Jam, Jelly and Marmalade: A Global History

Description

Whether they make it themselves or just enjoy it with breakfast, people can be passionate about their favourite jam, jelly or marmalade. Award-winning jam-maker Sarah B. Hood looks at the history of these sweet treats from simple fruit preserves to staple commodities, gifts for royalty, global brands, wartime comforts and valued delicacies. She traces connections between sweet preserves and the Temperance movement, the Crusades, the prevention of scurvy, medieval banquets, Georgian dinner parties, Scottish breakfasts, Joan of Arc and the adoption of tea-drinking in Europe. She explores the birth of unique local specialties and treasured regional customs, the rise and fall of international marmalade mavens, the mobilisation of volunteer preserve-makers on a grand scale and a jam-factory revolution.

Sarah B. Hood has taught for more than twenty years at George Brown College and is the author of the preserving cookbook We Sure Can!, which was shortlisted for Taste Canada, Canada's national food writing award. She lives in Toronto.

"A nice survey of the history of jam-making and preserves for the layperson." * Digestible Bits and Bites * "Hood traces the earliest forms of preserves in Persia and China, following the link between preserving and the availability of sugar, the contributions of railroads, jam's part in the emerging labor movement, and the rise of large-scale commercial preserving that shipped these comestibles to all corners of the globe. Who thought jam, jelly, and marmalade were just delicious foods to spread on toast, dress a pudding, or fill a tart? The truth? It's the history of the world . . . in a jar." -- Elizabeth Baird, best-selling cookbook author and member of the Order of Canada