Book of the Month

As featured in the January 2010 issue of Practically Seeking.

Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning

The Gardeners and Farmers of Terre Vivante

I suppose it may seem a bit odd to be writing a review for a book on preserving food in the middle of winter, but I'm sure that many of you, like me, have been finding seed catalogs in your mailbox and are already beginning to plan what you will plant once the danger of frost has passed.
Such an exciting time of year!
One of the most important lessons I have learned regarding both the Hunter-Gatherer lifestyle and the Self-Reliant one is that the time to start preparing for next winter is at the end of this one. And knowing that I am choosing to plant fruits and vegetables that I will be able to preserve without the use of electricity and without destroying their much needed nutritional content is, I think, very important indeed!
Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning is a compilation book that brings together an amazing amount of knowledge collected from the readers of an organic gardening magazine in France. Les Quatre Saison du Jardinage (Four Season Gardening) is a popular and influential organic gardening magazine throughout French-speaking Europe and several years ago they put a call out to their readers to share their family recipes for preserving fruits and vegetables. The response was tremendous and the result was this book — a wonderful anthology of almost lost knowledge that has now been preserved and is ready to be attempted by all who are willing to give these "new" old ways a try.
As the title clearly states, the two most common modern methods of food preservation, freezing and canning, have been deliberately omitted. Rather, this book focuses on traditional methods of preservation that are actually superior in almost every way!
Preserving through the use of Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage and Lactic Fermentation may seem as strange and slightly weird to you as they were to me, but these preservation techniques actually purport to preserve more flavor and nutritional content, cost less, and use less energy than the more familiar ways of freezing and canning.
All preserving is done as naturally as possible, retains maximum amounts of flavor and nutrition, uses ingredients that are whole or minimally processed and locally grown, and all the methods have been tested and are easy for "regular people" to try out.
While I'm still feeling a bit timid about attempting the lactic fermentation recipes (so different than anything I have ever heard of before!) I am very excited to have some great new ways of keeping food whole and fresh both in the ground and in cold storage for months after I would normally have given it up to the frosts or dropped it into a hot-bath canner. The idea of storing my apples wrapped in dried elderflowers that will give them a taste of pineapple after about six weeks is just too enticing to pass up! And learning to preserve everything from tomatoes and beans and peppers to swiss chard and garlic and cherries and so much more in oils and salts and vinegars … I am looking at my seed catalogs with whole new eyes this year.
As it states in the 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 the food."
Thanks to the wonderful willingness to share by the Gardeners and Farmers of Terre Vivante, our harvest this year will be much more poetic.

— Julie