How to Keep Your Food from Spoiling

Every housewife should know something of how foods are preserved — canned fruits, meat and vegetables, or pickles and jams — for a knowledge of these matters means a great saving in her monthly budget. It was said of old: the direct reason for preserving foods is to keep them from spoiling when they exceed the family's need.

And now, madam, here are some elementary observations on the subject:

1 – When you prepare the various grains for the pantry, such as beans and chickpeas, sun them well and store them in dry places away from insects.

2 – The spread of refrigerators in the various modern homes makes the preserving of foods easy, for low temperature kills all microbes and thus extends the life of the various foods; so profit, madam, from this scientific fact.

3 – Drying is an old custom widespread among our grandmothers, such as the drying of figs, apricots, okra, and mulukhiyya. The West has profited from this elementary method in drying milk, eggs, and all sorts of foods that would never occur to us, such as soup or shorba.

4 – Canning, or preserving in cans or tins: here too the food experts have shown their ingenuity, leaving no kind of fruit or vegetable — or even cooked dishes — that they have not preserved inside tightly sealed cans.

5 – Sterilization, which is done by killing all life in the foods; this is achieved by heat and by boiling over the fire, as you do with milk.

6 – Fermentation, the strangest of the methods and the most common in our homes. Laban, labneh, and cheese, for example, are all the result of the work of bacteria at certain degrees of heat, time, and humidity. Another example is the action of yeast in bread and in beer, and vinegar, which is itself used to make pickles and to keep them from spoiling.

7 – The best method of preserving foods, however, and the one most useful to the housewife, is the chemical method. What the ordinary lady may venture into is, first, by means of sugar — jams of every kind, candies, and the like — for a sugar concentration of 40 to 50 percent assures that these foods keep in good condition.

Salt likewise is an excellent medium for preserving foods such as vegetables, pickles, meat, and fish. We know, too, that the rule followed for the proportion of water to salt is 'the floating of the egg,' as our mothers taught us — meaning that we keep adding salt to the water and stirring it until the mixture is enough to float the egg on the surface of the water. This method is used for pressing green olives and for pickles such as cucumbers and turnips, and it is warranted to keep foods far from spoilage.

In preserving basterma and makanek sausages, for example, certain spices are added to the salt; these react chemically in a way that is sometimes not free of the danger of poisoning, and we do not advise the ladies of the house to use them without consulting the experts in this field.

When we set about making jam or pickles, we are driven in our work by the force of tradition more than by sound knowledge. It was said of old: 'Ask a man of experience, not a sage' — and in the matter of keeping foods from spoiling this saying holds true to a great extent, for the long experience of the old women has not gone for nothing, and their talk on most occasions deserves attentive ears. Yet the observations of modern science and the results it has reached in its laboratories and workshops — these too have their importance, and the housewife would do well to give them some attention.

Finally, we may draw from our talk the following:

1 – Dry foods containing fatty matter, or liable to absorb air, must be kept at a low temperature or inside sealed containers.

2 – Liquids are the foods most exposed to spoilage.

3 – Adding a little sugar or salt to liquids reduces the speed of their spoiling.

4 – A rise in temperature increases the speed at which foods spoil.

5 – Food with a high proportion of water must be sterilized by boiling, or preserved chemically, or kept at a low temperature.