I love when serendipity brings a new book into my life. While digging around online for home repair stuff, I somehow, completely by chance, came across a copy of MFK Fisher’s reprint of Catherine Plagemann’s Fine Preserving.
Published in 1986 by Aris Books (Berkeley, CA), this particular volume is interesting because it comes to you, the reader, as a glossed text. That is, the original text is presented alongside margin notes that were added in by a different reader (MFK Fisher), giving you a couple layers of text to experience and explore.
Next week I’ll talk about the experience of becoming part of that larger decades-long conversation through the margin notes of the book.
But this week I want to talk about the book itself, and the recipes inside (scroll down for a couple of my favorite recipes from this text, if you’re curious).
There are several layers of conversation happening in this text: There is the original text itself: Plagemann’s original 1967 Fine Preserving, a copy of which Fisher owned, and which sparked the publication of this annotated volume.
Fisher was, according to the preface, in conversation with friends about lost masterpieces, and said without hesitation that if she could revive any book it would be Plagemann’s. The book’s publisher happened to also be at the table and the rest, as they say, is history.
It was decided not just to reprint Plagemann’s book as-is, but to include the annotations Fisher made in her personal copy to produce a new version of the text.
The annotations go beyond “this is good” or “I don’t like this”, though those are present too: What struck me was that Fisher’s conversational tone also pops up in her annotations, particularly when writing out a specific food memory in the margins. It leads me to wonder if her original annotations were taken as-is or edited a bit for the published text (one assumes the latter), but I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn Fisher’s margin notes read exactly as they do here in the original version.
Sometimes, this is accompanied by a recipe: And in the case of orange marmalade, she notes that she prefers her mother’s recipe, then offers it, as an extra treat of sorts, on the adjoining page. The annotations, then, are not just Fisher’s experiences, but an opportunity for us as readers to recreate those experiences in some limited way. To try Plagemann’s recipes, and some of Fisher’s family recipes, and bring the authors into our own kitchens.
There’s a temporal and geographic element to it as well: Fisher and Plagemann both note what ingredients they have in abundance where they live (e.g. Fisher, in California, talks about working with grapes and citrus in abundance). But the kinds of foods they serve the preserves with also speak to a way of eating that is very meat-heavy: The recipe notes for just about every fruit preserve say that it’s good alongside meat (a tendency that asked me to think more broadly about how I use fruit preserves, as someone who rarely eats meat, with fruit or otherwise). It feels, to me, like the cooking of a generation or two before my time, which it is, though Plagemann may also have been heavily influenced by German cooking, where in my experience this is more common.
And Fisher clearly tells us her favorites from this book: pickled seedless grapes and chermoula (scroll down to see).
Most of the recipes are for sweet preserves and pickles, with a few surprises, like cucumber ketchup (though readers familiar with Our Fermented Lives will probably remember that this has historical precedent: people make ketchups out of just about anything).
From a food preserving standpoint, many of the recipes hold up to my experience of what makes a good-tasting preserve, though I will say there are a lot more jellies in this book than I typically make (MFK Fisher, I learned, shares my lack of interest in making jellies, and we both find them overly finicky and prefer to make other preserves instead).
From a modern-day food safety standpoint, some of the practices are not ones I would personally share in a book (like sealing jars with paraffin rather than safely canning them). But also, I recognize that these processes were a part of food preserving’s history, and thus the book makes sense for the time in which it was written. The recipes I’ve made from this book so far are ones that work well as preserves kept in the fridge (I may, at some point, can some of them, but have not done so yet).
If you want to make your own, here are a couple to try, including Fisher’s favorites, and that cucumber ketchup:
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