Canning Essentials is a tutorial and cookbook aimed at the beginning canner/food preserver. Due out 9th April 2020 from Fox Chapel, it's 176 pages and will be available in paperback format. The content included in Canning Essentials was previously published as Can It (2012), this appears to be a reformat and re-release. I don't have both editions for comparison, so I'm not able to speak to any content differences.

There are so many classic canning and preserving cookbooks that it's a difficult niche to find something truly new and breakthrough. Although I think most cooks who have experience with canning have a copy of Ball's Blue Book lying around, it's also nice to get some new recipes to try out and this collection has some interesting ones.

The layout is standard: the introductory chapters cover equipment, supplies, ingredient choices, and some basic safety. The following chapters include instructions, storage, and food safety for freezing and canning. The second half of the content includes the recipes and there are some interesting ones: curried apple chutney (a savory chutney), cinnamon pickles made with 'red hots' candies, along with a number of others. For cooks who prefer to do everything from scratch, this book does generally use pre-purchased pectins, stabilizers, and color protectants. The photography is adequate, but mostly not original to this volume (shutterstock, and creative commons licensed photos). The photos are well done, however, and it's nice to have nearly all of the recipes photographed.

Each of the recipes includes an introductory description, ingredients listed in a bullet point sidebar (US measurements only, no metric conversions), and step by step instructions. There is no metric conversion provided in the book. The appendices do include helpful tables for larger measures of ingredients (bushels, pecks, etc) along with expected poundage for various vegetables and fruits and hints and tips from the author for processing and preserving.

In general this is a good starting volume for beginners with some interesting recipes. Most of the yields for the recipes make a fair bit of product (5-10 pints at a minimum), so testing out a recipe will require some commitment in time and materials. I recommend it, but don't think it will be replacing my Ball Canning Book.

Three stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

Canning Essentials is written for those new to canning. It provides basic instruction and basic recipes for water bath and pressure canning., as well as information on equipment and other forms of preserving.

I feel there are more organized books out there for new canners. You are well into the book before there are any recipes, and I’m not sure new canners will stick around long enough to see them. There is also, inexplicably, a long chapter on Freezing in a book called Canning Essentials. Maybe the name of the book should be Preserving Essentials.

The author goes overboard in disparaging poor Grandma, as she uses Grandma as an example over and over about what not to do. Leave my Grandma alone. She raised 12 kids and grew, raised, slaughtered, canned, or preserved everything they ate. Maybe show her some respect.

This book is not for experienced canners. The recipes are very basic and the book is filled with too much non-canning information that will bore you. It will teach new canners the basics of canning, but the Ball books are better organized and easier to follow.

I received a free copy of this book from the publishers and Netgalley. My opinions are my own and are voluntary.

There are so many modern canning books, and none of them ever offer more for me than my favorite two or three Ball canning books. This one is no different. While it's supposedly about canning, it's not until page 59 that we even get to canning instructions (it's freezing and basics before that). Then there's the standard instructions and FAQs you find in the other 5,000 modern canning books, along with the standard foods and recipes of modern books. One beet recipe and it's not even for pickled beets. One grape juice, and it's sweetened with water added. And so on. She warns you that only these recipes are okay to use because they're USDA approved, but what if you want spiced beets or straight up grape juice? Go look in your older Ball books for far more recipes. They're also approved. Better yet, buy a British canning cookbook and find a huge assortment of foods that modern American cooks don't bother with for the most part (gooseberries, elderberries, currants, etc.).

I was pleased to see that wild foods were given one page in here, but she doesn't give you any information on what to do with them or any recipes. There is one generic berry jam recipe where she mentions berries like gooseberries, but she gives the exact same formula for whatever berries you want and this much sugar no matter what berries you use. Berries like green gooseberries are incredibly sour compared to something like blackberries. It doesn't work to just have a one-size-fits-all recipe for all berries. Again, pull out your older Ball book for this (even the modern ones count on Americans growing or gathering fewer and fewer foods and leave out more and more foods).

Parente also says that grocery store canned foods contain BPA in the lining (true for most), and then never lets on at all that all the lids she recommends (standard sealing canning lids) also contain BPA. She says those are the only lids approved, which is absolutely untrue. Tattler lids are plastic, reusable, BPA-free lids that are also approved for safe canning use (I use both).

There's a nice assortment of very basic recipes and then some Amish and Mennonite ones (think pickles canned with red hot candies and chow chow). She uses modern additives for the most part -- purchased pectin and citric acid and that sort of thing.

Modern cooks for the most part all use these kinds of recipes without question and they will no doubt like this book fine. I prefer the (absolutely safe) Ball book and British books myself but this is a fine one for what it is.

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for the purpose of review.