A smokehouse is a building where meat or fish is cured with smoke. The finished product might be stored in the building, sometimes for a year or more. Even when people in some rural American areas during the twentieth century, notably where electricity still was not available, did not use smoke, they nevertheless called such a building--typically a small square unpainted wooden structure in the back yard--the "smoke house." Hogs were slaughtered after the onset of cold weather, and hams and other pork products were salted and hung up or placed on a shelf to last into the following summer.
