Elisabeth Luard's alliterative new book

Elisabeth is one of our very favourite writers, ever, and her own illustrator, to boot. We are really very grateful to her for taking the time to give us her writing below…

Elisabeth Luard writes: A brand new all-singing all-dancing Preserving, Potting and Pickling (Grub Street £25) is out this merry month in a fully illustrated edition of what was first published by Bantam in 1988 as The Barricaded Larder ('terrible title' - publisher Anne Dolamore) as a companion volume to European Peasant Cookery.  

Apart from a thorough overhaul of the text, the difference is the inclusion throughout of my own ink-and-watercolours. Recipes are representative rather than definitive - neighbours can all too easily come to blows over the inclusion (or absence) of a scraping of nutmeg or the number of  soakings required to leach the bitterness from an olive.  

Recipes include everything you've ever needed to know about bottling, salting-down, putting-up at home, and some of the delicious dishes that follow. With everything on the supermarket shelf available all year round, much of it ready-prepared, it's easy to forget that there was a time when rural households took self-sufficiency for granted - and there were many such in the early 1980's when the recipes were gathered - each with its own way of preserving the glut of summer against the shortages of winter.  

The original title (pace esteemed editor), was suggested by an exchange of memories between members of farming family while pitting plums in a warm kitchen somewhere on the Hungarian pushta in the autumn of 1983: ‘The only door which ever had a padlock was the larder. In normal times it wasn't locked. It was only when the soldiers came - Magyars, Czechs, Turks, Russians, Germans, didn't matter which. Then the larder was barricaded with a heavy iron bolt and a padlock, and we all knew we had defend it to the death.

That is exactly what it meant -  the difference between life and death.’  A sobering thought, but a lesson in what mattered most - maybe still does.