The National Trust Book Of Forgotten Household Crafts

Rediscover the lost world of traditional household crafts with 'the grand master of self-sufficiency' John Seymour. Master tried and trusted methods that have been honed over the centuries and learn to make butter and cheese, embroider, keep bees, decorate your home and more. As Seymour himself once said "we must fill our homes and our lives with beautiful things again and cast out the mass-produced rubbish. This book shows that such things are possible." Part fascinating historical survey, part practical manual, this book shows how many timeless skills were first employed. From basketry to baking to quilting, the book explores a range of fascinating skills and techniques. For country dwellers and those living in the heart of a city, this book encourages a celebration of and a return to some of the wonderful traditions of yesteryear.

The Forgotten Arts & Craftsbrings together in a single absorbing volume two best-selling classics, The Forgotten Artsand Forgotten Household Crafts, written by the acknowledged 'Father of Self-sufficiency', John Seymour. Taking the reader on an evocative journey through the worlds of traditional craftspeople - from blacksmith to bee-keeper, wainwright to housewife - Seymour celebrates their honest skills, many of which have disappeared beneath the tread of progress.

Buying for the Home is a book about the experiences and also the polarities of shopping and the home. It analyses the ways in which the agencies and discourses of the retail environment mesh with the processes of physical and imaginative re-creation that constitute the domestic space, teasing out the negotiations and interactions that mediate this key arena. The study examines how the strategies of retailers were both arbitrated by and negotiated through the actions and desires of the homemaker as consumer. Drawing on the recent CHORD (Centre for the History of Retail and Distribution) colloquium on shopping and the domestic environment and including two specially commissioned pieces, the book draws on a wide selection of interdisciplinary work from established scholars and new researchers. Organised around four key themes - retail arenas and the everyday; identity and lifestyle; fashioning domestic space; and cultural practice - the ten case studies cover a range of cultural encounters and locations from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century. Through these interdisciplinary but linked case studies, Buying for the Home forces us to consider the fractured space that existed between the world of goods and the middle- and working-class home and in so doing interrogate how middle-class and plebeian homemakers view, imagine and ultimately occupy their domestic spaces in early-modern, modern and post-modern society.

A gripping historical narrative that explores the rich chronicle of innovation, revolution, and controversy of our world's most famous fat: butter. The delicious kitchen staple we so often take for granted is not merely a stick tucked into our refrigerator door. It's a culinary catalyst, an agent of change, a gastronomic rock star. From its accidental invention in a long-ago herder's pouch to its ubiquitous presence in the world's most fabulous cuisines, butter is boss. Now, it finally gets its due. Award-winning food writer and chef Elaine Khosrova serves up a story as rich, textured, and culturally relevant as butter itself. From the ancient butter bogs of Ireland to the sacred butter sculptures of Tibet, Butter is about so much more than food. Khosrova details its surprisingly vital role in history, politics, economics, nutrition, even spirituality and art. From its humble agrarian origins to its present-day artisanal glory, butter has a fascinating story to tell, and Khosrova is the perfect person to tell it. Her butter chase took Khosrova throughout the United States and to France, Ireland, India, Bhutan, and Canada. She's never been the same. As the first and only publication to chronicle the life and times of this beloved fat, Butter is an epic excursion into the turbulent history of this kitchen staple. Khosrova even includes the essential collection of carefully developed core butter recipes, from beurre manié and croissants to pâte brisée and the perfect buttercream frosting, and provides practical how-tos for making various types of butter at home - no cow, goat, or yak necessary.

From a late-night snack to a cold beer, there’s nothing that whets the appetite quite like the suctioning sound of a refrigerator being opened. In the early 1930s fewer than ten percent of US households had a mechanical refrigerator, but today they are nearly universal, the primary means by which we keep our food and drink fresh. Yet, for as ubiquitous as refrigerators are, most of us take them for granted, letting them blend into the background of our kitchens, basements, garages, and all the other places where they seem so perfectly convenient. In this book, Helen Peavitt amplifies the hum of the refrigerator in technological history, showing us just how it became such an essential appliance. Peavitt takes us to the early closets, cabinets, and boxes into which we first started packing ice and the various things we were trying to keep cool. From there she charts the development of mechanical and chemical technologies that have led to modern-day refrigeration on both industrial and domestic scales, showing how these technologies have created a completely new method of preserving and transporting perishable goods, having a profound impact on society from the nineteenth century and on. She explores the ways the marketing of refrigerators have expressed and influenced our notions of domestic life, and she looks at how refrigeration has altered the agriculture and food industries as well as our own appetites. Strikingly illustrated, this book offers an informative and entertaining history of an object that has radically changed—in a little over one hundred years—one of the most important things we do: eat.