Fridge-less Living: Our Favorite Food Preservation Methods and Tips

Image Gallery Building an outdoor root cellar: 1) Dig pit in a hillside. ILLUSTRATION: VINCENT BABAK

What our great-grandparents called "common storage" — simple, commonsensical, hand-done, low-or-no-energy ways of putting up home-garden and orchard crops — is far from common any more. Now, most of us are content fed by the SooperDooper and fueled by Exxon.

Who hills soil over rutabagas — or even grows them? — or mulches winter-keeping cabbage under straw for harvest over the winter holidays?

Why bother steaming up the kitchen to make dandelion jelly when the Keebler elves or Mr. Smucker's grandchildren will do it for us?

So many of our old-time food preservation methods have been discarded. Hardly anyone remembers how to sun-dry food anymore either. Dried apricots are shipped in from California all bagged in plastic and soaked in sulfur "to retain color," while little electrical food dryers are pitched in TV advertorials to make salt-and-sugar-soaked snacks.

Few of us remember how to put up winter vegetables the old ways anymore either — by air-drying green beans into "leather britches," braiding up garden-cured onions and packing potatoes in hay and carrots in moist sand down in the root cellar.

MOTHER remembers...remembers both the good old ways of "common," low-energy storage and the crises of weather and worse that made these techniques of hand-powered self-reliance the difference between dearth and plenty, health and illness, in times past.

Following are some of MOTHER's favorite old-time food preservation methods along with a few more modern techniques that can serve as energy-conserving appropriate technologies for the 21st century when, inevitably, we'll need them more than ever.

Plan Your Plantings

With a little forethought, you can grow for storage. Don't plant just Red or Golden Delicious apple trees to produce juicy, thin-skinned, early-maturing, eating-only apples. For storage fruit, choose one of the newer good-keeping eating varieties such as Fuji, and/or an old-style heirloom winter-keeper with firm, dry flesh such as Red Rome. Rome matures in late October and sports a tough, dark maroon, naturally-waxed hide that demands eaters with strong jaws and all their own teeth but is sure to stay firm in pies and to hold in cold storage till the first rhubarb is ready the following spring.

If planting strawberries, be sure to set in a few rows of one of the new day-neutral varieties that produce dessert-quality berries all season long. But plant the main plot to Sparkle or another reliable June-bearer of tasty firm fruit that will stay whole in a jar of preserves and that come on in wondrous abundance when most welcome in the preserving kitchen: between the rush of planting in spring and harvest in late summer and fall.

Select late-season, winter-keeping varieties, but time your planting so that produce will have time to mature completely and comes on at a time and in a sequence that is most convenient for preserving. In other words, plan and plant early enough so that winter squash has plenty of time to harden up naturally, so onion tops can dry and heal in the fall sun, and so that fat full Brussels sprouts can experience one or two light frosts for greatest sweetness. Stagger so you aren't faced with two bushels each of string beans, plum tomatoes and sweet corn, all on the same August weekend that you'd been promising the kids all summer that you'd take them to the lake.