I HAVE been squirrelling away food for winter for 40 years—I like the reassurance of a full larder, not buying so much stuff out of season and, perhaps most of all, the preserving process itself. There are many ways of storing food: drying, salting, smoking, bottling, pickling, fermenting, and pastes, plus the clamping of root vegetables, and ‘forcing’ the roots of biennials for fresh winter leaves.
Bottling and drying are my favourite methods, with several days in the year taken up by a