Putting Food By - Janet Greene [1]
—JG
1
What Is It?
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. In fact, home preserving in the United States is more popular than ever. Between October 2008 and October 2009, sales of home-preserving products by Jarden Home Brands, the maker of the famed Ball and Kerr canning jars, rose 12 percent.
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 fulfill its ordained life cycle.
And finally we deal with the greater 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.
PFB 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 gas grill or backyard barbecue can follow the ways to preserve food safely.
2
Why Foods Spoil
Everything in this chapter applies to every safe method of preserving food at home, as you will see as PFB describes each process for each individual food. Meanwhile here follow the basic principles that are amplified throughout the rest of the book. They are corralled here for ready reference because we feel so strongly that any newcomer to canning, freezing, making preserves, drying, root-cellaring, or curing can always keep the How of food safety in mind if the Why is clear and handy.
Four kinds of things cause spoilage in preserved food: (1) enzymes, which are naturally