The year 2012 was one of major milestones at Chelsea Green: We took a significant step toward securing our long-term resiliency by becoming employee-owned, landed our fourth book (in less than 10 years) on The New York Times Bestseller List, and we set a new, all-time sales record.

To celebrate, this week we’re featuring our 2012 best-sellers. Some, like Gaia’s Garden, are perennial favorites, and some, like The Art of Fermentation, are brand new hits.

All our titles, are available for a 35% discount through January 31st, as part of our extended holiday sale. Just use the promotional code: CGFL12 when you check out.

We look forward to bringing you more inspiring tools and resources in 2013 as new crops of books arrive. Available soon will be Paradise Lot by Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates, and Rebuilding the Foodshed by Phillip Ackerman-Leist. We’ll have more details about all of our exciting 2013 titles in upcoming e-newsletters.

In case you missed them at the end of the year, check out the recently-released Organic Seed Grower by John Navazio, and Farms with a Future by Rebecca Thistlethwaite. Both promise to be must-haves for the seed grower or fledgling farmer.

Happy reading from the folks at Chelsea Green Publishing!

P.S. Don’t forget, free shipping on orders over $100.*

The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

Retail Price: $39.95Discount Price: $25.97

The Art of Fermentation is, quite simply, the most comprehensive guide to do-it-yourself home fermentation ever published. And it single-handedly drove our annual sales through the roof, even spending a couple of weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. Who knew sauerkraut was such a rock star!

Sandor Katz presents the concepts and processes behind fermentation in ways that are simple enough to guide a reader through their first experience making sauerkraut or yogurt, and in-depth enough to provide experienced practitioners with deeper understanding of their ferments. Also available as part of a book/DVD set.

Try a sample recipe for fermented “Roots” Beer…

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Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, Second Edition

Retail Price: $29.95 Discount Price: $19.47

The first edition of Gaia’s Garden sparked the imagination of America’s home gardeners, introducing permaculture’s central message: working with nature instead of against her results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens.

This extensively revised and expanded second edition broadens the reach and depth of the permaculture approach for urban and suburban growers.

Read an excerpt: Building an Apple-Centered Guild…

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Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners

Retail Price: $24.95 Discount Price: $16.22

Seed to Seed is widely acknowledged as the best guide available for home gardeners to learn effective ways to produce and store seeds on a small scale.

The book contains detailed information about each vegetable, including its means of pollination, required population size, isolation distance, techniques for hand-pollination, and proper methods for harvesting, drying, cleaning, and storing the seeds.

Browse the Table of Contents…

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Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era

Retail Price: $34.95Discount Price: $22.72

In Reinventing Fire, Amory Lovins and Rocky Mountain Institute offer a new vision to revitalize business models, end-run Washington gridlock, and win the clean energy race—not forced by public policy but led by business for enduring profit.

Grounded in 30 years’ practical experience, this ground-breaking, peer-reviewed analysis includes market-based solutions for transportation, buildings, industry, and electricity.

Reinventing Fire was named ForeWord Reviews’s Book of the Year in Business and Economics.

Watch Amory Lovins’ TED Talk on Reinventing Fire…

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The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year-Round Vegetable Production Using Deep-Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses

Retail Price: $29.95Discount Price: $19.47

From Eliot Coleman, the bestselling author of The New Organic Grower and Four-Season Harvest, comes an in-depth guide to year-round production of fresh, organic vegetables—with little or no energy inputs.

In The Winter Harvest Handbook, Coleman offers information on greenhouse construction and maintenance, planting schedules, crop management, harvesting practices, and even marketing ideas in this complete, fully-illustrated guide. Want to learn even more from the master? Check out the Eliot Coleman Set.

Browse the entire book online…

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Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity

Retail Price: $17.95Discount Price: $11.67

In Local Dollars, Local Sense, Michael Shuman shows small-scale investors how to put their money into building local businesses and resilient regional economies—and profit in the process.

Shuman demystifies the growing realm of local investment choices—from institutional lending to investment clubs and networks, local investment funds, community ownership, direct public offerings, local stock exchanges, crowdfunding, and more. This book is part of the Community Resilience Guides series, a partnership with the Post Carbon Institute.

Read an Excerpt: Investing in Yourself…

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The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

Retail Price: $17.95Discount Price: $11.67

With a quiet urgency The Seed Underground reminds us that while our health, food security, and sovereignty are at stake as seeds disappear to industrial agriculture’s homogenization, so, too, are the stories, heritage, and history that pass between people as seeds are passed from hand to hand.

From rural Maine to Oregon’s Palouse, Janisse Ray introduces readers to dozens of seed savers. Through this compelling book, meet the eccentric sociology professor she dubs “Tomato Man”, Maine farmer Will Bonsall, the “Noah” of seed saving, and many others.

The Seed Underground was named one of Booklist’s Top Ten Gardening and Crafts Books of 2012!

Read the Introduction…

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More New and Noteworthy Titles On Sale

Reposted from Mother Earth News.

“Every earth-conscious home cook who wishes to nourish his or her family with sustainable, local, grassfed and pastured meats should be able to, regardless of income,” argues Shannon Hayes, radical homesteader and author of Long Way on a Little. The core reference for any home cook, Long Way on a Little examines the conundrum of maintaining a healthy, affordable and ecologically conscious meat-based diet, while simultaneously paying America’s small sustainable farmers a fair price for their food. In this excerpt from chapter 9, “Heads, Tails and Other Under-Appreciated Treasures,” learn about nose-to-tail cooking and how offal, such as chicken livers, lamb’s heads and oxtails, are packed with essential nutrients and often contribute the best flavor to home cooking. Then try some delicious offal recipes.

“Heads, Tails and other Under-Appreciated Treasures,” is a foray into what most Americans consider the grisly side of prudent meat consumption. I, too, fell into this camp, balking at the very idea of cooking a pig’s head or skewering a chicken’s heart. The thought of tackling this chapter, frankly, filled me with dread. Having written it, I’ve come through the fog, and the recipes included are some of my family’s favorites. While heads, tails and organ meats do not represent as much waste from an animal as the bones and fat, their concentration of minerals and fat-soluble vitamins makes discarding them a huge waste of nutritional value. And, handled properly, they are fantastic.

Long Way on a Little represents the single greatest learning curve I’ve climbed in my understanding of grassfed meats and how to most thoroughly use them. It represents four years of studying cookbooks from the Great Depression and World War II eras, of experimenting in the kitchen, of writing and rewriting until I could outline a new cuisine for my family that minimizes our waste and maximizes our nutrition and our enjoyment. I hope you will find it useful in your own kitchen, and that you will join me in what has now become a permanent learning path, of perpetually exploring how we can use our food choices to heal the planet and change the course of history in this country, and how, ultimately, each of us can find the delicious trail to going a long way on a little.

Offal Recipes

I’ll admit it: I did not look forward to researching and writing this chapter of the book. Organ meats, heads, feet and other such odious (in my opinion) cuts were an over-glorified salvation effort—the affected cuisine of die-hard nutritional fanatics, stoic old-world hausfraus or pretentious epicureans. According to my own eco-sensibilities, if a person chose to forsake the organ meats, but made full use of the bones and fat of the beasts that gave their lives for our wellbeing, well, that was ample thrift to earn the omnivore’s atonement. As far as I was concerned, the kidneys, livers and hearts could go to the dogs, the heads and feet to the compost or the renderer. I have just enough customer demand for oxtails to equal our supply, so I rarely ate those, either (though they never repelled me as hearts and heads did).

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KEEP READING: http://www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/offal-recipes-ze0z1301zwar.aspx#ixzz2Hc2ztj6K

The following is an excerpt from In Late Winter We Ate Pears: A Year of Hunger and Love by Deirdre Heekin and Caleb Barber. It has been adapted for the Web.

Tortelli di Zucca

Squash Ravioli

Around the elegant northern city of Mantova these ravioli are called Tortelli alla Mantovana, “in the style of Mantova.” Of course, in Mantova itself they are simply referred to as Tortelli di Zucca, “squash Tortelli.” A Tortello is a 2-inch-square raviolo, also called a Cappellaccio in some regions. They are not difficult to make and they are worth all the time and effort.

In addition to the ingredients listed below, you will need either a pasta-rolling machine (not to be confused with a pasta-making machine) or (proficiency with) a rolling pin; as much open counter space as possible; a pastry brush; and a little water. Keep in mind: Measure the flour carefully, better to have pasta dough that requires regular dustings of flour as you work it than to have an impossibly stiff dough. And once you begin to roll out the dough you must work without interruption to avoid handling complications. Serves 4.

• 4 eggs
• 3 cups all-purpose flour, plus extra for dusting the dough
• 1 can (12 ounces) plain pumpkin
• 1/4 cup crushed amaretti cookies
• 1/4 cup plain bread crumbs
• 1/2 cup ricotta
• Salt and pepper
• 2 to 3 tablespoons butter
• Freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

In a large bowl mix together the eggs and 3 cups flour until you can compress the mixture into one shaggy mass with your hands. Wrap this crude dough in plastic and set it aside while you prepare the filling

In a large bowl, mix together the pumpkin, cookies, bread crumbs, ricotta, and salt and pepper until well blended. Taste and correct seasoning as needed. Set filling aside while you roll out the pasta.

Cut off a piece of dough the size of a grapefruit. Set the pasta machine at its widest setting. Use a rolling pin to roll out the dough until it is just thin enough to put through the rollers of the pasta machine. Put the dough through the machine again but at the next setting down. Continue to put the pasta through the machine, each time on successively thinner settings— dusting with a little flour as necessary to keep the dough from sticking to everything in sight, except itself—until you have rolled it through the machine on the thinnest setting.

On a lightly floured work surface, lay out the sheet of pasta and cut it in half. Set aside one half. Lightly brush the remaining half sheet of dough with water. Place filling by the tablespoonful at 2-inch intervals in 2 rows down the length of the dough. Beginning at one end, carefully lay the setaside sheet of dough over this piece, pressing it into place down the middle as you slowly lay it down to cover the dots of filling. Once in place use your hands to align and press the edges of the dough together, and to press between the dots of filling. (You must be sure to get good contact so that the ravioli don’t open up when boiled.) When the dough sheets are pressed together around the filling, you are ready to cut the ravioli apart. Slice once lengthwise between the two rows and then cut crosswise between dots to free up each raviolo. Set the ravioli on a clean dishtowel where they won’t be disturbed, making sure they do not touch one another. Repeat the procedure, beginning with a grapefruit-sized hunk, with the remainder of the dough until the filling is used up. (Any leftover dough can be stored or rolled and cut into another shape for use on its own.)

Fill a bowl large enough to hold the tortelli with hot water and set aside to warm.

Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil. Put about 10 or 12 ravioli in the boiling water and cook for 8 minutes. While they cook, gently melt the butter in a sauté pan. Empty and dry the warmed mixing bowl and transfer the melted butter to it. After about 8 minutes lift out a tortello with a slotted spoon and test one corner: it must be tender to the bite, not al dente. When tender, use the slotted spoon to remove the cooked tortelli and very carefully turn them in the melted butter. Once all the tortelli are buttered, serve immediately with a separate bowl of grated parmigiano alongside.

“You can have a salad every night all winter long.” So says Eliot Coleman, New England’s guru of the four-season harvest. There’s no big secret. As long as there is ample daylight—and even in Coleman’s home of Harborside, Maine, there is ample daylight—you can use a variety of techniques for cold-weather gardening that will extend your growing season, effectively “moving” your garden beds 500 miles south.

From Yankee Magazine:

For more than 30 years, Eliot Coleman of Harborside, Maine, has successfully grown food in winter without heated greenhouses. Think outside your zone. Each winter, his gardens head south, to Georgia, without moving an inch.

How? For every layer of protection–a cold frame, for example–the growing environment shifts 500 miles. By doubling up, says Coleman, winter farmers never have to contend with frozen soil, not even when the mercury drops well below zero. “You might get a little surface freezing, but by 10 a.m. it will be unfrozen,” he says. “The minute the sun comes out, all of a sudden it’s 50 degrees in there. We’ve never had a day when we couldn’t put seeds in the greenhouse beds.”

For more on winter gardening, go to: Four Season Farm

Hoop Houses

Coleman says you can find simple, inexpensive options out there to protect your plants. If you’re already using a cold frame, he recommends getting six unused 2×4s and building an A-frame around the structure, then wrapping the new enclosure in greenhouse plastic.

No cold frame? No problem. Coleman is also a big fan of “hoop houses,” small enclosures made from semicircle-shaped strips of metal or plastic piping covered in plastic. “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’m still like a little kid when I go in there and see what’s happening,” he says. “It’s amazing that it just works.”

Read the whole article here.

Related Articles:

• Midwestern Farmers rely on Eliot Coleman’s Advice for Cold-Weather Farming
• In Maine, the Growing Season Just Keeps On Growing
• Eliot Coleman: Mythology and Day Length

It’s the darkest time of year in the north, but that’s no reason to go hungry.

Try this simple recipe from Full Moon Feast for a hearty solstice-time meal. Jessica Prentice’s classic cookbook takes you through the year, with legends and traditions associated with each full moon, and recipes connected to history and place.

The following is an excerpt from Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection by Jessica Prentice. It has been adapted for the Web.

The Moon of Long Nights arrives in late autumn as the days grow shorter and the winter solstice approaches. In some parts of the world nights are so long that dawn and dusk occur almost at the same time. It is eerie to contemplate such sunless days, and yet they are an annual reality for many northern dwellers. Even those people living at moderately northern latitudes experience the shortness of the day and the length of the night at this time of year. It is a time of darkness.

Western post-industrial society is not very comfortable with darkness. To the modern Western mind, darkness is a symbol of ignorance, death, danger, depression, and even evil—not a very positive set of connotations. It is no wonder that we have developed so many technologies that dispel it. But the lightbulb is a very recent invention. For the vast majority of human history there was no electricity, and light came from just a few sources: the sun, the moon, the stars, and fire.

Sausage with Potatoes and Cabbage

Serves 2–4

This is one of my favorite wintertime meals. I consider it an eintopf—the German word for a one-pot meal.

• 2 tablespoons bacon drippings, olive oil, lard, or other fat
• 2 whole fresh sausages in casings
• 2 leeks, sliced thin, including much of the green part—or 1 large onion, sliced thin
• 1 small head cabbage or ½ large head cabbage, shredded
• ½ teaspoon caraway seeds (optional)
• ½ bunch greens (chard, kale, collards; or mustard, radish, or turnip greens), sliced into ribbons
• 3 medium potatoes (such as Yukon gold), diced
• ½ cup hot water or stock, or more as needed
• Sea salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
• ½ cup sauerkraut (optional)
• Sour cream or crème fraîche

1. Heat the bacon drippings, oil, or fat in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the whole sausages and brown on both sides.
2. Add the leeks (or onions) to the pan around the sausage and sauté. When the sausage is cooked through, remove it from the pan and let it cool.
3. Add the shredded cabbage to the pan along with a pinch of salt and the optional caraway seeds. Continue to sauté a few minutes, until the cabbage begins to wilt.
4. Add the greens and stir gently.
5. Add the diced potatoes, another pinch of salt, and the hot water or stock. Cover, reduce the heat somewhat, and steam until potatoes are just tender. Add more water or stock if the pan gets too dry.
6. Slice the sausage into ½-inch-thick pieces and add it back to the pan, stirring to incorporate and heat through. You can also leave the sausage whole or cut it in half.
7. Add plenty of salt and freshly ground pepper. Taste and adjust.
8. Remove from the heat and stir in the optional sauerkraut.
9. Serve in a shallow bowl with a big dollop of sour cream or crème fraîche.

Independent book publisher Chelsea Green announced today that due to a record-setting sales year and strong revenue growth, employees would each receive a $2500 end-of-year bonus. Leading the company’s record revenue growth was the strong sales of The Art of Fermentation, a New York Times bestselling book by self-described “fermentation fetishist” Sandor Katz. This is the fourth Chelsea Green book to make the list in the last 10 years.

Released in June, the $39.95, 500-page hardcover reference book features an inspiring foreword from Michael Pollan. After four printings there are now more than 50,000 copies in print.

“If Random House can give all their employees a $5000 bonus for 50 Shades of Grey, then Chelsea Green can give everyone a $2500 bonus due to the phenomenal success of The Art of Fermentation,” announced Margo Baldwin, president and publisher.

Call it 25 Shades of sauerkraut. Or, kim chi. Or kefir. Or Kombucha.

It’s fitting that in a year in which the mainstream publishing industry became domineered by erotic fiction and saw decreasing print book sales, Chelsea Green once again bucked the trend and saw double digit sales growth of its list that focuses on DIY living, organic food and farming, homesteading, and building community resiliency.

To be fair to the bacteria necessary to make all that delicious fermentation happen—they are probably having a grand old time reproducing in those bubbly crocks and mason jars.

Overall sales through November were up 30 percent year-to-date, with a 40 percent increase in ebook sales and a 29 percent increase in print book sales.

Sales were not all due to sauerkraut, however.

In 2012, Chelsea Green saw strong sales across the board and in all categories.

Chelsea Green saw strong overseas, and subrights, sales for 2052 by Jorgen Randers, a look forward at what the next 40 years will be like in the wake of increasing climate change, flat economic growth, and a growing population. Other top sellers, so far, included the first book in our Community Resilience Guides series (published in collaboration with Post Carbon Institute), Local Dollars, Local Sense by Michael Shuman. The second book in that series,  Power from the People by Greg Pahl, was released in September. The third book, Rebuilding the Foodshed by Philip Ackerman-Leist, will be released in March. Other top-selling books from 2012 include Janisse Ray’s remarkable book about seed saving, The Seed Underground, and Gov. Madeleine M. Kunin’s call for true family-friendly economic and workplace reforms in The New Feminist Agenda.

Two books released in Fall 2011 sold strongly throughout the year, too, those where Reinventing Fire by Amory Lovins and The Holistic Orchard by Michael Philips.

Keeping with tradition, Chelsea Green’s backlist continued to sell strong, with several older titles ranking among the top-selling 25 books of the year. Those include Katz’s earlier book, Wild Fermentation, as well as Toby Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden, Elliot Coleman’s Winter Harvest Handbook, Harvey Ussery’s Small-Scale Poultry Flock, Mat Stein’s When Technology Fails, and the book Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning.

The end-of-year sales and revenue announcement comes on the heels of a busy year for Chelsea Green Publishing, its staff, and its authors.

In June, the company became employee-owned, making it one of only a handful of independent book publishers that can claim employee-ownership status, and of those Chelsea Green will be near the top in terms of the percentage of stock controlled by its employees. After the transaction, nearly 80 percent of the stock is held by employees; the remaining percentage remains in control of Margo and Ian Baldwin, the company’s founders.In 2012, Chelsea Green was recognized by ForeWord Reviews as its 2011 Publisher of the Year, in which the company was recognized for its “significant contributions in the categories of politics and sustainable living.”

At the start of the year, Chelsea Green added staff in an ongoing effort to expand its digital offerings and improve its existing online presence, as well as provide greater outreach and publicity support for its authors.

Greg Pahl, author of Power from the People, the latest installment in our Community Resilience Guides Series, also wrote Natural Home Heating: The Complete Guide to Renewable Energy Options, which we published in 2003.

The book is a guide to using woodstoves, passive and active solar, biomass, and other natural methods for keeping your nest as toasty as possible. It may be too late for you to prep your home for the winter that’s already here, but perhaps the cold weather and the video below can inspire you to scheme some sustainable heating upgrades for your home in the coming year.

Greg Pahl performed an energy overhaul on his 1950s tract home in northern Vermont. In the process, he transformed a house that was built with no consideration for energy efficiency or sustainability into a naturally heated home using sustainable fuel sources.

In this video, Greg explains the conversion of his decorative living room fireplace—a “smoke alarm tester,” as he puts it—into a usable and efficient home heating appliance. He’ll explain what’s involved in installing one in your own home, saving you money and energy this winter.

This video is part of a series. See also:

• Greg Pahl Explains His Solar Domestic Hot Water System
• Greg Pahl Explains His Pellet Boiler
• Greg Pahl Explores a Sustainable Green Home

If you’re curious about Pahl’s new book on community-based renewable energy systems, and our partnership with the Post Carbon Institute, visit Resilience.org to find out more. For an easy intro to the concepts in Power from the People, you can watch a recent webinar that Pahl led, here.

Making your own yogurt is an easy, healthy, and affordable way to experiment with fermentation, make milk last longer, and replace an industrial food product filled with mysterious chemical ingredients with one you know all about.

Yogurt itself is a wonderful, versatile food, but you can also turn it into a spread or dip by thickening it with this simple method.

The following is an excerpt from Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener’s Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting by R. J. Ruppenthal.

You can make a spreadable cheese (resembling cream cheese or sour cream) from either yogurt or kefir. You will notice that when you make either yogurt or kefir, it becomes more solid and sour the longer you let it ferment. Make sure to start the cheese with some mature yogurt or kefir, not the particularly runny stuff; give it a few extra hours of fermentation time for good measure.

• A few ounces of strong yogurt or kefir
• Large glass jar, measuring beaker, bowl, or clay pot
• One square of cheesecloth or large coffee filter
• Strainer that fits over this container or an extra-large piece of cheesecloth
• Large rubber band or twine

Wrap your homemade yogurt in cheesecloth or a coffee filter. Using the strainer or extra cheesecloth (with rubber band or twine if needed), suspend this package above the container. Make sure it has room to drip. Put this in the refrigerator, an unused oven, or anywhere else it will fit and be relatively undisturbed. Leave and allow it to drain for 24 to 48 hours. Your main goal here is to strain out the water (whey) from the yogurt or kefir, leaving a solid mass that can be used like cheese. This recipe makes a nutritious, low-fat cheese. Be aware that your yogurt or kefir will continue to ferment during this time, so if you want a milder version, then you might want to put the cheese into the refrigerator as it drains. (This will slow down the fermentation.) Use the finished product as you would use cream cheese or sour cream. And don’t forget the whey: this liquid byproduct makes a refreshing drink on its own, or, if coming from kefir, it could be used to culture a batch of kimchi or sourdough starter.

Related Posts:

• How to Make 3 Kinds of Kimchi
• Preserving by Drying: Sun-Dried and Fermented Tomato Coulis
• Make Your Own Kombucha: The Tea Beast Lives

Jessica Prentice’s cookbook Full Moon Feast combines simple recipes with food history and the meanings of various meals throughout the seasons. Food has become a commodity in our time, something to be consumed quickly, and to be measured in terms of nutrient levels or cost. Flavor takes a backseat to cheapness and quality has given way to quantity. But as readers of Chelsea Green books probably know, the true value of food comes from the care that went into its creation, and joy is not something you can quantify as simply as a broker trading futures of high fructose corn syrup on Wall Street.

Simple foods made from easy-to-find ingredients, put together with love, make any season warm. This winter, try Prentice’s recipe for some spicy kimchi, a savory garnish made from fermented cabbage, plus radishes, carrots, chile peppers and other spices.

The following is an excerpt from Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection by Jessica Prentice. It has been adapted for the web.

Snow Moon

When autumn is becoming winter, we move into the lunar cycle called the Snow Moon in sixteenth-century England. Northern dwellers could expect their first snowfall, and waterways and reservoirs might start to freeze. For many peoples, this was the last opportunity to preserve food and ensure that there would be stores of necessities to last through the winter.

Nowadays we take for granted our ability to freeze and chill food in our own kitchens. But the mechanical refrigerator is an extremely modern invention. The first practical domestic refrigerator was sold in the United States in 1918, so for most of human history cold storage has ranged from elusive, to seasonal, to almost constant, depending on the local climate. Cold needed to be found and used where it was—like a root cellar dug deep in the cool ground. My father-in-law grew up in the 1920s on a Texas farm equipped with a cistern—an underground reservoir for water collected during the rains, used like a well. Dairy products and meat that needed to be kept cold would be lowered in a bucket into the cistern, so that the bucket was just immersed—but not submerged—in the cool underground water. That was their refrigeration.Some people, of course, didn’t need to look far for a source of refrigeration.

The Inuit could store their food simply by burying it in the snow or ice. But other peoples often went to great lengths to harvest ice and create the conditions for natural refrigeration. The ancient Romans had snow brought down from the Alps to be used for keeping perishable foods cold. In places where there were cold winters and warm summers, ice would be harvested before the first thaw and stored in insulated icehouses. The icehouse would then be used to preserve food throughout the warm months until the return of the Snow Moon.

The challenges of refrigeration were one of the reasons that our ancestors developed such a wide range of technologies to preserve food. We have a tendency to think that indigenous people ate their food fresh from the forest, farm, or garden, and that processed foods are a modern invention. This misimpression is based on our notion that processed foods means factory-processed foods: chips and other snack foods, cookies and sweets, boxed cold cereals, and everything that falls into the category of junk food. But the staple foods of many traditional diets were actually often quite processed, in the sense that they were taken through a process—sometimes an elaborate series of processe—before they were eaten. The difference lies in how they were processed. While our food processing is mostly done in factories
using heavy machinery, traditionally foods were processed on a relatively small-scale basis (what we would now call artisanal), and generally in the context of community.

Quick and Simple Kimchi
Makes about 1 quart

This is an easy starter version of kimchi, but it is delicious. After it is fermented, I make a quick meal by serving it in a bowl topped with soba noodles drizzled with toasted sesame oil, and a well-seasoned beef or chicken broth (such as the one I use for Asian Egg Drop Soup, page 67). You can add some cooked meat or just a sprinkling of scallions for an easy lunch or dinner.

1 head napa cabbage
1 daikon radish
1 black Spanish radish (these are common in local farmer’s markets—if you can’t find it, just leave it out or replace with another kind of radish)
1 turnip
2 carrots
2 tablespoons sea salt

1. Rinse the cabbage and cut into ½-inch strips (not the tough core). Cut the radishes, turnip, and carrot in half and then slice thinly on the diagonal. Mix the vegetables together in a bowl and sprinkle generously with sea salt. Cover with filtered water, cover with a towel, and let sit for 3 hours.

2. Meanwhile coarsely chop the garlic, ginger, and scallions. Remove the stem and seeds from the pepper and cut the skin into a few pieces. Put these ingredients into a mortar and pestle (what I use) or a food processor and mash into a paste.

3. Drain the soaking liquid off the cabbage mixture and reserve.

4. Mix the ginger paste in with the cabbage mixture and pack into a mason jar. Press the mixture down repeatedly with your fist until liquid begins to rise up. Then add enough of the soaking water into the jar so that all the vegetables are covered with liquid.

5. Now gently weigh down the top of the mixture, with a smaller jar filled with water as for the Quick Kraut above, so that the liquid rises above the solids. This pushes the vegetables down but allows the liquid to come up over the top.

6. Place the jar with the weight inside on a counter and drape a cloth napkin or tea towel over it.

7. Ferment at room temperature for 1 week, checking daily to make sure the vegetables are submerged in the brine. (If you find that you need more brine, dissolve 1 teaspoon sea salt in N cup water and pour enough liquid into the jar so that the brine covers the vegetables.)

8. Remove the plastic lid and weight, screw the top on the jar, and transfer it to the fridge. This will last for several months.

We talk a lot about preserving food here at Chelsea Green, but it’s not to be didactic! It’s because we believe in the possibilities of having power over one’s food supply, and being able to seek a more sustainable life, with a stocked larder. We believe in food that is affordable, in spaces for gardens even in the most urban of places, and the RIGHT to grow and process one’s own food.

Just last weekend we participated in the Weston A. Price Foundation conference, a convergence of raw-food advocates and fermentation fans. Three of our authors gave talks on the importance of taking control of your food, in small but significant ways, from experimenting with simple vegetable ferments to making artisan cheese, to fighting corporate control of agriculture on a national level.

But maybe we should take a moment and rewind, and revisit the whole idea of preserving food from a fundamentals standpoint. Let’s think about the WHY. And the HOW.

From our piece on Planetgreen.com:

There are plans in the works for the world’s largest telescope–one that can see back in time to the first stars and their formation. I know, right? Blows your mind. But while you wait for this magnificent (and seemingly impossible) invention, you can turn back the clocks of time in your own home. Starting in the kitchen. And by the way, you don’t even need to have a garden! Try something new: turn your produce into preserves, without nutrient loss. You’ll be eating fresh veggies even in the coldest of months, and as for your hors d’oerves platter—it’ll be the talk of the town.

The Gardeners and Farmers of Terre Vivante, an ecological research and education center located in southeastern France, are masters in the art of preserving food. But their technique is not as simple as stuffing food in your freezer, or storing them away in mason jars. They implement more traditional and old-fashioned methods using salt, oil, sugar, alcohol, vinegar, drying, cold storage, and lactic fermentation. In their book, Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation, they give tips and recipes on how to preserve food, the traditional ways.

The History of Canning and Freezing

According to the folks at Terre Vivante:

“These days, frozen foods tend to replace canned and bottled goods, since foods lose fewer nutrients through cold than through heat. But freezing is not very satisfactory either: it is expensive, consumes a lot of energy, and destroys many of the vitamins. In the home kitchen, we observe the same development as we have seen in industry: Canning, which was very popular in the 1960s (country folks each with their own sterilizers, putting up their own green beans, shell peas, and tomatoes), has given way to freezing. Emerging relatively recently (sterilization in the nineteenth century, freezing in the twentieth century), these two processes have relegated traditional food-preservation methods to obscurity, if not complete oblivion, as their scope of application has dwindled away. By far, the best example of displacement is lactic fermentation. Formerly used to preserve all sorts of vegetables, it has survived solely for making sauerkraut, and at that, more for gastronomic reasons than as a preservation process in its own right.

Fortunately, the traditional methods of preservation still live on in the French countryside, although they are rapidly disappearing. There is a wealth of knowledge to be gathered here before it falls into anonymity.”

Choosing a Method of Preservation

So what to choose in lieu of freezing and canning? According to these gardeners and farmers:

“Three methods overwhelmingly dominate the history of food preservation before the industrial age: cellar storage under cool, dark conditions, for certain fruits and winter vegetables (such as root vegetables, tubers, apples, and pears); drying, for fruit; and lactic fermentation for most other vegetables. Natural-state preservation in a cellar is the most basic way to preserve foods that take well to this method. Although it is possible to dry apples and to lacto-ferment carrots, winter provisions have traditionally relied on apples stored in a cellar in their natural state, and carrots preserved likewise in a root cellar, or in the ground.”

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Read the entire article here.