PRESERVING FOOD FREEZING or CANNING Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation THE GARDENERS & FARMERS OF TERRE with a new foreword by VIVANTE Deborah Madison Food / Gardening / Preservation $ 25 00 USD For the Kitchen Poet Who Rhymes "Nutritious77 with "Delicious77 YPICAL BOOKS ABOUT PRESERVING garden produce nearly always assume that modern "kitchen gardeners" will boil or freeze Ttheir 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 tech- niques 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. CENTRE TERRE VIVANTE is an ecological research and education center located in Mens, Domaine de Raud, a region of southeastern France. Terre Vivante hosts courses on regenerative gardening and farm- ing, renewable energy, and ecological building techniques. In addition to more than fifty books, Terre Vivante publishes the influential organic gardening magazine Les Quatre Saisons du Jardinage. ELIOT COLEMAN is a farmer and author of two best-selling gardening books, The New Organic Grower and Four-Season Harvest (Chelsea Green). DEBORAH MADISON is author of best-selling cookbooks including The Greens Cookbook and Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmers' Markets. ISBN 978-1-933392-59-2 Chelsea Green Publishing White River Junction,Vermont 802-295-6300 WOrlh if www. c h e lse a gree n. c o 111 h®"®ON recycled PAP£R PRESERVING FOOD WITHOUT FREEZING OR CANNING 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 TERRE VIVANTE •4* Chelsea Green Publishing Company White River Junction, Vermont English translation copyright 1999 by Chelsea Green Publishing Company. Illustrations copyright 1999 by Robin Wimbiscus. Foreword by Eliot Coleman copyright 1999. Foreword by Deborah Madison copyright 2006. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. Book design by Molly Cook Field. Translation by Diane Cote. ISBN: 978-1-933392-59-2 Printed in the United States of America. First published in 1999 as Keeping Food Fresh. New edition first printing, January 2007. Originally published in 1992 in Paris by Terre Vivante. 14 13 12 11 10 6 5 4 3 2 1 Our Commitment to Green Publishing Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecologi- cal stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise on the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative (www.greenpress initiative.org), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world's endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning was printed on Nature's Natural, a 50 percent postconsumer recycled, old-growth-forest-ffee paper supplied by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The Library of Congress has catalogued the previous edition as: Conserves naturelles des quartre saisons. English. Keeping food fresh : old-world techniques and recipes : the gardeners and farmers of Terre Vivante. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 1-890132-10-1 (alk. paper) 1. Food—Preservation. I. Aubert, Claude. II. Terre Vivante. III. Title. TX601.C643 1999 641.4—dc21 99-35132 CIP Chelsea Green Publishing Company P.O. Box 428 White River Junction, Vermont 05001 (802) 295-6300 www.chelseagreen.com CONTENTS Foreword to the New Edition IN THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST by Deborah Madison vii Foreword to the First Edition THE POETRY OF FOOD by Eliot Coleman xi Preface HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE xiii Introduction: PRESERVATION WITHOUT NUTRIENT LOSS xvii Chapter 1 PRESERVING IN THE GROUND OR IN A ROOT CELLAR i Chapter 2 PRESERVING BY DRYING 25 V Contents Chapter 3 PRESERVING BY LACTIC FERMENTATION 61 Chapter 4 PRESERVING IN OIL 93 Chapter 5 PRESERVING IN VINEGAR 107 Chapter 6 PRESERVING WITH SALT 121 Chapter 7 PRESERVING WITH SUGAR 131 Chapter S SWEET-AND-SOUR PRESERVES 157 Chapter 9 PRESERVING IN ALCOHOL 173 Appendix WHICH METHOD FOR PRESERVING EACH FOOD? 183 INDEX 187 ^ vi Foreword to the New Edition IN THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST BY DEBORAH MADISON LIVE ON A DIRT LANE IN A SMALL, historic New Mexican village. In the middle of the lane is a place where raised stones mark the sides of a six-foot square. I had driven over these stones for years, wondering what they might signify—an old well or perhaps a cis- tern?—until I happened to have a chat with my neighbor, Modesta. In the course of discussing all our wormy apples, she told me how people here used to store food for the winter, chiles and other vegetables, in pits of sandy soil. "Like that," she said, pointing to the patch of stones. "That was a storage pit. There are lots of them around here." And it was probably used not that many generations back. vii Foreword to the New Edition It's good to know how people have, through time, preserved their food—to have a window to view the old techniques and traditions. Preserv- ing Food Without Freezing or Canning gives us just this opportunity. The meth- ods here may well inspire us with their resourcefulness, their promise of goodness, and with the idea that we can eat well year around and quite inde- pendently of our long-distance food systems. Mostly what's required is curiosity and the willingness to use some elemental tools—air and sun for drying, the earth for holding, salt for transforming and preserving, paper for wrapping, oil for banishing air, ashes for preserving freshness. These basic things are the stuff of old-world techniques, and not all are in the past. The oldest technique for preserving food, drying, is still used in New Mexico. Corn is roasted or slaked with lime and then dried in the sun on tin roofs or wire screens. Chiles are dried then ground to make molido, less commonly apples are sliced and dried on strings on clotheslines. The long red ristras of chiles are still stored food even if they now have the dual role of ornamenting homes. On the farm they hang from the eaves of barns where the dry air passes freely around them, discouraging mold. A ristra placed in the kitchen makes it easy to pluck off chiles when cooking. Although green chiles are no longer buried in sand pits like the one in my lane, two techniques for doing so are described in this little book, should you want to try. Covering food with earth, drying it in the air, fermenting it in salt, burying it in fat—all traditional techniques of food preservation— should not be so impossibly far from our plates and palates today as we might, at first thought, assume. It's tempting, if one is nervous about the future, to say that it's good to know about the old ways of putting food by because we might need to know about them someday, just to survive. True, this could be a life-saving book, but this isn't the main reason to read it. There are good reasons that don't involve an uncertain future, those that have to do with taste and fla- vor, processes that preserve nutrition, such as lactic fermentation, as well as pleasure and poetry. One of my favorite descriptions in Preserving Food With- out Freezing or Canning, a method for storing apples, involves wrapping them in dried elderflowers. Imagine the pleasure of being sent to retrieve such an apple, brushing off the still-fragrant flowers, discovering that the fruit has changed from an apple to something mysterious and enchanting. Or, consider how simple is it to wrap tomatoes in paper to extend their pre- ^ viii J? Foreword to the First Edition cious season where frosts come early. This is a book I turn to when I find myself with a bounty of fruit. It guides me with the most direct ways to transform fruit into jellies and syrups, chutneys and preserves, without drowning it in sugar or killing it with pasteurization. The combinations are subtle and poetic, not quiet like others I've encountered. Take, for example, Melon Marmalade with Mint, Pear Jam with Walnuts, Blackberry Jam with Hazelnuts, or Cinnamon Dark Red Plums preserved in vinegar. The Bicol- ored Grapes in Vinegar are said to be divine with game—how enticing. I have some venison; where are the grapes? We all have these fruits and nuts, but what different ways of aligning them are given here. There are also foods we might have but really don't know how to use, like buckthorn berries, linden flowers, elderberries, and wild greens and mushrooms, but can learn about should we encounter them.