Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation

The Gardeners and Farmers of Centre Terre Vivante

Apr 2007 · Chelsea Green Publishing

About this ebook

More than 250 easy and enjoyable recipes!

"The methods here [will] inspire us with their resourcefulness, their promise of goodness, and with the idea that we can eat well year around."—Deborah Madison

Over 100,00 copies sold!

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 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.

Inside, you’ll learn how to:

• Preserve without nutrient loss
• Preserve by drying
• Preserve with oil, vinegar, salt, and sugar
• Make sweet-and-sour preserves
• Preserve with alcohol

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.

An essential guide for those who seek healthy food for a healthy world.

Ratings and reviews

I've used, and now enjoyed, a number of the preserving ideas in this book and have found the results to be very tasty. The cucumbers preserved in salt, with our own addition of dill seed, is the new family favorite. The only requirement, other than trying to follow the instructions faithfully, is to make the effort to use the resulting products. You will be pleasantly surprised.

A collection of personal recipes and traditional food preservation methods. The book is not only a collection of methods and techniques, but a book of traditional food lore. The introductory pages discuss the need and utility of preserving the lore of food preservation; a distinction between traditional and modern methods; and the story of how this book came to be written. Following an introduction on preservation, the cautions, and general ideas behind the methods; each chapter begins with a short description of the general method under consideration-along with cautions. The rest of each chapter consists of recipes and lore about specific foods preserved in the method under discussion. The chapters cover: types of and uses of root cellars; drying foods; lactic fermentation; preservation in oil; salt (and salt brining); sugar; preserves; sweet-and-sour preserves; and the use of ethanol for food preservation. The closing chapter is a chart about how to choose the best method for a particular food. The book has nice illustrations and great layout. It is well supplemented with a thorough index to make any recipe immediately available.

About the author

Deborah Madison is a freelance writer and board member of the Foundation for Bio-Diversity and the Seed Savers Exchange, among others. As a freelance writer she has contributed to Cooking Light, Williams Sonoma's Taste, Vegetarian Times, Gourmet, Food and Wine, Bon Appetit, Garden Design, Fine Cooking, Organic Style, the LA Times, Orion, and others.

Eliot Coleman has over fifty years experience in all aspects of organic farming, including field vegetables, greenhouse vegetables, rotational grazing of cattle and sheep, and range poultry. He is the author of The New Organic Grower, Four-Season Harvest, and The Winter Harvest Handbook, as well as the instructional workshop DVD Year-Round Vegetable Production with Eliot Coleman. Coleman and his wife, Barbara Damrosch, presently operate a commercial year-round market garden, in addition to horticultural research projects, at Four Season Farm in Harborside, Maine.