Saturday, June 28, 2025

The Essential Canning Cookbook: Water Bath and Pressure Canning Recipes for Every Season

 

The Essential Canning Cookbook is a seasonal tutorial and cookbook with recipes developed and curated by Molly Bravo. Due out 5th Aug 2025 from Cider Mill Press, it's 176 pages and will be available in hardcover and ebook formats. 

There are so many classic canning and preserving cookbooks that it's a difficult niche to find something truly new and breakthrough. Although most cooks who have experience with canning have a copy of Ball's Blue Book lying around, it's also nice to get some new recipes to try out and this collection has some interesting ones.

The layout is standard: the introductory chapters cover equipment, supplies, ingredient choices, and some basic safety. The second half of the content includes the recipes grouped thematically: fruits, vegetables, sauces & chutneys, broths stocks & soups, one jar meals, and desserts in jars.

Each of the recipes includes an introductory description, ingredients listed in a bullet point sidebar (imperial (US) measurements only, no metric conversions), and step by step instructions. The appendices do include helpful tables and charts, as well as hints and tips from the author for processing and preserving. There's a metric equivalents table as well, and a cross-referenced index.

In general this is a good starting volume with some interesting recipes. Most of the yields for the recipes make a fair bit of product (5-10 pints at a minimum), so testing out a recipe will require some commitment in time and materials. It's useful, and full of really beautifully detailed photography, but readers should still keep their Ball Canning Books (but a nice supplement).

Four and a half stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

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