We think that it's one of the most useful and well-proven books on this topic available, and we hoghly recommend it!
It's the perfect companion to 'Making And Using Dried Foods', which we also recommend.
This new revised edition updates its invaluable and already-comprehensive contents and adds several new sections on how to:
With the latest and most complete information, Putting Food By is an essential resource and guide for anyone seriously intent on building a food reserve.
"Best and most complete on the subject we have seen"
- Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
"Do not pass 'Go', do not collect anything, do not make a move without Putting Food By...It is a veritable bible of the subject" - Knight NewspapersFrom the Introduction:
"To "put by" is an old, deep-country way of saying to "save something you don't use now against the time when you'll need it." Putting food by is simply food preservation.Who does it? Millions of households in the United States and Canada, for openers. Preserving food at home is prehistorical, though; drying and fermenting are the earliest known means, followed in very short order by salting and brining [pickling]. Preserving with sugar came next, but much later. Home-canning is less than two centuries old, and deliberate deep-freezing is the youngest method used at home.
Nowadays every nation on earth practices its own forms of preservation family-by-family, but chances are that North Americans do more of it on a wider scale than householders in any other major region. One statistic will give an idea; in the last year that figures were available [at this writing, the year was 1985] experts in the field of preserving food at home estimated that in the United States alone $310 million was spent on canning jars, lids, sugar, salt, pectin, vinegar, and spices.
There is no hocus-pocus about food preservation, no touchstone, no luck, no mystery. Food preservation is the protection of food from spoilage - period. Spoilage can mean unattractively over-the-hill, on to downright nasty, to finally - and most dangerously because sometimes it is not self-evident - deadly.
This book has been written to tell the lay person how to control spoilage or prevent it entirely, so that a full program/menu of foods can be harvested in a time of plenty and treated to be wholesome and available in a time of need.
Whether we are cooking dinner or canning tomatoes, we first clean the food, ridding it of external spoilers like dirt, blemishes, or infestations. We do the same thing in starting to preserve it. Next, we treat the unseen causes of deterioration , chief among them being the enzymes, those remarkable substances programmed to make the food fulfil its ordained life cycle.
And finally we deal with the greatest trouble-makers: the micro-organisms that can poison our food. These are stopped dead or destroyed outright by reducing the oxygen that most microbes need ; by applying heat or radically decreasing the temperature [heat kills them, freezing holds them immobilized]; by increasing acid [because virtually no microbial action occurs in strong-acid mediums]; by decreasing the available water that they require.
George York of the University of California, Davis, gives the following examples of how these microbial controls are applied, thereby demonstrating the beauty of home-preservation of food. The preserving methods are (1) making jams and jellies - lowering the available water, removing oxygen, applying heat, adding acid; (2) canning fruits and tomatoes - reducing oxygen [sealing jars], applying heat, relying on natural or added acid; (3) drying - taking away most of the available water; (4) canning vegetables and meats [both low-acid] - removing oxygen again, and applying intense heat; (5) freezing - inhibiting enzymatic action and radically lowering temperature; and (6) pickling - greatly increasing acidity beyond the tolerances of deadly micro-organisms.
Putting Food By has said earlier, and says again, that anyone with the drive to preserve food has the gumption to want to do it right. No big deal: anyone who can ride herd on a backyard gas barbecue can follow the ways to preserve food safely."
This is one of the finest and most comprehensive books on food preservation and storage of every type that we have ever seen, and we recommend it unreservedly! Buy it now, or as early as you can in 1999, and make good use of it this coming Spring, Summer, and Fall in building your own or your family's food stocks inexpensively and expertly!
Paperbound; 420 pages
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