Books:
in-print

Food Preservation
NOTE: Please be careful when preserving food. Canning instructions in particular change as we learn more about food-borne diseases, so it is a good idea to use more recent canning methods.

Book Description:
New techniques for canning, drying, freezing, juicing, pickling, and storing fresh, in-season foods

more info:    The Big Book of Preserving the Harvest

Amazon.com
If you've been laboring under the illusion that your grandmother just smashed berries into a jar or that pickles grew on exotic pickle trees, prepare to be enlightened with Linda J. Amendt's Blue Ribbon Preserves: Secrets to Award-Winning Jams, Jellies, Marmalades & More. Canning, as shown in this exhaustive edition, is as much a science as an art, and this book includes every detail to educate the uninformed on what it takes to make great preserves.
Her recipes include the standards, such as strawberry jam, and the obscure, such as Garlic and Onion Jam. Amendt also does the public service of explaining the real difference between jams and jellies. Special caution about food safety holds a prominent place in Blue Ribbon Preserves and Amendt teaches us how to chose optimal foods for canning as well as how to safely store preserves to avoid potentially lethal food contamination. Be prepared for a bit of a chemistry lesson, which can be a long and sometimes didactic read, but it's well worth it for the critical food-safety information.

So complete is the book that Amendt, herself a recipient of countless state-fair awards for her preserves, includes pointers on how to succeed at such competitions (in a very thorough chapter which includes insights into how judges pick their winners). Blue Ribbon Preserves covers everything that goes into a ball jar and more, and in the process earns not only a tight seal of quality but its own blue ribbon. --Teresa Simanton

more info:  USA:  Blue Ribbon Preserves: Secrets to...

Europe:  Blue Ribbon Preserves: Secrets to...

Back Cover:
The Updated and Expanded Edition of Garden Way Publishing's Classic Guide
Discover the fast, easy way to save and preserve fresh and healthy fruits, vegetables, and herbs with this indispensable guide. The Busy Person's Guide to Preserving Food is packed with time-saving tips and advice for freezing, canning, cold storage, and drying. Here is the most up-to-date information on preserving food in the shortest amount of time right at your fingertips.

The Busy Person's Guide to Preserving Food includes:
* Step-by-step instructions and how-to illustrations for preserving today's most popular fruits and vegetables quickly and easily
* Quick tips and shortcuts for saving time while canning
* Instructions for alternative preserving methods including freezer bags, easy-to-make ice packs, and root cellaring
* Practical charts for determining yield and blanching time
* A review of equipment and appliances essential to fast home preservation
* Recipes for harvest dinners, salsas, herbal vinegars, pestos, jellies, and teas

Plus, you get simple explanations and solutions for the most common "what-went-wrong" questions. A must-have guide for today's busy cook and gardener
 

more info:  USA:  The Busy Person's Guide to Preserving...

Europe:  The Busy Person's Guide to Preserving...

more info:  USA:  The Complete Book of Year-Round...

Europe:  The Complete Book of Year-Round...

More than a cookbook, this food-preparation reference guide is a superbly informative read, with useful information on everything from the cultivation of plants and new techniques in jamming to liqueurs and cordials. While many people believe they lack the hobby time to can preserves, Jamlady demonstrates techniques and ingredients adaptable to busy households.

more info: The Jamlady Cookbook

Europe: The Jamlady Cookbook

Amazon.com:
Pickling food seems like a form of culinary alchemy to most of us. Or we recall it as something grandmothers used to do, laboring over heaps of vegetables and huge, steaming kettles to turn out jars of jewel-like pickles and piquant chutneys.
In the first chapter of The Joy of Pickling, Linda Ziedrich demystifies the pickling process. She explains the difference between fresh pickles made with vinegar and longer-keeping, salt-preserved, fermented pickles. Her detailed explanation of canning methods, including low-temperature pasteurization, shows how to avoid risky problems.

After reading the opening of this pickle primer, go straight to the "Quick" and "Freezer Pickle" chapters and discover how easy it is to make Green Olives with Lemon and Thyme and Freezer Dill Slices without any sterilizing, boiling, or safety issues. In addition, you get to enjoy them within 24 hours. When you are more confident, let Ziedrich guide you through pickling Spicy Broccoli, Pig Ears, Korean Kimchi, and Irish Corned Beef. Her three recipes for pickled eggs are also bound to please. --Dana Jacobi
 

more info:  USA:  The Joy of Pickling : 200 Flavor-Packed...

Europe:  The Joy of Pickling

Alternatives to freezing and canning  for preserving food.

more info:  USA:  Keeping Food Fresh: Old World Techniques...

Europe:  Keeping Food Fresh

Illustrated step-by-step instructions explain the techniques for canning, freezing, drying, and pickling.

more info:  USA:  Keeping the Harvest: Preserving Your...

Europe:  Keeping the Harvest : Preserving Your...

Amazon.com
We're apt to ignore the importance of food preservation, but its significance can't be overestimated. In Pickled, Potted, and Canned, Sue Shephard tells the fascinating and unexpectedly stirring story of the development of preserved, portable food--a history full of human ingenuity and mastery that follows our evolution from hunter-gathers, dependent upon food availability for sustenance, to "season cheaters" able to take nourishment when and where we wanted to and thus discover the world. Food preservation's history is the story of civilization itself, and in lively prose readers discover the way the world was shaped by such common yet extraordinary techniques as drying, salting, smoking, and, most recently, canning and freezing.
In 1800, Shepard writes, archaeologists working in Egypt discovered the body of a baby perfectly preserved in millennia-old honey, a practice stretching back in time and employed by the embalmers of Alexander the Great, also buried in honey. Sugar preservation, we are reminded, is one of the major techniques of food keeping--mixed with fruit, sugar produces jams, preserves, candied fruit, and other time-defying food--and Shepard traces its history from ancient Greece to the present. Similarly, she explores other techniques including salting, responsible for keeping meat and fish like cod palatable and at the ready; fermenting, to which we owe soy sauce and other mainstays; and drying, which gave us pasta and "ever-fresh" breads such as hardtack and matzo. From ancient but ever-evolving preservation methods like these to modern dehydration, which helps produce food that sustains astronauts, the book details simultaneously world-changing skills and culture in the making. --Arthur Boehm

more info:  USA:  Pickled, Potted, and Canned: How the Art...

Europe:  Pickled, Potted, and Canned: How the Art...

Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables - Mike Bubel, Nancy Bubel (Contributor), Pam Art (Editor) -1991

Back Cover:
Root cellaring, as many people remember but only a few people still practice, is a way of using the earth's naturally cool, stable temperature to store perishable fruits and vegetables. Root cellaring, as Mike and Nancy Bubel explain here, is a no-cost, simple, low-technology, energy-saving way to keep the harvest fresh all year long.

In Root Cellaring, the Bubels tell how to successfully use this natural storage approach. It's the first book devoted entirely to the subject, and it covers the subject with a thoroughness that makes it the only book you'll ever need on root cellaring.

Root Cellaring will tell you:
* How to choose vegetable and fruit varieties that will store best
* Specific individual storage requirements for nearly 100 home garden crops
* How to use root cellars in the country, in the city, and in any environment
* How to build root cellars, indoors and out, big and small, plain and fancy
* Case histories -- reports on the root cellaring techniques and experiences of many households all over North America

Root cellaring need not be strictly a country concept. Though it's often thought of as an adjunct to a large garden, a root cellar can in fact considerably stretch the resources of a small garden, making it easy to grow late succession crops for storage instead of many rows for canning and freezing. Best of all, root cellars can easily fit anywhere. Not everyone can live in the country, but everyone can benefit from natural cold storage.

more info:  USA:   Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of...

Europe:  Root Cellaring

Book Description:
The most comprehensive, up-to-date guide to harvesting, storing, preparing, and preserving foods of all kinds.

For the self-sufficient farmer or the urban weekend gardener, the third edition of Stocking Up is an invaluable addition to any kitchen. With detailed illustrations and easy-to-follow directions, this encyclopedic resource makes "stocking up" easy.

Follow step-by-step instructions for:

* Freezing, canning, drying, and preserving fruits, vegetables, meats, fish, and poultry
* Harvesting nuts, seeds, sprouts, fruits, and vegetables
* Preparing pickles, relishes, jams, jellies, butters, cheeses, and breads.

With more than 300 recipes for preservable foods -- from old standards like casseroles, fruit leather, and ice cream to new favorites such as sun-dried tomatoes, herb vinegars, and salt- and sugar-free versions of basic fare, Stocking Up covers everything for the home cook. Hundreds of charts and illustrations simplify preserving chores and choices for everyone interested in stocking up on wholesome, natural foods

more info:  USA:  Stocking Up: The Third Edition of the...

Europe:  Stocking Up : The Third Edition of the...