Refrigeration and freezers have certainly made things easier. But we did have similar options even 200 years back. They just required more work and planning.
Your yard was for growing garden veggies. No cabanas, ornamental plantings or swimming pools. If you owned a house, you had a cold cellar. No problem keeping root crops and apples til April in there. Your wife also dried foods, or canned intensely. I still put away 100+ jars of pickles, preserves and fruit for winter every year. Sugaring off in early spring was a necessary ritual. it was your source for sugar during the year, and any surplus was bartered at the general mercantile for those things you could not produce yourself.
Meat was dealt with in three ways. Smoke and cure, or salt and dry, was by far the easiest, but still a 1-2 day process. Pickling, but the Mrs had to really know what she was doing. Folks I knew, growing up, were still pickling herring and smelt from Simcoe in the early 70's . man were they good.
There was a refrigeration, of sorts. There was the ice house. A cabin, 1/2 buried in the ground built of thick timber. Seams grouted with thick wads of moss or peat. In winter, the men went out with ice saws and cut huge slabs of ice that were placed in the huts to the ceiling. A space tween the wood and ice was packed with sawdust. The rafters were also packed with insulating of a fashion. You could then keep meat hung in there for months without spoiling. In cities, companies sold blocks of ice to be placed in an ice box to keep food from spoiling.
In cities many went to the baker for bread. The norm was to bake fresh bread once or twice a week. Every culture has it's own version of hard tack or biscuit for when grain for fresh bread was in short supply. For Finn's it was rye ring or Reikäleipä. Others have rusks, hard tack, etc... I still practice some of the old world recipes
it was all much more labour intensive, yes. The focus on living was to survive. Fishing was not a hobby, it was a chore. Fish were food, not playthings. People certainly did not have the leisure time they enjoy currently in Western society.