma and pastarma is therefore the explanation that best fits the dates, the routes and the documented techniques, but it is not yet a demonstrated transmission.

Conclusion

Pressing appears wherever thick cuts are salted and dried slowly. The Chinese record includes dried and mechanically worked meats in the Zhou Li and the Li Ji, while the Qimin Yaoshu and the later summer salted meat recipe of the Song or Yuan period directly document squeezing or pressing. The other documented cases include Nanjing duck, pastirma, Pastarma govezhda, Bündnerfleisch, San Daniele, charque, the 1891 Cape biltong and, in fish, Chinese salted fish, Atlantic salt cod and West Coast bokkoms. The practice speeds drying, prevents case hardening, extends production into warmer months, lowers water activity, drains blood and brine, and yields firm, flat pieces that store and travel well. The load may come from hands, rods, boards, stones or sandbags, and the principle stays the same. The same physics governs the consolidation of soft ground under sandbag loads, the pressing of cheese and the weighting of pickles, which shows how freely such techniques cross between fields. Pressing cannot replace dry air, salt or time, and this limit explains its absence from the thin cut, sun dried traditions of the Sahel and from humid regions where smoke takes its place.

Nowhere in antiquity was this kind of drying understood and recorded as clearly as in China. The oldest written instructions come from 6th century northern China, where dewatering by pressure was already familiar from the wine press, where sandbags had served as weights since the Han, and where pounding and beating of meat go back to the Zhou and Han periods. In the same 6th century manual, hides were boiled into glue, glue bound ink, cooked head meat was pressed into blocks and drying meat was squeezed, all under one set of rules for collagen rich materials. Omasum, a collagen rich organ that China had preserved since the Zhou, belongs to the same family of materials. A plausible line runs from there through the steppe and the Tarim oases to Kayseri, and from Anatolia along the Thracian road into Bulgaria. The pressing of pastirma, of Pastarma govezhda and of omasum can therefore be hypothesised to be of Chinese origin, while the Alpine, Italian, South African and American cases may reflect either further diffusion or independent discovery. For peoples who chose where to settle by how well meat dried, pressing made drying less dependent on the climate.

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