sauerkrautsaulFucking seriously ruining the general web in terms of looking up information.
In the age of SEO and AI slop, may your niche hobby or interest never become trendy.
RebekahWSDUnfortunately canning and recipes in general are now concerning and I have to worry about food safety so much more!
Can’t speak for canning, but for the recipes in particular, I was really shocked at the state of things the first time I looked at a recipe on an English website (not my first language).
I only look at recipes in my native language, partly because of the fact that this bullshit is not yet generalised and a fair few website have them still in a good format.
If that’s not the case for you, maybe translating a foreign recipe would help? Don’t know how long for though…
Te acompaño en este momento de dolor.
Canning now boils down to for me, “only use the sites you know are safe” and it’s annoying.
Maybe it’s just back to physical cookbooks again!
I went back to my mum’s method of writing down the recipes I like in a dedicated notebook… Does not help with finding new things, but it does with having to skip slop in recipes I want to do again.
survivorlibrary.com/…/canning_and_preserving-1887…
Here, knock yourself out.
Thanks for this, saved so I can access it offline. There’s a lot to be said to tested, proven methods even if they’re not exciting foods sometimes. My (70yr old) aunt made some canned chicken that looked extremely questionable a few years back. It was canned in its own broth so ended up being encased in a disgusting chicken gelatin. But I fuck with canned meats I’ll try it.
Once we finally got around to using it we were a little sad we hadn’t sooner. It was some of the tenderest most flavorful, real chicken I’d ever had.
The problem with old old recipes is they haven’t been tested probably uh, ever. Ball/Kerr has a good website with tested recipes, as does the National Center for Home Food Preservation, which are the two sites I know are considered safe (well I consider safe??).
That book is very very cool in the “Damn I love old books” way though!
Yes, and, please don’t use old canning and preserving recipes as written. Not all of those recipes were safe. People died of botulism regularly. And some recipes that used to be safe aren’t safe anymore because of changes in technology, in ingredients, in chemicals available, and so on.
For example: it used to be you didn’t need to add acid to tomatoes when canning them, because tomatoes are pretty acidic already. (Acidic foods are safer to can because botulism and other particularly nasty bacteria can’t grow in acidic environments.) But modern tomato varieties are less acidic than the old varieties were, so modern canned tomato recipes have you add lemon juice to increase acidity.
The USDA Guide to Home Canning (most recent edition 2015) is safe and reliable and is available free online.
God. The first line of the preface to that book is:
In this age of adulteration we know not what we eat
We keep making the same mistakes, don’t we?