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Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation By The Gardeners and Farmers of Centre Terre Vivante ( Chelsea Green Publishing )
Release Date: 2007-04-04
Average Customer Rating:
List Price: $25.00
Price: $16.50
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Product Description
Typical books about preserving garden produce nearly always assume that modern "kitchen gardeners" will boil or freeze their vegetables and fruits. Yet here is a book that goes back to the future—celebrating traditional but little-known French techniques for storing and preserving edibles in ways that maximize flavor and nutrition.
Translated into English, and with a new foreword by Deborah Madison, this book deliberately ignores freezing and high-temperature canning in favor of methods that are superior because they are less costly and more energy-efficient.
As Eliot Coleman says in his foreword to the first edition, "Food preservation techniques can be divided into two categories: the modern scientific methods that remove the life from food, and the natural 'poetic' methods that maintain or enhance the life in food. The poetic techniques produce... foods that have been celebrated for centuries and are considered gourmet delights today."
Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning offers more than 250 easy and enjoyable recipes featuring locally grown and minimally refined ingredients. It is an essential guide for those who seek healthy food for a healthy world.
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 Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying etc.
Great book to add to my canning information. Will put to use some of the new techniques (to me) in my canning and food storage for next year.
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Food for the Gods from our Forefathers: What good taste they had!
I'm so glad that this book exists! All the simple and proven methods of food preservation that any of us can use and all without a freezer or complicated sterilization processes.
What a joy to read about simple and natural methods that not only preserve fruits and vegetables, but that make them taste better and in many cases make them positively gourmet!
Every person should grab a copy of this book whether they grow their own vegetables or not. Imagine being able to purchase fruit in season at reasonable prices, and then take some of it and preserve it for the dark days of winter when it would be prohibitively expensive. Our forefathers (and those great foremothers that did the preserving and came up with the 'recipes')knew to preserve not only the bounty of the summer and fall harvest, but to preserve the nutrition that is stored in the produce.
Vinegar, oil, salt, alcohol, sugar, drying methods too simple to name were all developed so that they (and we!) can eat food fit for the Gods all winter until the spring harvests. Each one of us can make a simple salt and water brine and preserve green beans. Each one of us can string a multitude of fruits and vegetables on strings and dry them for later rehydration in stews, soups, cobblers and pies.
What a book! What simple and flavorful methods! I'm so glad that this collection from the 'Gardeners and Farmers of Terre Vivante' was compiled so that all of us can benefit not only from their expertise, but from the nutrition and flavor that we can capture and hold over from harvest to harvest.
Get this book. Bronze it and pass it on to your children, friends and family. Everyone should know how to preserve food...whether they have bought it or grown it. Invaluable! TEN stars!
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A very useful book, that calls to mind grandmas of the world!
I ordered this book a bit over a month ago. I received it very promptly and read it front to back the same day. I was totally amazed by the varied methods of preserving- from using root cellaring to fermenting to using salt and oils and even making jams and jellies! This book is teaching me a lot of methods that I remember my grandmother telling me and my cousins about. Up til now they were lost to time as she died when I was young and too little to remember everything she did. The most exciting thing for me is first making sauerkraut and then the dandelion wine recipe. I have already started the wine, and once I bottle it (next week) I'm using my crock to make some kraut. I can't wait. I'm also anxious to try making some jam. I really like the idea of not using high-temperature canning, since I've always thought that it changes the flavor. When I taste before canning, I love the fresh flavor, but after having been canned, its just off somehow. My mom tells me I'm nuts, but we'll see when I try out one of these recipes that doesn't use that method. I'm sure the freshness will come through.
I read some other reviewers saying that the recipes aren't concise enough, not giving exact amounts, etc.. I find this to be a lot of hooey. The recipes are as concise as they need to be. Sometimes you seriously need to use some common sense. Its not too far fetched to see these mothers and grandmothers from the Terre Vivante just adjusting recipes to their own taste. Thats all you need to do when you are questionable about amounts. Adjust them to meet YOUR standards. After all, when all is said and done what they did doesn't matter, it matters what you do and what your tastebuds tell you.
The most useful part of this book, I think is the chart at the back showing the basic and alternate methods of preserving almost every fruit or vegetable I can even think of, and then some. The descriptions of each method at the beginning of each chapter and the introductions at the front of the book are all also very informative. And of course, the descriptions of what to do in the recipes in the farmers' own words, along with who they are and where they're from are priceless. They put me in mind of my grandmothers' recipes. Totally authentic and interesting to me to see how they actually make them. I think anyone who wants to learn about traditional methods should get this book! And maybe a second one too if your as messy in the kitchen as me! I'm sure to need to get another one in the coming years as it'll be like the rest of my favorite recipe books, splattered and spilled on til the recipes are almost unreadable. :o) hehe. -FYI this review by, MRS. S.G. Bewley
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An excellent book for those who wish to eat healthy all year long. ( japplejam )
I read the previous edition of this book ("Keeping Food Fresh"), then bought this edition for my daughter. All of the methods I have tried from this book have been very good. I appreciate knowing how to preserve food the way people used to (and obviously some still do), without having to destroy so many nutrients through canning. Many of the recipes in here can be adapted to other foods. For example, I took a recipe on pickled onions (lactic acid fermentation), eliminated the spices, and substituted garlic for the onion. I now have a wonderful method of preserving garlic to get that fresh taste all year long. I can also just use the juice. These methods also preserve food for a longer period of time than freezing does.
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 THE OLD WAYS HAVE SOME VALID POINTS
GREETINGS:
The rising costs of food and it's transportation by truck is forcing us to grow more veggies, and if you believe in the peak oil crisis, and we have no rail system to back up food truck deviveries,;then this book has great ideas of the past for safe canning, etc.
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