Making your own delicious, healthy, probiotic sauerkraut or kimchi is easy!

Four easy steps are all you need to turn fresh garden veggies into a long-lasting, tangy, pungent condiment perfect to serve alongside sausage or eggs.

Sandor Ellix Katz is the gregarious, mutton-chopped master of all things fermented, and his easygoing attitude will inspire you to experiment in your own kitchen. So go ahead, make friends with the microbes in your life.

All it takes is Chop, Salt, Pack, Wait!

The following excerpt is from The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World by Sandor Ellix Katz. It has been adapted for the web.

The English language does not have its own word for fermented vegetables. It would not be inaccurate to describe fermented vegetables as “pickled,” but pickling covers much ground beyond fermentation.

Pickles are anything preserved by acidity. Most contemporary pickles are not fermented at all; instead they rely upon highly acidic vinegar (a product of fermentation), usually heated in order to sterilize vegetables, preserving them by destroying rather than cultivating microorganisms. “For pickles, fermentation was the primary means of preservation until the 1940s, when direct acidification and pasteurization of cucumber pickles was introduced,” writes Fred Breidt of the USDA.

My vegetable ferments are usually concoctions that do not fit any homogeneous traditional ideal of either German sauerkraut or Korean kimchi. But of course, everything I’ve learned about sauerkraut and kimchi reveal that neither of them constitutes a homogeneous tradition. They are highly varied, from regional specialties to family secrets. Nonetheless, certain techniques underlie both (and many other related) traditions, and my practice is a rather free-form application of these basic techniques rather than an attempt to reproduce any particular notion of authenticity.

In a nutshell, the steps I typically follow when I ferment vegetables are:

1. Chop or grate vegetables.
2. Lightly salt the chopped veggies (add more as necessary to taste), and pound or squeeze until moist; alternatively, soak the veggies in a brine solution for a few hours.
3. Pack the vegetables into a jar or other vessel, tightly, so that they are forced below the liquid. Add water, if necessary.
4. Wait, taste frequently, and enjoy!

Of course there is more information and nuance, but really, “Chop, Salt, Pack, Wait” is what most of it amounts to.

Image Credit: The Kitchn

In New York City, one and a half million people (out of 9 million) are food insecure, meaning they do not have access to healthy, good quality affordable food.

While many of the city’s residents can afford to dine out in expensive restaurants or shop at upscale markets, there are neighbors, many of them children, who go to sleep hungry. Organizations have stepped up to deal with this crisis in food insecurity. One of those is BLK ProjeK in the South Bronx, headed by Tanya Fields.

Tanya is Executive Director of The BLK ProjeK. Inspired by her experiences as a single working mother in a marginalized community Executive Director Tanya Fields created and founded the BLK ProjeK in 2009. Tanya will be both an instructor and speaker at the University of Vermont Food Systems Summit in Burlington, Vermont, in June. UVM interviewed her about the successes and challenges of building a sustainable food system in the biggest city in the US.

Chelsea Green is a sponsor of the UVM Food Systems Summit, a month-long meeting of minds where you can take course, attend lectures, weigh in on roundtable discussions and participate in the Necessary (r)Evolution conference. Find out more about the summit here.

University of Vermont: How did you get involved in BLK ProjeK?

Tanya Fields: I was born and raised in Harlem, a community that I love, but that I could no longer live in due to gentrification. I moved to the South Bronx several years ago. It was an eye opener. I became much more aware of food insecurity, particularly among children. When my own child became ill, I realized that the quality, quantity and affordability of healthy food was a key determinant of health.

I also realized that social activism had a major role to play in the solution. We can complain about a perceived problem, but unless we do something, take action, the problem will persist. BLK ProjeK has two intertwined missions: to make healthy food accessible, and to develop leadership skills in local youth, particularly females.

UVM: In a city as big as New York is that an insurmountable task?

TF: No. If I thought that way, I would not be able to do my work. We are very small as an organization and it is difficult to get the funding that we need to sustain our work, but we are making changes everyday. Next month, we launch our Mobile Market, which will bring the needed healthy food to the people who need it most in this community.

UVM: There are several organizations, some big and some small, that do work similar to yours. How do you differ?

TF: Sadly, the organizations that have been around for many years and some newly formed organizations, have more than a million people to serve. That’s important work for all of us. We spend all of our money on food and delivery to the most in need. We don’t spend money on brochures and t-shirts because we just don’t have it to waste. We invest our money in solutions that increase access and create opportunities for people to feed themselves and their families.

UVM: What do you see as most important agenda in fixing the broken food system?

TF: Leadership. Particularly among the people who know these underserved communities first hand. I grew up seeing the dynamics in my neighborhood, in the schools, in social networks. I understand the issues because I lived them. But that is not enough. We need to develop leadership so that change is achieved though policy, though concrete solutions. A delivery of food to someone hungry is vital. Even more important is being an instrument of change, so that the system of food insecurity does not perpetuate itself.

Congratulations are in order to Sandor Ellix Katz, aka Sandorkraut. His groundbreaking book The Art of Fermentation has just won a James Beard Foundation Book Award!

Covering all aspects of the industry—from chefs and restaurateurs to cookbook authors and food journalists to restaurant designers and architects and more—the Beard Awards are the highest honor for food and beverage professionals working in North America. Think of them as the Oscars of the food world.

The Art of Fermentation won in the Reference and Scholarship category, making it Chelsea Green’s first ever James Beard award winner. We’ve had only one prior nominee, which was The Bread Builders in 2000.

The beautiful book reflects Katz’s years of research, teaching, and passionate proselytizing of the wonders of homemade ferments, and welcomes both new and seasoned fermentos alike into the simple magic of this ancient food processing technique.

The Art of Fermentation spent two weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list when it was first published, and we are close to printing our 50,000th copy—remarkable for a 500-plus page hardcover book about fermentation. In addition, Sandor’s work is featured prominently in Michael Pollan’s new best-selling book Cooked.

We’re proud to be Sandor Katz’s publisher, and to help spread the word about the joys of microbial coexistence. Ferment on, everyone!

Happy 4/20! To help you celebrate responsibly, here are three common marijuana myths, debunked by the authors of Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?

Marijuana is Safer was Scribd’s most-read book of the year in 2010, when we offered it for a free download. Since then, the nation has seen expansive marijuana laws go into effect, especially in Colorado. The argument in Marijuana is Safer — that the public health outcomes of pot legalization make it a policy no-brainer — were what won the day in Colorado. As the fight for reasonable marijuana regulation continues the book will continue to be important for activists and politicians.

Have you heard these myths repeated in the media? Don’t be fooled — learn the facts behind the humble cannabis plant and its much-maligned psychoactive properties…

This is an excerpt from Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? It has been adapted for the web.

The origins of cannabis prohibition are steeped in prejudice, misinformation, and fear mongering. Inflammatory accusations against marijuana and marijuana consumers are typically unsubstantiated, while evidence refuting these claims often goes ignored.

Today, the U.S. government and many law enforcement officials continue to justify the need for cannabis prohibition by promoting alarmist myths that distort the truth about marijuana. Some of these distortions, such as the claim that pot smoking is linked to violent and psychotic behavior, date back to the “Reefer Madness” era of the 1930s. Other myths, like the claim that today’s cannabis is highly addictive, are more recent yet equally specious. Nonetheless, this propaganda serves as the basis for the criminal prohibition of marijuana today.

Therefore, we want to dispel some of the more prominent myths about cannabis by providing sound scientific, health, criminal justice, and economic data. We hope that you will keep these facts in mind the next time you hear government officials spreading lies about cannabis.

• MYTH: Using marijuana will inevitably lead to the use of “harder” drugs like cocaine and heroin.
• FACT: The overwhelming majority of marijuana users never try another illicit substance.

Although pot is consistently referred to as a “gateway drug,” the authorities neglect to mention that virtually everyone who has ever used cannabis tried tobacco and alcohol first. Yet it is hard to imagine that even the most ardent prohibitionist would argue that this sequential correlation would justify criminally prohibiting the use of booze or tobacco by adults.

It should come as no surprise that the majority of people who use highly dangerous drugs like heroin or crack cocaine have previously used the far more popular and safer drug marijuana. But despite pot’s popularity, Americans’ use of other illicit substances remains comparatively low. Data provided by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services indicates that only 3.5 percent of U.S. citizens have ever tried crack, and fewer than 2 percent of Americans have ever tried heroin. As for cocaine, the next most commonly used illicit drug in America after cannabis, fewer than 15 percent of Americans have tried it.

But what about those minority of cannabis users who do go on to use other illicit drugs? Isn’t the pot to blame? Not at all. In fact, experts generally identify “environmental circumstances,” not the prior use of a drug, as the primary reason why a handful of people transition from the use of marijuana to harder drugs.

If U.S. policymakers legalized marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol—thereby allowing its sale to be regulated by licensed, state-authorized distributors rather than by criminal entrepreneurs and pushers of various other, hard drugs—the likelihood is that fewer, not more, marijuana smokers would ever go on to try any another illicit substance. In short, it is marijuana prohibition, not the use of marijuana itself, that functions as a gateway to the potential use of harder drugs.

• MYTH: Marijuana is highly addictive. Millions of Americans seek treatment every year because they become dependent upon marijuana.
• FACT: Marijuana lacks the physical and psychological dependence liability associated with other intoxicants—including tobacco and alcohol. Very few cannabis users voluntarily seek drug treatment for pot “addiction.” The majority of marijuana smokers in drug treatment were arrested for pot possession and ordered into treatment as a condition of their probation.

Is cannabis addictive? Let’s look at what the science tells us. Numerous reports, including one by the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet and another cited in the New York Times, have found cannabis’s risk of physical or psychological dependence to be mild compared to most other drugs, including alcohol and tobacco. In fact, two experts in the field—Drs. Jack E. Henningfield of the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse and Neal L. Benowitz of the University of California at San Francisco—reported to the New York Times that pot’s addiction potential is no greater than caffeine’s.

According to a report by the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine, fewer than 10 percent of those who try cannabis ever meet the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of “drug dependence” (based on DSM-III-R criteria). By contrast, investigators reported that 32 percent of tobacco users, 23 percent of heroin users, 17 percent of cocaine users, and 15 percent of alcohol users meet the criteria for “drug dependence.”

• MYTH: Smoking marijuana impairs driving in a manner that is worse than alcohol. Marijuana consumption is responsible for tens of thousands of traffic accidents every year.
• FACT: Marijuana intoxication appears to play, at most, a minor role in traffic injuries.

While it is well established that alcohol consumption increases motor vehicle accident risk, evidence of marijuana’s culpability in on-road driving accidents and injury is nominal by comparison. That’s not to say that smoking marijuana won’t temporarily impair psychomotor skills. However, pot’s psychomotor impairment is seldom severe or long lasting, and variations in driving behavior after marijuana consumption are noticeably less pronounced than the impairments exhibited by drunk drivers.

Unlike motorists under the influence of alcohol, individuals who have recently smoked pot are aware of their impairment and try to compensate for it accordingly, either by driving more cautiously or by expressing an unwillingness to drive altogether. As reported in a 2008 Israeli study assessing the impact of marijuana and alcohol on driving performance, “[S]ubjects seemed to be aware of their impairment after THC intake and tried to compensate by driving slower; alcohol seemed to make them overly confident and caused them to drive faster than in control sessions.”

Of course, none of this information is meant to imply that smoking marijuana makes you a “safe” driver. In closed-course and driving-simulator studies, marijuana’s acute effects on driving include minor impairments in tracking (eye-movement control) and reaction time, as well as variation in lateral positioning, and speed.

To summarize, a motorist who has just smoked marijuana is a safer driver than one who has just consumed alcohol (even quantities of alcohol that are well within the legal limit for drinking and driving in most countries), but he or she is arguably not a “safe” driver. As with alcohol or most over-the-counter cold remedies, cannabis consumers are best advised to abstain from operating a motor vehicle for several hours after imbibing, and they should always designate at least one person to act as a sober designated driver.

Droves of people have turned to local food as a way to retreat from our broken industrial food system. From rural towns to the most urban of cities streets, people are growing, fermenting, enjoying, and celebrating food produced close to home. “Local food” is a thriving movement and also a fad, an evocative trend that captures people’s imaginations — sometimes even moreso than it translates into actual regional food production. When even Frito-Lay can claim that its mass-produced potato chips are “local” because, lo and behold, the majority of them are grown in Hastings, Florida…then it’s time to take the conversation to the next level.

Rebuilding the Foodshed, a new book by Green Mountain College professor and farmer Philip Ackerman-Leist, refocuses the locavore lens on rebuilding robust regional food systems. Only by taking a systems-thinking approach can we successfully replace the destructive aspects of industrial agriculture, meet food demands both affordably and sustainably, and be resilient enough to endure potentially rough times ahead as we face a shifting, unpredictable climate and uncertain fossil fuel supplies.

Publishers Weekly recently reviewed the book. “For a somewhat wonkish book about food policy, Rebuilding the Foodshed is unusually humorous and open-minded. Vermont farmer and professor Ackerman-Leist ruminates his way through the conundrums and possibilities of local food, demonstrating how words and their definitions can shed light on and transform our understanding of the rapidly evolving, often confusing, emotion-fraught questions of what people eat, where the food comes from, who has access to what, and how the answers to these questions affect the lives of eaters and growers. With insight, he demonstrates how communities can bridge and transcend the “false divides” he pinpoints in the local-food conversation: urban/rural, small-scale/large-scale, local/international, and all/nothing.

Rebuilding the Foodshed is the third installment in the Community Resilience Guides series. Chelsea Green Publishing has partnered with Post Carbon Institute to publish this series to detail some of the most inspiring and replicable efforts currently being taken to restore local supplies of capital, food, and power. We’ve made them available as a discounted set here.

Learn more about the series at Resilience.org.

Renowned chef and cookbook author Deborah Madison contributed the Foreword to Rebuilding the Foodshed, which you can take a look at below.

Enjoy! 

Deborah Madison’s Foreword to Rebuilding the Foodshed by

One sunny day in August 2001, armed federal agents stormed the farmstand at Rawesome Foods in Venice Beach, California. The proprieter of the shop, James Stewart, was charged with conspiracy to commit a crime, and ended up spending four months in jail (you can follow the twists and turns of the bizarre and emotional story via David Gumpert’s blog, The Complete Patient). The raid of Rawesome Foods made headlines in Los Angeles, and was even spoofed by the Colbert Report.

It’s easy to imagine that this California farmer was doing something seriously illicit to draw the fire (almost literally) of the authorities the way he did. But Stewart was merely selling raw foods, particularly goat milk, yogurt, and kefir.

Stewart was not the first person in our “free” country to feel the wrath of the FDA for actively seeking the foods he wanted to eat — foods not typically available through the normal channels provided by our industrial food system. And agents marching in with guns at the ready aren’t the only forces keeping our food system from being free. In addition to bizarre government raids and oppressive laws that don’t make sense, we find massive corporations like Monsanto in control of seed supplies, and processors like Kraft and Cargill maneuvering politicians to do their will.

Government and large corporations work together to do what they think is a good thing: make lots of cheap food. And it’s hard to argue against the benefits of a full belly. Except that the fuller our bellies are with corn (especially high-fructose corn syrup) and soy (and meat that’s fed soy-based feed), the bigger those bellies are getting, and the less healthy our bodies are becoming. Obesity and diabetes are rampant public health problems in our country, and they can be directly tied to the style of agriculture we’ve created.

If we want to create a better outcome, for health, for our communities, and for the planet, we need to fight for a different system. If we do, we won’t be alone. As journalist David Gumpert outlines on his blog and in his forthcoming book, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Food Rights, the struggle to gain and keep access to foods like raw milk, yogurt, butter, kefir, fresh lacto-fermented vegetables, and others is drawing in stakeholders from all walks of life. Unlikely alliances are forming between Amish farmers trying to keep a traditional way of life afloat in a new century, and suburban soccer moms trying to feed their families healthfully.

At the forefront of this struggle is the Weston A. Price Foundation, with chapters in cities across the country. Weston Price advocates for a return to ways of eating that have historically made for healthy humans, and tend to avoid processed food, wheat, refined sugars, and soy. In an era obsessed with “nutrition” and terrified of saturated fats, it’s controversial to say that lard is a health food, and that you’d be better off eating a slab of rare steak than a hunk of wheat bread — but that’s exactly the kind of advice you’ll get from Weston A. Price champions like Sally Fallon Morrell.

Price was a dentist, and he studied diets from traditional societies around the world to find out which ones were the best for overall health. His research forms the basis of books like Nourishing Traditions, and makes for some delicious eating. But because of its promotion of raw foods — especially raw dairy — eaters who follow Price’s advice open themselves up to frightening persecution.

What do you think? Are food regulations too strict, or are they not strict enough? Certainly there’s ample evidence to support either opinion. For every raw-food buying club that gets raided there are hundreds of serious illnesses from contaminated industrial food.

Let us know what you think by visiting our Facebook page.

As Sandor Katz puts it, “Humans did not invent or create fermentation. It would be more accurate to state that fermentation created us.”

A perfect example of the truth of this simple notion can be found by looking at our ancient relationship to cheese.

Paul Kindstedt’s groundbreaking book, Cheese and Culture traces the nearly 9,000 year history of cheese in Western civilization, and shows how integral fermented milk products have been to the development of the world we know today. The ability to ferment, and therefore store, dairy products increased the nutrition of our diets, and cemented our relationship to sheep, goats, and cows.

Cheese and Culture is now available in paperback, and will be on sale for 35% off this week.

Kindstedt was featured on CBS news last month on National Cheese Lovers Day. Pop over to CBS’s website to watch the feature and learn about the latest archeological evidence of ancient cheesemaking (plus enjoy the adorable cartoon of Paul!).

(35% off, highlight reviews, blogs, news, events…)

An oft-repeated koan of the conscious or ethical foodie movement and the environmental movement is that adopting a vegan diet will do more to heal the ills of the planet than buying a brand new Prius.

Here at Chelsea Green, we believe that it’s unreasonable to expect the entire meat-loving world to give up their steaks and drumsticks, their shortribs and salame, their sashimi and their kibbe. Instead of a radical approach, influenced as much by ideology as it is by positive intention, we would like to suggest a corollary to the meatless mission: eat less meat, grassfed only, local if possible.

Since this is National Meat Week, a relatively new holiday created by Erni Walker and Chris Cantey, it’s a perfect time to try some new recipes specifically designed for sustainably-raised meats. If you haven’t already, you should also browse your local farmers’ offerings at Local Harvest or FarmPlate to find a source of good meat near you.

Eating the entire animal is a good way to maximize the pleasure and nutrition one can get from carnivory. Grassfed beef farmer Shannon Hayes’s new book, Long Way on a Little is designed to help meat-lovers do this. Check out her four “offal” recipes, recently shared by Mother Earth News.

Hayes’s other books also encourage conscious eaters to enjoy meat responsibly. The Farmer and the Grill, and The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook are both excellent additions to any planet-loving omnivore’s kitchen bookshelf.

If you already have a stockpile of excellent recipes, but want to learn more about why and how meat can be part of a healthy planet, you might want to check out Simon Fairlie’s info-packed book Meat: A Benign Extravagance.

Fairlie makes the case for pastured livestock as part of a soil-healing, integrated permaculture system. His arguments are strong enough that they even made George Monbiot change his mind about the benefits of a vegetarian diet! Even if you’re already convinced, Meat will give context and depth to your understanding of just why meat doesn’t have to be taboo—and some great talking points when you’re debating your vegan or vegetarian kin.

For people in climates with cold winters, meat has traditionally been a reliable source of nutrition through the dark half of the year. Of course, with well-insulated homes, heaters of all shapes and sorts, refrigerators to keep food fresh INSIDE our toasty warm houses, and a globalized food system that provides even Vermonters with fresh tomatoes in February you can understand why we’ve lost touch with some of our traditional foodways.

Full Moon Feast, by Jessica Prentice seeks to re-educate us about these traditions, and how they intertwine with the changing seasons. With a chapter for each month, or moon, this cookbook is full of interesting lore and delicious recipes. Try this one for Meat Week: Swedish Meatballs.

Another way to look at the meat issue is by paying careful attention to the health of livestock animals. Cattle, pigs, and poultry raised in commercial-scale facilities and fed corn and soy rations laced with antibiotics are definitely worth avoiding for many reasons. But chickens raised with care in your backyard or on a farmer’s pasture are a completely different story.

Harvey Ussery cares for his flock with a holistic attitude influenced by his studies in Zen Buddhism. His book, The Small-Scale Poultry Flock, outlines Ussery’s methods for raising healthy and happy birds, including how to pasture them, and how to raise a completely local food source for them by harvesting grubs. He even includes a few recipes, like this one for making a simple, versatile, and healthy broth.

The solstice is behind us, and sun is slowly returning to the land, but if you live in a northern climate chances are you’re still shoveling snow and huddling by the fire to keep warm during this dark time of year. 

Jessica Prentice’s cookbook Full Moon Feast shares traditions from each “moon” of the year, along with seasonal recipes. The excerpt and recipe below are for the deep midwinter, or Wolf Moon.

The Wolf Moon comes in the deep dark of winter, when the North is covered with snow. At this time of year our northern ancestors would have taken refuge in their homes, staying close to the fire as the winds and the wolves howled outside. Families lived off the food they had put up in the fall, often supplemented by hunting for wild game. It was these rations that kept the wolf from the door.

The wolf as a metaphor for hunger, appetite, or famine dates back to at least the fifteenth century. Over the past sixty years we have steadily driven the metaphorical wolf from our door, and we have also steadily driven the actual wolf from the land. We have also, perhaps, driven the wildness of the wolf from our hearts. These developments are not unrelated. By the mid-1970s wolves, once the most populous large mammals in North America, had become an endangered species. The development throughout the American West of large tracts of rangeland for cattle and sheep, and the widespread practice on the part of ranchers of shooting predators on sight, contributed to the wolf ’s demise. Agricultural and urban development also steadily eroded the large, uninterrupted areas of wilderness where wolves thrived.

Cream of Butternut Squash Soup
Serves 3–4

This is one of my favorite cold-weather standards. The primary recipe is for an herby, European-style squash soup. Then I offer an Asian-style variation.

• 2 tablespoons butter or olive oil
• 2–3 leeks, sliced into rounds
• 1 fresh seasonal butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into chunks
• Chicken stock or filtered water to cover
• 1 bouquet garni (page 309)
• ½ cup cream, crème fraîche, or yogurt; or 1 cup buttermilk or half-and-half
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Crème fraîche or yogurt, for garnish
• Finely minced rosemary, thyme, sage, or parsley leaves (or a combination of
• these herbs); or a grating of nutmeg; or a grind of black pepper, for garnish

1. Heat the butter or oil in a medium-sized soup pot. Add the leeks and sauté until soft.
2. Add the butternut squash, then add stock or filtered water to cover the vegetables by about ½ inch. Add the bouquet garni and bring the pot to a boil.
3. Reduce the heat and simmer until the squash is soft.
4. Turn off the heat and remove the bouquet garni.
5. Puree the soup with an immersion blender (or in a standard blender), adding the yogurt or other dairy, and plenty of salt and pepper as you blend. Taste the soup and adjust the seasonings—adding more salt and pepper if it’s too bland.
6. Serve in a shallow bowl with a dollop of crème fraîche (or yogurt) and a sprinkling of herbs, nutmeg, or pepper.

Note: This simple recipe shows off the flavor of a good in-season squash, but might be unimpressive if made with an older, less-flavorful squash—in which case you might want to roast the squash first to bring out the sweetness.

Variation: Butternut Soup with Coconut Milk and Ginger

1. Replace the butter or olive oil with ghee, if you have it.
2. Replace the bouquet garni with 3 to 4 slices fresh gingerroot.
3. Add a tablespoon or so of fish sauce to the soup while it’s cooking (reduce the salt).
4. Replace the yogurt (or other dairy) in the puree with coconut milk (you can use a whole 13.5-oz can).
5. Garnish with a dollop of yogurt and a sprinkling of minced scallions.

Not to be confused with “Pi Day,” the nerdy celebration of everyone’s favorite irrational number, which takes place on March 14th, today is National PIE Day.

Today we celebrate the delicious beauty of scrumptious round baked goods with fillings both fruity and savory, with crusts both crumbly and crisp.

The American Pie Council*, which has as its mission to “preserve America’s pie heritage and promote American’s love affair with pies,” and which sponsors National Pie Day, shares some tidbits from man’s long love affair with pies:

• The first pies were made by early Romans who may have learned about it through the Greeks (sic). These pies were sometimes made in “reeds” which were used for the sole purpose of holding the filling and not for eating with the filling.
• Pie came to America with the first English settlers. The early colonists cooked their pies in long narrow pans calling them “coffins” like the crust in England. As in the Roman times, the early American pie crusts often were not eaten, but simply designed to hold the filling during baking. It was during the American Revolution that the term crust was used instead of coffyn.

We want you to be able to celebrate the illustrious pie in style, so we’re happy to share some fun pie recipes from Chelsea Green books.

First, we’ve got a simple, mouthwatering recipe from our newest cookbook, Home Baked: Hanne’s Lemon Pie.

Home Baked comes from the Risgaard family, who grow and grind organic grains in Denmark. The Risgaards grow and sell some of the finest grains on the planet, and bake phenomenal breads and pastries with them. A unique bread book, Home Baked features recipes made with spelt and rye as well as conventional wheat. With fresh ingredients such as nettles and ramps, you’re sure to find a surprising treat within its pages. And, of course, a pie.

An alternative to the typical apple pie comes from Michael Phillips’s book The Apple Grower. This pie is made from cider, reduced down to a thick and tangy syrup more like lemon curd than the familiar beverage that warms up your Christmas parties. Get the recipe here.

And lastly, from Joan Gussow’s classic memoir This Organic Life comes a recipe for Gooseberry Pie. The tart, tiny, green fruits look a little like grapes gone mad, but their flavor is unforgettable. And, what endears us to them even more is that they are a reliable perennial crop. Perfect for a permaculture-inspired home garden!

As Joan says,

“Nothing I know of tastes anything like gooseberry pie. My first Christmas away from home, in 1950, with my whole family across the continent in California, I tried all over Manhattan to get fresh gooseberries. Finally, in the German section, I got two cans of gooseberries for a price which was, then, about 20 percent of a week’s salary. Well worth it. My recipe calls for fresh ones.”

We hope you have a delicious and exciting National Pie Day!

*Yes, there is an American Pie Council. No, it is not a joke.