Food Basics
I have previously commented on some of this on r/HousingWorks, particularly in these two posts:
For a basic kitchen, you need at least one means to heat food (not a microwave). You need food storage and access to adequate clean water.
You don't necessarily need cold storage. If there's no electricity and cold storage is not feasible, shelf stable foods plus a garden and/or services that supply fresh items may suffice.
Older houses in the US frequently have a special small door for fresh milk delivery. This is a service we mostly no longer have but before it was standard to have cold storage and ready access to homogenized store-bought milk, fresh milk was delivered every morning and the door for milk delivery secured the milk for residents without significant risk of letting in criminals because it was too small (and may have required a key that the milkman had but no one else did).
Similarly, my mother who died at age 88 nearly a year ago grew up in a large cosmopolitan city in Europe and once a week her mother went to the harbor to buy fresh seafood, including LIVE eel. If it's not dead yet, it's not rotting yet.
So milk delivery and seafood sold live are examples of historical means to provide access to fresh foods. Plus women typically had a kitchen garden, even if only a few potted plants in a kitchen windowsill for fresh herbs but also sometimes a larger garden just outside the kitchen door with fresh vegetables.
On a farm, the husband grew crops at scale like corn or wheat and tended to the farm animals, a practice called animal husbandry which is likely where we get the term husband.
The wife didn't get involved in those things and had a separate garden plot for herbs and vegetables to supply the kitchen table, often by harvesting what they would be eating that same day.
If you harvest it, wash it and cook it to be consumed that day, there's no need for cold storage in that process.
The children's song that says "Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold." is evidence of how poor families typically ate. They typically ate vegetarian meals and had a hot meal for lunch and cold leftovers of the same a few hours later for dinner.
If it contained no meat, it wasn't going to spoil if you ate it cold a few hours later.
Dried foods, salted foods or foods stored in oil were ancient means to preserve food without cold storage. Cellars or other underground storage provided long term cool storage without modern electricity or refrigeration and some storage or food prep methods involved burying foods in the ground, often in some kind of container.
My understanding is wolves will bury meat in muddy river banks to preserve it. It likely is fairly cool and largely anaerobic and those are two essential details for food storage, though I'm not recommending mud as a method, no.
When experimenting with new and unfamiliar processes, figuring out germ control pain points or other potential pitfalls will be an inevitable part of the process. Even if it's not new to the world and is just new to YOU, this is going to happen.
My mother knew stuff she never explained to me and I grew up in the house she lived in and observed what she did, yet remained baffled at some of the things she was able to pull off. I never did figure out exactly what she did or what she knew that somehow made certain things work.
This piece has a paragraph about a historical process for preparing meat that incorporates many good practices that obviously had to be sorted out by trial and error because it preceded germ theory.
My understanding is the simplest cheese you can make at home is ricotta which is basically curds from curdled milk. I never tried it myself but I read about it and had a cheese maker's catalog at one time.
I think I never tried it because it calls for unhomogenized milk and that wasn't readily available to me as an American getting store-bought milk. If you are in more rural circumstances, you should have access to raw milk.
Whey is the liquid leftover after intentionally curdling the milk using an acid, like lemon or vinegar. You pour milk into a container like a cake pan that is broad and shallow, add an acid and skim off the curds as they form and squeeze them out in cheesecloth to get rid of any remaining liquid.
My recollection is you typically stick the pan in the fridge overnight and by morning you have curds and whey. There are various types of cheesecloth and it's just a clean, usually cotton material that is intentionally porous to make it easy to squeeze out the liquid.
I ate ricotta regularly when I lived in Germany because commercially available ricotta was very mild compared to American brands I had tried, so I investigated the possibility of making my own at home since the curds themselves were something I was happy to eat and one of my children was happy to eat this as a small child in Germany but somehow something in the process of American ricotta leaves it tasting sour.
Ditto plain yogurt. Plain yogurt in Germany did not taste sour the way plain yogurt in America typically does.
My plan was to use lemon as the acid source for making ricotta on the theory that American ricotta is probably made with vinegar. This idea was rooted in the fact that my mother made German red cabbage with lemon instead of vinegar and hers was milder and not as sour as red cabbage typically is and I tolerated it better.
I recentely asked around on Reddit and was told I could look up a normal recipe for red cabbage and substitute lemon or even another acid for the vinegar. So I'm guessing you can use some other food grade acid if lemon juice or vinegar are either not available or not to your liking.
Modern American food practices, like TV dinners and microwave meals, have tried to replicate the historic practice of complex multi-course meals made by a full-time homemaker and then tried to tack on "convenience" by freezing them and trying to make them heat-and-eat.
This undermines a lot of important pieces of home-cooked meals, including choice in which foods to include in the meal, nutritional value and taste.
I've written up a concept of vernacular cuisine to try to distinguish it from home-cooked family meals prepared by a full-time wife and mom. My concept focuses more on the goal of eating well rather than cooking it yourself from scratch per se.
Post divorce, my eating habits have trended towards one-pot meals, take-out food and other convenience options that place a high value on freshness, nutrition and taste. I am not a fan of microwave meals or microwaves generally and don't typically consume microwaved foods.
This may cost a bit more upfront than microwave meals but I have a serious medical condition that is supposed to be extremely expensive to treat under conventional medicine and eating well is vastly cheaper and a fundamentally better solution than conventional medical treatment.
My suspicion is most Americans would be better off in every way doing the same rather than eating poorly because it's "cheap and easy" and then feeling terrible and resorting to a lot of medical care at high cost, both financially and logistically.
There's an upfront cost in learning new approaches and changing longstanding habits, but after you make this approach your new normal, it doesn't have to be a huge headache to eat well consistently.
Most Americans have largely abandoned a lot of proven food practices to preferentially choose foods involving a complex cold storage supply chain instead of shelf stable options as the default. This has a great many knock on effects, including economic instability because it is both more fragile and more expensive than shelf-stable foods as a dietary staple.