As humorous as his monologue is, there is truth in Keillor’s words. Home food preservation has been a fundamental human activity until more recent generations, when developed societies migrated to industrialized farming and food preparation. Food preservation is as old as civilization. People have always endeavored to devise safe means to extend the useful life of the food that they have found, grown, caught, or killed. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, many families enjoyed the benefits of home-grown/raised produce and meat, and they preserved them using a variety of familiar methods including canning, drying, salting, smoking, and, later, freezing. The second half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of mega-grocery stores, food warehouses, convenience foods, fast foods, industrial farming, and the wane of home food preservation. Our busy, dual-income, multitasking families embraced convenience and fast foods, while putting Grandma’s canner on a dusty shelf or, more likely, in a tag sale. Times change and so does a society’s perspective. As the twenty-first century enters its second decade, economic issues, concern for food safety and nutrition, and a heightened awareness for global environmental concerns are foremost. Many people are revisiting home food preservation for a variety of reasons—some that are consistent with earlier generations, such as economy and wholesome food, and others that are unique to contemporary needs.
But this renaissance poses a number of questions in the minds of the new would-be preservationist. Mom and Grandma aren’t around to show me how to do this. How can I be sure that I’m doing it right? Is it hard? Could I poison my family? What’s the best method: canning, freezing, or drying? Can city-dwellers get into home food preservation? The stream of questions is almost endless, and the good news/bad news is that the stream of answers is, too. How does the neophyte get started without a PhD-level investment in learning?
Breathe easy. As a Wall Street Journal headline once stated, “Yes, You Can.” Home food preservation is not only possible for the uninitiated, but it’s also fun! This book is intended to bring together old-school basics and today’s need for accurate, easily accessible, and succinct instructions. I’ve designed it so that you can quickly get just the information that you need.
Are you new to home food preservation? Concerned about safety, nutrition, and sustainability? Focus on chapters 1 and 2. You’ll gain an historical perspective, while reviewing the many benefits of home preservation and learning about food safety and spoilage issues. You’ll see that today’s home food-preservation techniques go far beyond the Mason jar. Chapter 2 helps you choose home food-preservation methods that best support your objectives in terms of nutrition, ease, and sustainability. Many folks have strong opinions about what method is best. Bottom line: what is best is whatever works for you and your family.
Equipped with information about the scope of food procurement and preservation, you can choose the chapter that gives you specifics about the method you’re most interested in. Look at chapters 3 through 6 for details on each of the various preservation methods that we cover: freezing, canning (water bath and pressure), making jellies and jams, and pickling and fermenting. This book offers a concise survey of safe preservation methods along with tasty and convenient recipes. Because sustainability is in the forefront of many people’s minds, I offer tips and options that are eco-friendly.
You will also find handy reference information in the appendix, such as conversion charts, techniques, and more. This book is a great first step into the world of home food preservation, and when you’re ready to take bigger steps, you can check out the list of resources I’ve compiled for you at the back of the book.
Enjoy the adventure of home food preservation! It’s a hobby that easily turns into a lifestyle.
CHAPTER 1
A Contemporary Perspective
Food preservation has been a part of our human discourse since the dawn of civilization. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the needs and motives of our ancestors may feel remote. But it is no less true now than it was millennia ago: you are what you eat. What has changed is the society in which we live and the food growing, gathering, processing, and preservation options now available to us. We learned that we could maximize the crop yields through monoculture, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and industrial-size farming implements. We stopped taking ownership of our food gathering and learned to rely on commercial resources, often under the questionable banner of “convenience.” Dual-income families with an average of two-and-one-third children who played soccer, tennis, piano, and more didn’t have the time to cook a meal let alone consider the possibility of home food preservation. Today, much of our food “grows” in the cans, bottles, and cello packs that line our grocery shelves. Or even more conveniently, our meals come to us fully prepared through an anonymously staffed drive-through window. Unlike our ancestors, we have many and varied choices regarding how we gather and store our food. Food gathering doesn’t need to be delegated to nameless industrial farms and processing plants. If we want, we can take ownership of some or all of this food stewardship. While the degree of urgency may feel different today than it did for other civilizations throughout history, the core values are the same: preserve good, healthy food when it’s abundant to sustain us during times of scarcity.
If you picked up this volume, you are most likely choosing to take a more hands-on approach than many in our society. Let’s explore some of the reasons why taking this ownership of home food preservation makes sense today—how it can be convenient, safe, satisfying, and nutritious. We’ll take a short look back at some of the history, and we’ll look at some more contemporary issues of sustainability.
THE REAL CONVENIENCE FOOD
What’s more convenient than going out to the garden and picking tomatoes for your salad? Perhaps stepping into your pantry for a jar of canned tomatoes.
My mother grew up in poverty on a farm in Ohio. When she was a child, her family had no choice but to maximize what they took out of the soil and use or preserve every scrap. As her child a generation later, I helped her can and freeze the fruits and vegetables that we grew. We’d freeze sides of beef and pork that we had ordered from local farmers. With this stored bounty, we could spend the winter tapping into the jars on the shelves under the basement stairs and the goods frozen in our large chest freezer. Having grown up in the 1950s, I also remember how so-called convenience foods began to appear in our kitchen and on our supper table. Processed foods with extended shelf lives seemed to make food storage and preparation easier. As we all know, that trend became the norm.
Without getting into the fray of arguments between industrialized food and sustainable farming, let’s revisit this notion of convenience food and dispel some of the fallacies surrounding home food preservation:
Convenience is subjective, of course. But with a little planning and about the time you would spend watching one episode of your favorite sitcom,