90 Ways My Grandmother Made Food Last
My grandmother never threw anything out. She fed six people on almost nothing, and I never once asked her how. This is everything I have been able to find out since.
Made Food Last
one page, one way
$17, once. Ninety ways, nine sections, and two cards for the fridge and the freezer.
Somebody tells me one I had never heard.
This is not a book I wrote alone. Most of it came from the comments, from women who watched their grandmother do it and never wrote it down either.
Potato cakes are good too. Made with leftover mashed potatoes, chopped onion, a beaten egg and enough flour to hold it together.
I didn't know anyone else got milk toast when we were sick. We liked it so much we had it even when we weren't sick.
Sounds like my grandma. Homemade bread cooked in cans, always white crackers in the jars, lemon drops in the candy dish.
We only buy the 3 pound package of meat. Bring it home, divide it into 4 packages for 4 meals and freeze it. Less expensive that way.
Nine sections. Ninety ways.
- Jars and putting up
- Eggs, and how long they really keep
- The freezer, used properly
- Fat, butter and drippings
- Jam, pickles and the relish tray
- Drying, herbs and the rest
- Bread, and what she did with the end of it
- Salt and cure
- The pantry and the cold room
- The fridge card — one page, printed, on the door. Where everything goes and how long it keeps.
- The freezer log — because a full freezer you cannot remember saves nobody anything.
One page, one way. Nothing to study.
Every one of the ninety is laid out the same, so you can find the one you need in about four seconds.
- What she did
- Kept the heels in a cloth in the tin, never the bag.
- How
- Cloth, tin, out of the light. Never the fridge — it goes stale faster there, not slower.
- How long it keeps
- Four days soft. After that it becomes something else, and that is the point.
- What it saves
- Milk toast, potato cakes, and the crumbs for Sunday.
What she did that we do not do anymore.
Some of it was wonderful. Some of it we now know is dangerous, and I say which is which, plainly, with the reason.
- Low acid vegetables in jars need a pressure canner, not a water bath. This one matters more than all the others.
- Eggs on the counter worked where eggs were not washed. In America they are, so they cannot.
- The things she did that are still exactly right, and there are more of those than you would think.
I would rather lose a page than hand you something that makes you ill.
Nineteen cents a way. Less than the bag of salad you are going to throw out on Thursday.
Get the bookInstant access. Read it on your phone, print the two cards. No account, no password, nothing to install.
I am the one who did not ask in time.
I am Nora. I am forty, I cook for one most nights, and I grew up watching a woman feed a whole house on what would barely fill a basket today.
When we cleared her kitchen I was thirty two and in a hurry. I kept the skillet and threw out the rolling pin, and I have thought about that more times than I can tell you.
This book is me asking, ten years too late, and writing it down so that the next person does not have to.
Nothing here was invented.
Ninety ways, nine sections, two cards for the fridge and the freezer. Written down before the last person who remembers them stops answering.
The questions I get.
No. There are dishes in it, but they are always the answer to a problem — what to do with the bread, the milk, the end of the chicken. It is about keeping food, not about learning to cook. You already know how.
On the phone, and printable. The two cards are made to be printed and stuck up. The rest reads fine on a screen, in large type.
For most of it, no. Jars, a cloth, a tin, a freezer. Where something does need proper equipment — the pressure canner above all — I say so in bold and I say why.
Preserving food badly can make you very ill, and I take that seriously. Every method says what is still considered safe today and what has been superseded. When there is any doubt, I leave it out.
Write to me and I refund you. No form to fill in.