Pickled, Potted, and Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Preserving Changed the World - Softcover

Shephard, Sue

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743255534 ISBN 13: 9780743255530

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2006

Synopsis

We may not give much thought to the boxes in our freezers or the cans on our shelves, but behind the story of food preservation is the history of civilization itself. The development of portable, preserved food enabled the great explorers to travel into the unknown and gradually map the planet, facilitated the conquest of new territories, and created routes for the expansion of trade and the exchange of knowledge and culture that opened up our world. In Pickled, Potted, and Canned, author Sue Shephard weaves together the stories of the inventors -- and inventions -- in a lively and richly detailed narrative that spans centuries and continents. It is a tale filled with extraordinary characters, old legends, and new revelations: how Attila the Hun and his men "gallop cured" their meat; how cooks became chemists and chemists became cooks and how some even lost their lives, like seventeenth-century statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon, whose death was caused by an experiment with a frozen chicken.

From the primitive techniques of drying and salting to the latest methods that have allowed us to feed men in space, Pickled, Potted, and Canned gives us fascinating insights into the histories, cultures, and ingenuity of people inventing new ways to "cheat the seasons."

About this title

Review:

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 limns 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

About the Author:

Sue Shephard has spent most of her career working in television in England, where she was responsible for cocreating, among other programs, three series about food and culture. She is the author of Seeds of Fortune and coauthor of United Tastes of America. In 2001, Pickled, Potted, and Canned was nominated for the IACP Jane Grigson Award. Shephard lives in the southwest of England with her family.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0743255534
• ISBN 13: 9780743255530
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368