Carol Hupping (–2023)

This is a hefty volume at almost two inches thick, and covers just about every food preservation topic: choosing fruits and vegetables based on their keeping qualities, freezing, canning, drying, root cellaring, pickling, canning, juicing; making butter, cheese, yogurt, and ice cream; dressing, freezing, canning, curing, and smoking meats and fish; harvesting and using nuts, seeds, grains, and making sprouts. And every chapter has recipes. The editor explains in the introduction that they show more wrote this book for the person who has “more than a backyard garden, but less than a big farm operation”. [pg xi] It was compiled from Organic Gardening and Farming reader interviews, out of print books (from a time when all food was organic by default), USDA and college extension research, and first-hand research by the staff at Rodale to create a book that is a fairly complete guide to “preserving everything that could be raised on a homestead . . . as naturally as possible, without the use of any chemicals or overprocessed ingredients”. [pg xii]

So long as you have a recent copy of the canning guidelines from your local extension, the USDA, or the National Center for Home Food Preservation, to bring you up to date on the latest research, you really don’t need any other book on keeping your harvest. Directions are straightforward and thorough and really do focus on what you can do on a homestead. For instance, in the cheesemaking chapter gives direction on making cheeses with purchased starters but also with thistle, which you may have growing on the edges of your property. No white sugar can be found anywhere in the book, chiefly because the Rodale staff prefer more nutritious sweeteners, but also because other sweeteners (honey, maple syrup, sorghum) can be produced on the homestead. Additionally, the jam and jelly recipes all call for low-methoxyl pectin, which requires calcium salts rather than sugar to gel, allowing you to use less or no white sugar (I like tart preserves. This is also a boon for diabetics who wish to make their preserves with sugar substitutes.). Furthermore, they also give directions for a homemade alternative to the calcium salts and even detail the making of homemade pectin from apple thinnings. Plans with clear diagrams show multiple methods of constructing root cellars, food smokers, dehydrators, and cheese presses from materials you may have on hand. I even found a handy chart detailing the amount of trimmed cuts I can expect to get from our piggies at butchering time – along with rendering directions for all that lard I’m going to have to get creative with. show less

An old classic and still good. Other books have safer and more up to date, scientific methods and information in this book should be compared to modern publications, but ... I regretted having lost or donated my original copy from the 1970s and had to buy a copy secondhand. There's something about this book!

Obviously, this is out of date. A lot of advances have been made in this area in the past 40 years. However, it goes into the theory of the various ways of using power from what is freely available, and includes not only advice on buying equipment, but also on making your own. It could be fairly useful alongside more modern works.

If, like me, you enjoy the increasingly arcane are of putting up food this is the cookbook. Though the recipes lack innovation they are classic and leave room for any interpretations. Interestingly, many of the fruit recipes are sugar free and there are some vegan recipes in the other sections as well. If you are interested in canning, pickling, preserving or just plain freezing your leftovers you couldn't do better then this long time favorite.