Home canning, drying and preserving

Home Canning, Drying and Preserving is printed in hard cover, with green binding and a photograph of jam, fruit and scales on the cover. Unlike today’s cookbooks or recipe blog sites, Mrs Andrea’s book is fairly low on photographs, and the paper used to print the few photos on is of higher quality than the rest of the book, but again less high in quality than photo paper used today. For a topic that relies so strongly on aesthetic value, the black-and-white photographs are rather more unappealing.

The book is small — smaller than cookbooks found in kitchens today — and is organized into the following sections via the contents page:

(Click the links for detailed descriptions of each chapter)

I. General directions for canning

II. Equipment

III. Altitude (making allowances for geographical locations affecting the use of heat in jars)

IV. Canning vegetables (alphabetical), with subsection for combinations of vegetables

V. Canning fruits (alphabetical)

VI. Conserves, jams, marmalades, preserves and sweetmeats

VII. Fruit butter

VIII. Jellies

IX. Pickling

X. Syrups and beverages

XI. Canning with honey

XII. Canning soup

XIII. Canning fish

XIV. Canning meats

XV. Salting vegetables

XVI. Drying fruits and vegetables

References today come from everywhere — and this books serves almost as a prequel to our Twitter-using, app-developing, knowledge-consuming culture of today. Taking information from BC governmental pamphlets means Mrs Andrea’s book is using not only her personal knowledge, but information written, tested and used by others.

Today, websites like Tumblr and other blogs are used more frequently than physical cookbooks to learn new recipes. Decisions on what we want to cook are based on aesthetic reasons, price and health. Mrs Andrea’s book uses health and cost-effectiveness to some degree in her collection, but the ease at which one can pinpoint a certain recipe within the body chapters is significantly more difficult than a simple Google today.