Allison Carroll Duffy

Rather annoying. Part of it is the ebook formatting - the paper book is probably better in some ways (there are missing images, pages that break oddly, etc) - but the structure is really redundant. There's a section or two at the beginning that gives detailed, step-by-step directions for making jams/jellies/preserves/etc with Pomona's pectin. Pomona's actually works differently than most pectins - it jells with calcium, not sugar, so the sweetening you put in your jams etc is entirely up to you. The step-by-step is very clear (though there's some blatant errors, mostly with conversion to metric measures - at one point, she says "Most jam recipes call for 5 to 9 cups of sugar (1 to 18 kilos)..." Uh, no. That makes zero sense. I don't offhand know what the conversion factor of cups of sugar to kilograms is, but less than double does not equal 18 times the amount. But that's so blatant it's obvious and easily corrected. Then we get into the recipes themselves...and every single one gives all the steps, if not in quite as much detail as the first section. Making the fruit pulp, or the juice, or whatever differs (very) slightly between recipes - cut up apples and stone fruit, mash berries, etc. And some recipes do have differences in the rest of the steps. But recipe after recipe after recipe saying "boil the fruit, add the calcium water, mix the pectin with the sweetener, mix it in to the fruit, bring it back to a boil and boil 1-2 minutes, put it in the jars, process the jars...." gets really really boring. There's various tips and tricks - some of which are near recipes they apply to, some of which are mentioned and linked from recipes they apply to, and most of which are repeated at least once. How to slice a mango, whether to peel soft-skinned fruit (she doesn't), what a rolling boil looks like (though she skims over the hint that's most useful for me, that a true rolling boil can't be stirred down), how to grate ginger (in a rather wasteful way) - two or three times each, near some but not all of the recipes they apply to. And thus, not in one section where they can be easily referenced, but mixed through the recipes so if I want to know what she says about something I'd have to hunt through the book. There is an index, but it doesn't seem to include the tips - it does lead me to recipes where a particular tip would be used, so searching might not require paging through the whole thing, but...awkward, at best. Some of the recipes sound great; some are completely uninteresting to me (unsurprising, I (for instance) dislike the flavor of peppers so will skip all of those). I'm a little annoyed that she says it's much simpler to weigh fruit rather than do volume or number measurement, and gives the amounts for (most of) the fruit by weight (1 lb strawberries, etc), but then she tells you to measure the mashed fruit in cups (and ml) and doesn't give any weights for that. I'd rather weigh the mash as well, which will mean I have to weigh it and write down what the weights are if they differ; and if they don't differ, I'm even more annoyed at her. I suspect I will try some of her recipes, then extract the useful parts of the information into my notes and skip the repetition (all most of the recipes need is ingredients and prep method). She also gives possible variants at the end of most of the recipes, but that's equally annoying - over and over, if you want to change things up try honey instead of sugar. Or, add spices, but not more than one teaspoon total - but no explanation of why to limit the spices that way, will it make the jam less likely to jell or does she just think more would be too spicy? I suspect the former, but it would have been nice for her to say it at least once among the 15-20 times she repeats that exact paragraph, or better yet in the step-by-step section. It's got some good information and a good many interesting-sounding recipes, but it could easily have been half the size without losing any data (and would then have been easier to use).… (mere)