Thirty Jars for the Cold Months

Most preserving books end when the lid goes on

Mine tells you what to do with the jar in February. That is the whole difference, and it is the reason I wrote it. I have two of those big canning books on my shelf. I have never once opened them in winter — only in August, when I was already busy. A jar you do not know how to eat is a jar that sits there until you throw it away.

So every single one of these thirty has three ways to eat it written underneath.

WHAT IS IN IT

· 30 preserves — 8 sweet, 8 sharp, 5 in salt, 5 in the freezer, 4 in fat and oil

· 90 ways to eat them — three under every jar, because that is the part nobody writes down

· What each one keeps for, in plain numbers, and where — the cold, the shelf, or the freezer

· Three things I never preserve, and why everybody tries

SOME OF WHAT IS INSIDE

· Quince paste — the ugliest fruit in the market and the best sweet in France

· Grapes in vinegar — the reason a plate of cheese is never boring again

· Red wine vinegar, made from the bottles nobody finished, for nothing

· Herb salt, because drying takes the smell out and the smell is the whole point

· Plum jam with no thermometer, and the cold-saucer test I have used for fifty years

· Tomato confit, for the pasta on the nights when there is nothing in the house

WHAT IS NOT IN IT

No pressure canner. No sterilising rituals that take an afternoon. No cellar, no special shelf, no equipment you have to buy. I have a small kitchen and one cold shelf, and everything here was made in it.

And no lists of forty jams. Twenty jars is a hobby. Five is a kitchen that feeds you, and I will tell you which five.

Every recipe has the weights, the times, the honest shelf life, and what I do when it goes wrong — because it does.

Written from my kitchen, where the shop is a long walk and the tomatoes stop in October.