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Pickled, Potted, and Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Preserving Changed the World
We may not give much thought to the boxes in our freezers or the cans on our shelves, but behind the story of food preservation is the history of civilization itself. The development of portable, preserved food enabled the great explorers to travel into the unknown and gradually map the planet, facilitated the conquest of new territories, and created routes for the expansion of trade and the exchange of knowledge and culture that opened up our world. In Pickled, Potted, and Canned, author Sue Shephard weaves together the stories of the inventors -- and inventions -- in a lively and richly detailed narrative that spans centuries and continents. It is a tale filled with extraordinary characters, old legends, and new how Attila the Hun and his men "gallop cured" their meat; how cooks became chemists and chemists became cooks and how some even lost their lives, like seventeenth-century statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon, whose death was caused by an experiment with a frozen chicken.
From the primitive techniques of drying and salting to the latest methods that have allowed us to feed men in space, Pickled, Potted, and Canned gives us fascinating insights into the histories, cultures, and ingenuity of people inventing new ways to "cheat the seasons."
From the primitive techniques of drying and salting to the latest methods that have allowed us to feed men in space, Pickled, Potted, and Canned gives us fascinating insights into the histories, cultures, and ingenuity of people inventing new ways to "cheat the seasons."
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
November 29, 2008
This is a very well researched book on the history of food preserving. Too much detail for me though, I ended up skimming the 300 or so pages. I would have preferred a 30 page essay. Don't let my two stars put you off though, good for anyone who wants the in-depth history.
January 18, 2009
Currently reading- as you can guess from the title this book is about food preserving- specifically, the history of food preserving. If you want to know why we react to foods with built-in biases, Sue Shepherd gives you the wherefores and whats but lets you develop the whys.
Cylvia, this book is in the library. With a waiting list...
This was an intriguing book to read alongside Mark Bittman's "Food Matters" and Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma". Sue Shepherd provides historical perspective on the effect of food preservation on the populations that adopted them. Often, these changes/improvements came about as ways to provide cheap, edible food for the military. The successful adopters were often better able to extend political and economic dominance over their rivals and secure greater access to raw materials and new lands.
Cylvia, this book is in the library. With a waiting list...
This was an intriguing book to read alongside Mark Bittman's "Food Matters" and Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma". Sue Shepherd provides historical perspective on the effect of food preservation on the populations that adopted them. Often, these changes/improvements came about as ways to provide cheap, edible food for the military. The successful adopters were often better able to extend political and economic dominance over their rivals and secure greater access to raw materials and new lands.
November 15, 2012
This is a very cool book. The subtitle is "How the Art and Science of Food Preserving Changed the World" - to which I can only say "Thank Heavens!!" Pretty amazing that the human body can survive some of the assaults made upon it in the search for food. And the endeavor to preserve food for later consumption. The stories are fascinating. From "gallop curing" meat (Attila the Hun) to frozen vegetables at our fingertips (Clarence Birdseye) - it's been a long journey and we're not finished yet.
If you think you might be interested in the role food "availability" and preservation has had on our history as a species... this is a good read. It surprised me and I'm glad that it was shelved near the cookbooks (making preserves, specifically) in the library or I'd never have stumbled upon it!
If you think you might be interested in the role food "availability" and preservation has had on our history as a species... this is a good read. It surprised me and I'm glad that it was shelved near the cookbooks (making preserves, specifically) in the library or I'd never have stumbled upon it!
September 7, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads #Food History
Sue Shephard’s Pickled, Potted, and Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Preserving Changed the World is one of those books that reshapes the way you look at an everyday act—eating leftovers, opening a tin of beans, sticking something in the freezer.
What she uncovers is not just a culinary curiosity but the deep history of human survival, expansion, and innovation, all filtered through the deceptively simple question: how do we stop food from going bad?
From the earliest days, Shephard points out, human history has been a history of preservation. Without the ability to salt, smoke, dry, ferment, or pickle food, civilisations would never have survived winters, droughts, or long journeys. And as she peels back the layers of history, you realise just how central preservation was to everything from imperial conquest to industrial capitalism. The book makes you rethink something as mundane as a jar of jam as part of a lineage that stretches back thousands of years to the first clay pots of brined olives or smoked fish strung up in prehistoric huts.
Shephard is particularly brilliant at weaving together the strands of science and empire. Salted cod, for example, wasn’t just a dietary staple for northern Europe; it became the fuel of the Atlantic trade, binding together fisheries in Newfoundland, slave plantations in the Caribbean, and hungry markets in Spain and Portugal. Canning, which began as a French military experiment under Napoleon, transformed into a global industry once the British and later Americans industrialised tin production. What begins as a desperate necessity—feeding troops on long campaigns—ends up becoming the backbone of global capitalism, with soldiers’ rations morphing into consumers’ pantries.
Reading this during my own food history binge, I was struck by how Shephard manages to balance the technical details with stories that feel alive. She doesn’t drown you in sterile science but shows how a discovery in fermentation or glass-blowing intersects with human ambition and appetite. There are tales of shipwrecks where only preserved foods kept survivors alive, of wars won and lost because one side had better supplies, and of expeditions into the Arctic made possible by tins of meat and hard biscuits.
One of the strongest sections of the book is her treatment of the 19th century, when industrial food preservation collided with empire and the emerging global market. You see how canning, refrigeration, and chemical preservatives didn’t just change what people ate—they transformed time itself. Suddenly, strawberries could be eaten in winter, meat could be shipped across oceans, milk could last beyond a single day.
What had once been seasonal and fleeting became standardised, transportable, and—most importantly—profitable. Shephard is sharp on how this shift also changed cultural ideas of freshness, authenticity, and even trust. That sealed tin was not just a marvel; it was also a leap of faith, because consumers could no longer see or smell what was inside.
The book also makes you aware of how much preservation underpinned colonial expansion. British garrisons in India, sailors on Dutch spice fleets, and explorers in Africa—all relied on preserved foods. Without salt, sugar, and later canning, the great imperial projects would have been impossible. And then, of course, preservation itself became an instrument of empire: sugar plantations feeding molasses for rum, which was preserved and shipped to Europe; Indian pickling traditions commodified and sold back in British markets; and refrigeration opening up new meat frontiers in Argentina and Australia for European demand.
Shephard doesn’t romanticise these shifts. She reminds us that alongside ingenuity came exploitation, and alongside survival came dependency. Preserved food often meant preserved inequality: cheap salted herring for the working poor, delicate preserves for aristocratic tables. The very technologies that made food secure also locked societies into cycles of industrial production and colonial trade.
By the end, you find yourself looking at your kitchen shelves differently. A can of tomatoes is suddenly tied to French inventors, British tin mines, Italian migrant labour, and American supermarkets. A jar of pickles becomes a thread in a story that runs from Mesopotamian brine jars to Jewish delis in New York. A packet of instant noodles becomes part of the postwar boom in industrial food.
What I loved most about Pickled, Potted, and Canned is how it opens your imagination. Food preservation is one of those invisible infrastructures of daily life. We take it for granted. But Shephard restores the drama, the contingency, and the inventiveness to something that is usually overlooked. The book shows that our very survival as a species—and our capacity to travel, trade, colonise, and globalise—rests on the seemingly humble art of keeping food from spoiling.
This isn’t just a history of techniques, then, but a history of humanity’s relationship with time, necessity, and imagination. Food is never just food—it is survival, it is empire, it is science, and it is culture. Shephard’s work makes that visible, and I’m glad I picked this up during my exploration of food history, because it sits so well alongside books on salt, sugar, spices, and other culinary empires.
Every bite of preserved food carries with it centuries of ingenuity and power. After Pickled, Potted, and Canned, you’ll never open a can, jar, or packet without hearing echoes of that story.
Sue Shephard’s Pickled, Potted, and Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Preserving Changed the World is one of those books that reshapes the way you look at an everyday act—eating leftovers, opening a tin of beans, sticking something in the freezer.
What she uncovers is not just a culinary curiosity but the deep history of human survival, expansion, and innovation, all filtered through the deceptively simple question: how do we stop food from going bad?
From the earliest days, Shephard points out, human history has been a history of preservation. Without the ability to salt, smoke, dry, ferment, or pickle food, civilisations would never have survived winters, droughts, or long journeys. And as she peels back the layers of history, you realise just how central preservation was to everything from imperial conquest to industrial capitalism. The book makes you rethink something as mundane as a jar of jam as part of a lineage that stretches back thousands of years to the first clay pots of brined olives or smoked fish strung up in prehistoric huts.
Shephard is particularly brilliant at weaving together the strands of science and empire. Salted cod, for example, wasn’t just a dietary staple for northern Europe; it became the fuel of the Atlantic trade, binding together fisheries in Newfoundland, slave plantations in the Caribbean, and hungry markets in Spain and Portugal. Canning, which began as a French military experiment under Napoleon, transformed into a global industry once the British and later Americans industrialised tin production. What begins as a desperate necessity—feeding troops on long campaigns—ends up becoming the backbone of global capitalism, with soldiers’ rations morphing into consumers’ pantries.
Reading this during my own food history binge, I was struck by how Shephard manages to balance the technical details with stories that feel alive. She doesn’t drown you in sterile science but shows how a discovery in fermentation or glass-blowing intersects with human ambition and appetite. There are tales of shipwrecks where only preserved foods kept survivors alive, of wars won and lost because one side had better supplies, and of expeditions into the Arctic made possible by tins of meat and hard biscuits.
One of the strongest sections of the book is her treatment of the 19th century, when industrial food preservation collided with empire and the emerging global market. You see how canning, refrigeration, and chemical preservatives didn’t just change what people ate—they transformed time itself. Suddenly, strawberries could be eaten in winter, meat could be shipped across oceans, milk could last beyond a single day.
What had once been seasonal and fleeting became standardised, transportable, and—most importantly—profitable. Shephard is sharp on how this shift also changed cultural ideas of freshness, authenticity, and even trust. That sealed tin was not just a marvel; it was also a leap of faith, because consumers could no longer see or smell what was inside.
The book also makes you aware of how much preservation underpinned colonial expansion. British garrisons in India, sailors on Dutch spice fleets, and explorers in Africa—all relied on preserved foods. Without salt, sugar, and later canning, the great imperial projects would have been impossible. And then, of course, preservation itself became an instrument of empire: sugar plantations feeding molasses for rum, which was preserved and shipped to Europe; Indian pickling traditions commodified and sold back in British markets; and refrigeration opening up new meat frontiers in Argentina and Australia for European demand.
Shephard doesn’t romanticise these shifts. She reminds us that alongside ingenuity came exploitation, and alongside survival came dependency. Preserved food often meant preserved inequality: cheap salted herring for the working poor, delicate preserves for aristocratic tables. The very technologies that made food secure also locked societies into cycles of industrial production and colonial trade.
By the end, you find yourself looking at your kitchen shelves differently. A can of tomatoes is suddenly tied to French inventors, British tin mines, Italian migrant labour, and American supermarkets. A jar of pickles becomes a thread in a story that runs from Mesopotamian brine jars to Jewish delis in New York. A packet of instant noodles becomes part of the postwar boom in industrial food.
What I loved most about Pickled, Potted, and Canned is how it opens your imagination. Food preservation is one of those invisible infrastructures of daily life. We take it for granted. But Shephard restores the drama, the contingency, and the inventiveness to something that is usually overlooked. The book shows that our very survival as a species—and our capacity to travel, trade, colonise, and globalise—rests on the seemingly humble art of keeping food from spoiling.
This isn’t just a history of techniques, then, but a history of humanity’s relationship with time, necessity, and imagination. Food is never just food—it is survival, it is empire, it is science, and it is culture. Shephard’s work makes that visible, and I’m glad I picked this up during my exploration of food history, because it sits so well alongside books on salt, sugar, spices, and other culinary empires.
Every bite of preserved food carries with it centuries of ingenuity and power. After Pickled, Potted, and Canned, you’ll never open a can, jar, or packet without hearing echoes of that story.
April 25, 2016
Great and informative book. I thought it was very readable and it did teach me a lot of new things about why we eat what we eat. How different kinds of preserved food have come into existence. For instance I remember in the early eighties my mother would cook a lot of canned vegetables. Of course this was the cheaper option and probably her mother cooked in the same way, using similar ingredients. Nowadays we tend to buy more fresh vegetables, so I always wondered about that but now I understand better how cooking and shopping has changed. This is still a very relevant book.
February 1, 2018
Excellent read on traditional methods (Mainly European, Chinese, and middle eastern) of preserving food. The author does incorporate some Egyptian, Polynesian, and North/South American preservation types but I would have loved more but you can't have it all. Very easy to read and informative without being too heavy. I am typically a fiction reader and have been able to work my way through this which is unusual for me.
March 5, 2013
I can't say enough good things about this book. Comprehensive and very thorough, yet very readable and accessible. Engaging, interesting, fascinating, informative. I could probably come up with more positive-adjectives, but suffice to say this book was just plain wonderful. It was a joy to read and I learned a lot. What more could I ask for?
November 16, 2007
Not quite as engaging as Kurlansky and occasionally both a bit scattershot & repetitive; but still an interesting look at the history of food preservation around the world, as well how history was influenced by the slowly improving technologies.
February 6, 2022
never read a book so insanely jam packed with history. i wish i could have read it slower to really take in all the information, but i had to read it for a class. nonetheless, i have learned a lot from reading this book and hope to reread it someday.
April 30, 2020
To be read in chunks rather than as a (rather overwhelming) whole. A fascinating compilation of facts and illuminating historical anecdote from around the world, roughly arranged by technique (e.g. pickling, smoking, jam-making) rather than geographically or chronologically, but with a general chronological sweep that leads up to a rather cursory section on space-age foods. I felt interest lagged rather at this point, either because the author is less inspired by modern food technology and its acronyms or because she is less vivid at this than at evoking a forgotten or unknown culture. But by and large she juggles her inevitably overlapping subject matter - for example, the Mongols and their dried milk, who appear in at least two different contexts - skilfully in order to make a coherent narrative of it; it's difficult to draw together a vast body of research in an accessible and entertaining way, and this book succeeds. It picks up at the end with an enthusiastic chapter on WWII rationing and preserving, which rounds the book off nicely.
May 27, 2020
I cannot for the life of me think why i bought this, probably from reading an article in the Guardian about pickling something. But anyway, I am really glad i did, it's absolutely fascinating. From the first ways of preserving meats (mostly smoking and salting), fruits (mostly bottling and jam) and vegetables (pickling and in brine) to ultra-modern ways of freeze-drying food for astronauts.
As a bonus my copy is second hand and used to be in the Denver Public Library, which tickles me for some unknown reason. Highly recommended.
As a bonus my copy is second hand and used to be in the Denver Public Library, which tickles me for some unknown reason. Highly recommended.
January 22, 2024
I have decided that I just need to avoid ANY British non fiction book. I'm not saying this didn't have tidbits that were interesting, but it was a complete slog. I don't feel it was arranged in a readable format. The scope was really too large with the author trying to bounce from ancient Greece to the Ming Dynasty in China to Elizabethan England to Edwardian United States. I wouldn't recommend this to others. It was boring and overwhelming.
January 9, 2018
"Pickled, Potted and Canned: The story of food preserving" by Sue Shepard is a comprehensive review at the history of preserving food. Shepard examines a variety of techniques used in food preservation (including drying, pickling, salting and even refrigeration), describing the history of their use and applications. A must for the lovers of domestic sciences. A great reference book.
March 21, 2019
Picked this book up at a library sale and didn't know what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised. This is a history of food and how different cultures learned to preserve in their own way due to their culture and geographic limitations. A lot of informaion is given in this book. Easy read.
January 21, 2018
I heard about this on the BBC’s Food Program podcast; every bit(e) as good as promised.
April 5, 2019
Book on how preserving foods changed our world. Easy read. Chapters can stand alone. Interesting stories. A bit slow in places and also felt like it repeated in a few places (editor?).
June 13, 2021
Lots of interesting information.
Pretty randomly slammed together.
Crazily sexist/misandrist.
Pretty randomly slammed together.
Crazily sexist/misandrist.
August 1, 2023
Fascinating! I learned so much about the history of food preservation - which was the goal!
July 19, 2025
Read this for my term paper.
It was very well researched but too detailed and sometimes repetitive.
It was very well researched but too detailed and sometimes repetitive.
July 17, 2009
This book kicked off my current obsession with preserving foods -- I think it's such a fascinating part of all the food-related issues I'm interested in. Plus, where else can you read about Attila the Hun's "gallop-cured" meat -- preserved by the up-and-down motion of the rider, plus the salt from the horse's sweat. Yum.
I've been reading all I can about the alternative models of agriculture and food business that have arisen as if in opposition of our current dominant industrial system: all kinds of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) structures, farmer distribution coops, artisanal & local cheese or bread or pickle operations, community food coops, canning coops, community kitchens.
Many of these businesses operate by adding "value" to food by cooking or packaging, and a lot of this "value" is in the preservation of food for consumption by the public.
With all the media and hype about local, small-scale food production, and my own new-found and deepening interest in sustainable agriculture and food production, it's also wonderful to get a perspective on the history of food as we know it.
I knew, but I didn't really realize how very new our concept of food is. The idea of eating fresh food, whenever, wherever we want is so foreign within our cultural history, and even still in most places in the world and yet many folks in the Western world would be offended if someone told us it might be more healthy and more sustainable and more "normal" to eat a different way.
On my new favorite podcast, Deconstructing Dinner, they recently aired an episode documenting the reactions and thoughts of members of a newly created CSA at the end of its first season. Here's an apt thought from one member:
"The idea that the food dictates the menu, I think would be a helpful shift for all communities to begin to make. Given the amount of energy that is spent ot bring food from afar because we want our menu to dictate what we're going to buy. It would be a paradigm shift to say, okay, we've got some cabbage now and we've got some kale and we've got broccoli and okay, what are we going to do with that. [...:] It would be nice to see larger communities, larger cities make that shift, not only in food, but in everything we consume."
I've been reading all I can about the alternative models of agriculture and food business that have arisen as if in opposition of our current dominant industrial system: all kinds of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) structures, farmer distribution coops, artisanal & local cheese or bread or pickle operations, community food coops, canning coops, community kitchens.
Many of these businesses operate by adding "value" to food by cooking or packaging, and a lot of this "value" is in the preservation of food for consumption by the public.
With all the media and hype about local, small-scale food production, and my own new-found and deepening interest in sustainable agriculture and food production, it's also wonderful to get a perspective on the history of food as we know it.
I knew, but I didn't really realize how very new our concept of food is. The idea of eating fresh food, whenever, wherever we want is so foreign within our cultural history, and even still in most places in the world and yet many folks in the Western world would be offended if someone told us it might be more healthy and more sustainable and more "normal" to eat a different way.
On my new favorite podcast, Deconstructing Dinner, they recently aired an episode documenting the reactions and thoughts of members of a newly created CSA at the end of its first season. Here's an apt thought from one member:
"The idea that the food dictates the menu, I think would be a helpful shift for all communities to begin to make. Given the amount of energy that is spent ot bring food from afar because we want our menu to dictate what we're going to buy. It would be a paradigm shift to say, okay, we've got some cabbage now and we've got some kale and we've got broccoli and okay, what are we going to do with that. [...:] It would be nice to see larger communities, larger cities make that shift, not only in food, but in everything we consume."
September 21, 2015
I obtained plenty of interesting information about food preservation by reading this book, but I didn't have much fun doing it. Each chapter focuses on a specific type of preservation, and the chapters progress generally in the order of the appearance of each method historically. Organization seems to stop there, however. The chapters themselves read like unedited research notes, filled with highly-detailed, dense text that jumps all over the place chronologically and geographically. There are no tables, lists or charts, and very few images, even though this topic, and Shephard's collected information, is highly suited to being shown in figure form. An additional factor is that this book is written by a British woman, and preserved food seems to be an area where there is a huge amount of linguistic divergence between the UK and the US. This makes some of the author's descriptions difficult for an American (or at least this one) to follow.
May 29, 2013
Interesting book for what it was (the history of preserving food). It was well researched and actually a pretty good non-fiction read. However, I was looking for a book with recipes on how to pickle, preserve and can... this is not the book if that's what you're looking for. So, it's my own fault and not the book's :)
September 14, 2009
This is a well-researched book on food preservation throughout history. I found certain sections (canning, freezing) more interesting than others (freeze drying meat), but overall an interesting book. Parts of the book were pretty dry.
Read
December 25, 2008A fun book to read in the style of SALT. Not as good as salt, but nice reading.
October 26, 2010
Fasanating Historical Account
February 21, 2011
Fascinating read- very thorough and full of interesting facts. Despite the somewhat stale (excuse the pun) topic, the writing is flavorfull and overall its a great book!
January 23, 2011
not as boring as it sounds! Also, this is what happens when you read to many post-apocalypse books. Maybe focuses too much on the British Navy.
September 22, 2011
Didn't make it all the way through, but it was interesting! Just a whole lot of information...
January 16, 2018
-Bordern died in 1874 and his tombstone reads, "I tried and failed, I tried again and again and succeeded".
Read
June 9, 2024Fascinating history of preservation!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews