The Medieval Larder: 12 Ways to Keep Food Without a Fridge, and 24 Recipes to Cook It

Launch week: $29 instead of $37 until Sunday night. After that it goes to its regular price and stays there.

Twelve preservation methods and twenty-four recipes. 128 pages. How a household fed itself through winter before refrigeration existed — and how to do the same in a modern kitchen.

Open your refrigerator and look at what is in it. Almost everything there has a date measured in days. You are running a machine every hour of every day to buy yourself a week.

A medieval household had no machine and bought itself a year.

That is not nostalgia, it is a different strategy. Refrigeration slows decay by making things cold, which works only while the power is on. Preservation stops decay by changing the food — taking the water out, raising the acid, excluding the oxygen — and once the change is made it holds without any further input at all.

Part I · The Twelve Methods

47 pages. Each method explains what is actually happening to the food, gives the number that decides whether it works, and sets out the steps.

• Salt, dry and wet — the percentages that decide whether meat keeps for three years or spoils in a week
• Smoke, cold and hot — and why the temperature is the entire difference between the two
• Air — the dried cod that provisioned the North Atlantic without a grain of salt
• Fat — potting and confit, the conserve almost everyone has forgotten
• Honey, vinegar and lacto-fermentation — three different ways to make food hostile to bacteria
• Earth — the root cellar, including how to build one in a flat with no cellar at all
• Ice, sugar, and lime — including the limewater method that keeps eggs edible for a year

Part II · The Twenty-Four Recipes

67 pages. Not feast-day cookery. The food an ordinary household actually ate, most of it built from what Part I put in the larder.

Every recipe carries a Keeps line at the top — how long it lasts and under what conditions. In a book about preservation, that is the number you actually want, and it should not be buried in a paragraph.

Part III · The Year, and What Goes Wrong

14 pages. The preserving calendar month by month, because the seasons do not wait. Fifteen named failures with their real cause rather than the folk explanation. And a full chapter on food safety.

The Safety Chapter, and Why It Is In Here

Most books in this genre romanticise the old methods. This one names the places where they are not good enough.

Medieval households lost people to preserved food and had no way of knowing it — no germ theory, no thermometer, no way to connect a death in February to a pot sealed in November. You are not in that position. So the final chapter states, for each of the twelve methods, whether it actually blocks Clostridium botulinum and by what mechanism. Two of them do not, and one of them actively helps it. Both are named.

Every safety threshold in this book — the water activity figures, the pH limits, the curing-salt doses, the freezing protocols, the temperatures — was checked against the FDA, USDA, the UK Food Standards Agency, EFSA and the CDC before publication. Where an agency disagreed with the traditional practice, the agency won and the book says so.

What You Get

• 128 pages in the same parchment-and-ink style as the Medieval Bakery volumes
• 12 preservation methods, each with the numbers that make it work
• 24 recipes, every one with its keeping time stated
• The preserving calendar — what to do in which month, all year
• 15 named failures and the actual cause of each
• A full food-safety chapter, checked against named agencies
• Instant download · works on any device · printable for the kitchen wall

Who This Is For

You, if you watched our films on medieval meat, forgotten vegetables or the Roman soldier's diet and wanted to actually do it. You, if you grow or buy more than you can eat and watch it go to waste. You, if you would rather not depend on a machine and a power supply to keep a month of food alive.

No special equipment. Every crock in this book can be a glass jar, every smokehouse a box with a pipe in it, and every root cellar a bucket sunk in the garden. The medieval household had less than you do. That was rather the point.

From Checkout to Your First Jar

What happens after you buy, in plain terms.

1 · One payment. By card, PayPal, Apple Pay or Shop Pay. No account to create, no subscription, no recurring charges, ever. You buy the book once and it is yours.

2 · The download arrives in minutes. The PDF lands in your inbox straight after checkout. It opens on a phone, tablet, laptop or e-reader, and it prints — most readers run off the recipe pages for the kitchen wall.

3 · Start with cabbage. Don't read 128 pages first. Turn to Chapter VIII, shred a cabbage, weigh it, add two percent of that weight in salt, and press it into a jar. That is day one. It takes twenty minutes, it costs about a euro, and in ten days you have made sauerkraut that keeps for months.

14-day money-back guarantee. If the book is not what you expected, write to us and we refund you. No form, no questions.

Medieval bread was food. Your supermarket loaf is a product.
The choice is yours.

Format: PDF (instant digital download) · Length: 128 pages · Delivery: download link emailed immediately after purchase · Regular price: $37