Editorial

Jo McCarroll reports on a surge of interest in preserving and pickling.

Much has been written already – some of it, indeed, by me in this magazine – about the post-Covid surge of interest in gardening which saw sales of plants, seeds and garden gear increase by hundreds, or even thousands, of per cent on the pre-pandemic figures.

Trapped at home, sometimes for months, people across the globe have discovered, or rediscovered, the physical and mental benefits of getting their hands in the soil, and have been planting and sowing up a storm.

And eventually all those crops, sown so hopefully when things seemed almost hopeless, began – quite literally – to bear fruit. And so, perhaps inevitably, when harvest season came in the northern hemisphere there was a subsequent surge of interest in home preserving.

An American kitchenware wholesaler reported an increase in sales of preserving equipment of more than 600 per cent; and there were reports of price gouging by online retailers of preserving wax, pickling salt and pectin. Comparisons were drawn to the Great Canning Lid Shortage of 1975 (that is a real thing and led to a congressional hearing). In the UK, stores ran out of seals and lids, and there was an Instagram-driven marmalade-making boom (Liz Hurley alone made 47 jars).

“We are definitely seeing an increase in interest in New Zealand too,” Liz Oldfield, who owns the Auckland kitchenware emporium Milly’s Kitchen, told me. “We would normally expect to see sales of preserving equipment lift from about early to mid February but the run started in January, and we’re currently out of stock of preserving pans and preserving wax, and awaiting new stock.”

People have always preserved excess harvests, of course. My maternal grandmother, Marie McMurtrie, who lived on a sheep farm in Tokarahi, north Otago, was famous for her preserving skills: laying down jars of apricots, apples, tomatoes and beans, foraging for wild gooseberries and blackberries to make into jam, and wild mushrooms to pickle.

But in the last few years foodie influencers – let’s call them taste makers – like New Zealand-born, London-based Kylee Newton, author of The

Modern Preserver, and Sydney cafe and picklery Cornersmith, have been pumping out recipes for preserves with a more modern sensibility, lower in sugar and salt, and generally “making preserving look cool”, Liz says.

And post-Covid, there has been a huge increase in interest in “making things yourself and making things from scratch”, says Nelson chef Nicola Galloway, who has written about and taught techniques for preserving and fermenting for years. She told me her workshop this month, on sugarfree and low sugar preserving, was booked out by early December.

“There is a sense we might not know what the future is going to bring,” celebrity cook and food writer Annabel Langbein told me. “It’s like being a squirrel. In times of plenty we want to make sure we put away enough to get us through whatever is ahead. I have always been a bit obsessive about preserving everything but I just looked in my larder and I seem to have made enough for the next 10 years or so!”

“There has been a shift in consciousness,” Nicola says. “Prior to Covid, people were go, go, go, work, work, work and buy, buy, buy. But now people want to slow down. People want life to be simpler.”

I think she is right. I have been a keen preserver all my life. It just makes sense to me to take what I grow and make things I can store and share with the people I love. And making the most of what we have, wasting nothing, living in step with the seasons… well, what could be simpler than that? Jo McCarroll