Preserving the Harvest - The Learning Process

 Living in a time when a full bounty of almost any food imaginable is available year round at your local grocery store,  it's hard for most people to wrap their minds around the concept of transforming today's harvest into forms that will last till things start growing again months from now -- and without the benefit of refrigeration and modern canning practices.  At our "Preserving the Harvest" event at Hartwell Tavern our guests were exposed to a variety of methods used to ensure a food supply through the winter and early spring.

Over the next week, we'll share some of the food preservation techniques we tried.  Most of the time we can reasonably reproduce a receipt from a period cookbook, servant's directory or household guide, even when it involves obtaining that not so readily available ingredient, but what we often are missing is the common knowledge base of the time which most often it is not so much the how you do things but why you do them.  By actually going through the process you frequently learn more about what you don't know and that's where the real fun is - in trying to unlock these mysteries!