Putting Food By - Janet Greene [13]
Dealing with Minerals In Water
“Hard” water has above-average mineral content (calcium is often an offender here). Hard water can shrivel pickles or toughen vegetables.
You can check for hardness by shaking a small amount of soap—not detergent—in a jar of water: if it makes a good head of suds in your water, hardness is not a problem. Or ask your municipal water department to tell you the composition of the water that comes from your tap. In rural areas, your health officer can tell you how to have your private water supply tested for mineral content as well as for bacterial count.
Where there’s no dangerous air pollution (“acid rain,” etc): if your water is hard, and you can’t get distilled water, collect rainwater in the open—not as run-off from dusty roofs—and strain it through layers of cheesecloth.
Or if you know that hardness is caused by calcium or magnesium carbonates, boil the water for 20 to 30 minutes to settle out the mineral salts; then pour off and save the relatively soft water, taking care not to disturb the sediment.
If you plan to make pickles with whole small cucumbers, another means of dealing with very hard water is to boil it for 15 minutes, then let it stand carefully covered for 24 hours; remove the expected light film of scum from the top, and do not disturb the sediment. Pour off the water carefully into a clean, large container, again not disturbing the sediment; add 1 tablespoon white vinegar for each gallon of boiled water before you use it.
Or add ½ cup vinegar to each 1 gallon of water, so the acid will cause precipitation of calcium and other minerals; then pour off the treated water, as above.
Iron compounds in your water will darken the foods you put by.
In preparing fish or shellfish for processing or freezing, do not wash in sea water or use sea water for precooking, etc.
Don’t use water that contains sulfur if you can avoid doing so. The sulfates in water do settle out with boiling, but become more concentrated as the water evaporates. Sulfur will darken foods.
Salt
Only about 2 percent of all the salt—the common salt all of us know, which is sodium chloride (NaCl)—used in the United States is used for food, a statistic indicating that great amounts of available salt are not food-grade. In this book we refer often to salt, and always mean either table salt or a pickling salt that is fit to put in our food. We offer a quick description of the various kinds of salt that are offered at retail to householders in order to clear up some misunderstandings that probably stem from simple misnaming.
Use of any salt is optional: added salt to canned foods is only a flavoring, because it is included in amounts so small that it has no effect as a preservative. It is up to individual choice to avoid foods that need a good deal of salt as a preservative (certain pickles, cured meats, fish, vegetables—Chapters 19, 20, and 21).
Table salt is finely ground; is either plain or with an added iodine compound (if it is iodized the legend on the box will say so); and it has a non-caking agent as a filler. This “free-running” additive that prevents caking is not soluble, and therefore gives a cloudiness to a canning or pickling liquid. The very small optional amounts in canning are not enough to produce noticeable cloudiness, but this effect would be quite apparent in pickling liquids that contain much greater amounts of salt.
Any iodine in the table salt would discolor or darken pickled foods; this is why we specify plain pickling salt for such food.
Characteristically, table salt is in the form of tiny cubes. Its density is such that 1 pound of this salt will equal as near to 1⅓ cups as makes no difference in household use.
Cooking and canning salt usually comes in 5-pound containers. It is pure sodium chloride with nothing added to it—no agent to prevent caking, no iodine compound. Its density equals that of the table salt above, so 1 pound of it will also be about 1⅓ cups.
Kosher salt is so named because it is used in the ritual cleansing of food in the Jewish