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

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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.

  • Published on Aug 1, 1998
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