For many centuries famine was a grim reality in Britain and people used ingenious means to preserve surplus food for use in times of want. This book describes the techniques they used and still use, from early prehistoric hoarding to modern-day commercial preserving, and gives an original account of the social implications of food preservation. It shows how prehistoric methods of drying and burial continued into the Middle Ages when potting became popular. Pots and the foodstuffs preserved in them are described in detail. The preserving story continues through the role of the compleat housewife in Elizabethan and Georgian Britain to the arrival of industrial food-preserving in the 19th and 20th centuries.