Cookbook Club

Cookbook Review: Wiley Canning Company Cookbook

By: The Local Palate

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I doubt I’m alone in fearing canning. The pressure cooker, sterilization, and perfect marriage of acid and sweetness that ensures effective and delicious preservation seem far from idiot proof. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of it—homesteading, preserving in-season flavors, and bypassing all highly processed, canned goods on the grocery store shelves resonates with me. I eagerly volunteered to cook through the Wiley Canning Company Cookbook by Chelsea J. O’Leary and immediately balked when I got to the subchapter entitled “The Science and Safety of Canning.” Its categories around the biology, chemistry, and physics in canning don’t exactly jive with my typical “let’s wing it!” cooking mentality.

But this age-old practice demands respect for the level of sophistication surrounding the process of eliminating oxygen from the jars through heat or altering the pH of either brine or preserving liquid to prevent microorganisms from growing. Then there’s the physics of processing the jars through both a high-pressure and high-heat environment, according to the Ideal Gas Law. By the time you get to the recipes, seeing the science in action feels far from academic.