Good Housekeeping

Beautiful layout, easy to use. Tasty recipes, (apparently), for the most part, but when you boil up some fruit with sugar and pectin and pour it into jars which you store in the refrigerator (shelf life refrigerated is measured in weeks rather than months) it is neither canned (not sealed and processed) nor preserved (which would imply a long shelf life). ONE of the recipes in the jam chapter is canned (Sweet Cherry Jam -- it looks great!) ; the rest are either refrigerated or frozen. So much for the title! As for the "small batch" part, I really hate small-batch jam or pickle making because it simply doesn't make any difference in the amount of hassle to make 2 half-pints or ten. The other thing here is, can you honestly use 3 jars of cantaloupe jam in less than a month? I couldn't! So that small batch is actually a too-large batch.

Unlike the jams, the fruit butters and jellies are mostly canned for shelf stable storage and I plan to try a few of these. The chutneys are all make-and-use (again, how to use FOUR CUPS of chutney before it spoils?) The pickles vary. Some are canned, others are refrigerator. I question the refrigerator dill recipe that says to refrigerate and use the entire quart jar within two weeks. My own refrigerator dills, made from a very similar recipe, are barely coming into their own by two weeks and easily last six months in the fridge.

The startling difference between the chapters makes me think that they had different authors.

My advice to the cook is to read the recipes carefully and evaluate the usefulness and quantities, and your own refrigerator space. Unfortunately, the editors did not choose to make the information about shelf-stable vs refrigerated recipes easily available. I would have preferred it to be in the title, or at the top of the recipe page, or at least in an appendix. I would have even been grateful for a Canned Recipes see Water Bath entry in the index. We get none of these. Be careful out there. This goes for most 21st century "canning" and "preserving" cookbooks.

Bottom line: take it out of the library and evaluate its usability for your own purposes, then buy it if you love it.… (mer)