Storing food for the hard, lean months

As you know, I dabble at amateur 'preserving' seasonal foods, with the fruit leather, and highly suspect apple juice pasteurising.

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Making butter and cheese was the best way of preserving yields of milk

And midwinter nights make me contemplate how and why our traditional diet is as it is.Long since, I twigged that cheese and butter were the efficient way of preserving summer's largesse for the long hungry winter. And while most readers know, perhaps I'd still better explain ...

Grass grows best in the summer, and cows eating grass milk much better on it. Before the days of mechanisation and silage, and corn so cheap you can feed it to cattle, you simply couldn't rely on much milk through winter. So means of saving that rich surplus might be your salvation.

Go right back to the ragged dawn of farming domesticated animals, when Mr and Mrs Ugg discovered that, while they couldn't keep the goat milking through the winter, she'd survive on what she could browse. But if they had made enough cheese, they could keep the young Uggs growing. It really was that simple. It's only time, and the growth of 'civilisation' and urban life, that have made this reality so forgotten.