Customer Reviews

Preserves: River Cottage Handbook No.2

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I love the The River Cottage Meat Book so when I saw a recommendation for Preserves in the Guardian online (The Guardian, Saturday 10 January 2009, "Source It") I had to take a look. Pam Corbin has some excellent thoughts on growing and buying locally-sourced goods.

There are a good number of recipes for jams/jellies, pickled preserves and more. The first section runs through canning and processing in good detail, with hints on why preserves go bad and best practices to avoid it.

As this is the UK edition, most of the recipes use metric, but the last pages have direct conversion tables to Imperial (or US) measures for anything you might need.

Most preserving books offer the same old recipes. This book has some interesting and different recipes. The recipe for the elderflower syrup is SUPERB! Had tried a couple of others and they don't come close to this one.Just wish the book were bigger and had more recipes.

My partner gifted me this book after studying in England a few years back. I was just catching my stride in preserves and was excited at the prospect of a new book on canning.
There isn't much to say about it, it's just great. It's wonderfully written and insightful, offering alternative canning techniques than what you could find in the States. She offers conversions in the back of the book (e.g. what is gas mark 4 on my oven?! well, it's 350.) You also learn some canning techniques that you might not encounter otherwise, such as the oven method for canning blueberries (one of my favourite recipes).

However, if you are used to American publications you should take the following into consideration:
-It's metric, but the addition or use of a scale in your kitchen will make this transition easy, and if not preferable.
-Processing times aren't always found directly in the recipe, you'll have to hunt for the section on processing and probably use a table. Alternatively, I find looking up a similar recipe in the Ball Blue Book to be just as easy, then I just note in the margin what that processing time was in the future.
-Jam/Jellies often use 'sugar with added pectin' [..], something we don't really have here. But don't be discouraged. In the past, I simply weighed the pectin, then added the sugar to make up for it. This kind of worked, but I'd suggest even more so using something like Pomonas Universal Pectin, 1-Ounce Container (Pack of 6) instead.

Point is, these are some of the most delicious recipes in my canning aresenal and it'd be even better if I had my own hedge.

Lots of handy hints, especially for a beginner. The english version of things only makes it more interesting and makes you feel like your going back to your roots.It teaches you all aspects of preserving and that sometimes it doesnt work even for the professionals.