Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning

Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol,

by The Gardeners and Farmers of Centre Terre Vivante  
rating:
list price: $25.00 USD
Amazon price: $16.50 USD

Amazon Review: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.

Lynn's Review:

This amazing book from the Centre Terre Vivante in France outlines the many, many ways folks put food by before the advent of canning 200 years ago, and freezing less than a hundred years ago. Why use these methods?

[W]e believe that the traditional methods proposed herein are superior in every way: They preserve more flavor and nutritional content, are less costly, and use less energy.

All pluses in my book.

The Terre Vivante (Living Earth in English) gardeners and farmers have collected more than 500 methods and recipes for keeping food without freezing or canning, ranging from simply wiping oil on the rinds of winter squashes to my own favorite, lactic fermentation. It's not just for cabbage any more! (Or really, it never was.) You'll learn how to preserve cheeses in oil, pack green beans in salt, dry fruit, build a root cellar, and make dandelion wine (which Anhata and I did last year, very successfully I might add).

Anyone who's interested in food storage, the health benefits of traditional foods, saving money, or the "slow food" artisinal food movement would love this book.