Ken Albala - The Lost Arts of Hearth & Home: The Happy Luddites Guide to Domestic Self-Sufficiency

The Happy Luddites Guide
to Self-Sufficiency

A RECONDITE TREASURY OF ARCANE SECRETS,
WHEREIN ARE EXPLAINED MYSTERIES OF THE KITCHEN
AND CUPBOARD, PLAINLY SET FORTH FOR THOSE WHO
WOULD PROFIT MATERIALLY AND SPIRITUALLY THROUGH
SELF-SUFFICIENCY, HONEST UNPLUGGED LABOR, AND
DILIGENT APPLICATION OF ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES
DERIVED FROM OUR ESTEEMED FOREBEARS IN MATTERS
BOTH ESCULENT AND DOMESTIC.

K EN A LBALA and
R OSANNA N AFZIGER H ENDERSON

A PERIGEE BOOK

A PERIGEE BOOK

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

THE LOST ARTS OF HEARTH AND HOME

Copyright 2012 by Ken Albala and Rosanna Nafziger Henderson

Illustrations by Marjorie Nafziger

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or
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First edition: October 2012

ISBN: 978-1-101-61183-8

An application to catalog this book has been submitted to the Library of Congress.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is
not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision.
The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

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ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

To Mildred Q. Pilchard,
font of all wisdom and virtue,
our undying gratitude

To the Gentle Reader,

We are so happy to see you again, dear friends. In this, our sequel to the Lost Art of Real Cooking, we venture beyond the kitchen, scurrying down sundry corridors, to spread the spirit of antiquated self-sufficiency throughout the household. Well, to be honest, we had such fun and became so accustomed to testing recipes for the first book, that we never stopped. Then it occurred to us that most cookbooks in the past also included medicinal recipes, perfumes, hints about household maintenance, and sometimes dcor tips. Why not include all these, too?

Our goal is not, it should be pointed out, homesteading. We dont keep animals, plant crops, weave our own clothes, or live in a sod house on the prairie. Though that sounds like a lot of fun, we are both city dwellers with day jobs, Rosanna in San Francisco and Ken 90 miles inland in Stockfish, California. We expect our readers will be much like us: people who love to cook, love fresh natural ingredients and old techniques for preservation; people who like doing things themselves with a needle and thread, garden hoe or handsaw. Most important, we are writing for people who are fed up with the way modern food industries (and other household industries) connive to get us to buy things under the pretext that they will make life quicker, easier, and more convenient. We like doing things the slower wayso that first and foremost food tastes good and the objects we live with are aesthetically pleasing and useful. Our tastes are decidedly old-fashioned, not to the point of rejecting everything modern, but saving those precious things most people never think of doing themselves anymore.

In this book we have also decided to go a little more unplugged, flirt with techniques a little more daring and dangerous, and trust old cookbooks and our instincts a little more than before. Thus you will find more open fires than electric ovens here, more jars on shelves than in the fridgein fact we like to think of our approach to preservation as pre-Pasteurian. There are also more ambitious projects, things that, quite frankly, frightened us at first. They have since become second nature. We also invested in some more antiquated equipment, like a stone quern for grinding grain and a copper still for making electuaries. Neither was very expensive and we will offer alternatives for those enthusiasts not quite as committed as ourselvesyet.

We also realized while writing this that there is no point in offering you recipes for really complex technical procedures when expert books are readily available on topics like brewing and cheese making. Our intention is merely to get you started, as amateurs like us. We would like to help you think about things you would never have thought possible without a professional manual, thousand of dollars of equipment, and a degree in biochemistry. People in the past had none of these and neither do we. Yet as you will see, some of the things we have accomplished through pure gumption, perseverance, and a lot of sweat are perfectly feasible within a modest budget.

We should also point out that this book is written in a particularly old-fashioned style without precise measurements, cooking times, or unnecessary minutiae that would otherwise prevent you from unleashing your creative energy in the kitchen and workshop. We sincerely dislike the modern recipe format and hope you will come to appreciate how liberating it can be to just wing it, as we like to say. The recipes do really work; you just need to trust yourselves.