The Encyclopedia of Country Living: An Old Fashioned Recipe Book
Product Description
Initially self-published 20 years ago, The Encyclopedia of Country Living has become the trusted guidebook to sustainable, self-sufficient living. Filled with memorable anecdotes, crucial advice, and a generous helping of good humor, this compendium provides detailed information about food production — growing, processing, cooking, and preserving — together with hundreds of illustrations and recipes. With updates of over 1,100 mail order sources, including websites and email addresses, this revised edition is the definitive classic text for living off the land. Amazon.com Review
For twenty years people have relied on these hundreds of recipes, instructions, and morsels of invaluable practical advice on all aspects of growing and preparing food. This definitive classic on food, gardening, and self-sufficient living is a complete resource for living off the land with over 800 pages of collected wisdom from country maven, Carla … More >>
The Encyclopedia of Country Living: An Old Fashioned Recipe Book
Carla Emery was a national treasure and this book ensures her legacy. This is simply the most informative book ever written on country living, the next best thing to having a live-in grandmother who knows everything there is to getting homegrown food from dreams to dinner plates plus nearly anything else you need to know. Begun as a 12-page table of contents for a recipe book in 1969, the present ninth edition has 858 pages of far more than recipes. Veggies, vines, trees, grains, poultry, goats, cows, bees, rabbits, sheep, pigs. Planning, nurturing, harvesting, preserving, preparing. Flipping pages at random finds starting transplants, breads leavened with eggs and beating, speeding up tomato sauce-making, harvesting herbs, making cider, managing an existing stand of trees, root cellar storage, soap making, brooding chicks, secrets to safe cattle handling, cultured buttermilk, cooking on a wood stove, jams and jellies, making a wool quilt. I use my “Carla book” constantly. If your budget or bookshelf has room for only one book, this is the book to buy. Yes, even before you buy mine.
When I purchased an 8-acre ranch in 1985 I had a six-month old baby one on the way and had never been off of concrete in my life. Now I had 8-acres, goats, chickens, rabbits, ducks, geese, pigs, 60 fruit and nut trees and an acre garden. I had no clue how or what to do! I learned everything from reading that book. How to harvest, can and cook up your garden & orchard harvest, feed and butcher animals, all kinds of doctoring for kids and animals, crafts, and even how to cut hair. That book is so dog-eared with tape from all of my years of use. I owe my sanity to that book. It has every scenario imaginable. I recommend it to anyone living in the country or on a farm or thinking of it. What I learned from Carla Emery’s book will stay with me forever! The knowledge is priceless.
This book appears to have a devoted following so I’m sure I’ll arouse some ill will with this, but here goes.
There are several things potential readers need to know about this book. The first is that, as the other reviewers suggest, the author comes across as very friendly and sincere. Another is that it has been around in some form or another for a long time, long before many “hobby farm”-type books were available, and for that reason has many devoted fans, at least some of whom appear to be unaware of more modern reference books that have superceded this one in many respects. The next is that if you have a lot of free time, and you like nine hundred page books whose author is in no rush to get to any of its thousands of points, you’ll love it.
The most important, though, is that if you would like the best, easiest to understand advice available on raising sheep, keeping chickens, growing a garden, and all the other fun but challenging aspects of hobby farming, you will be far better served by other books out there. I have a hobby farm on seven acres with fruit trees, vegetable garden, livestock, etc., and own many of the hobby farm books available. We have had the opportunity to consult them as we have learned from direct experience, and have found that there is a wide variety in usefulness.
While The Encyclopedia of Country Living contains good advice, this book has features that I believe the average modern, would-be hobby farmers will be put off by. One is its overwhelming, unnecessary, and frustrating length. It wouldn’t be so bad if each paragraph was a sparkling, concise gem of practical wisdom, i.e, if it really were written like an actual encyclopedia, but core information is often clouded with anecdotes, nostalgia, sermonizing, etc. If you are the kind of person who likes reading books about country life, but who doesn’t actually live in the country and doesn’t plan to, this may be something you enjoy, but it made this book difficult to use for me.
Moreover, the author regularly feels obliged to list the many and disparate views on a particular topic held by her friends, or by people who have written her letters over the years. A number of these printed comments are either pointless or really daft, and are liable to confuse more than enlighten the would-be hobby farmer, especially since the author often does not make clear which ideas have most merit, scientifically or from her own personal experience.
I believe the average person who plans on “country living” or hobby farming will find other books far more useful. The updated and revised “Backyard Livestock”, by Steven Thomas, is absolutely brilliant for beginning hobby farmers serious about keeping animals for food, eggs, milk, etc. It is concise while still telling you everything you need to know. For those wishing more detailed information on livestock, the various Storey’s guides to raising farm animals are also excellent. If you are interested in fruit or berry cultivation, you will find the Stella Otto books far more valuable than this one. For vegetable gardening, “The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible” by Edward C. Smith is the best. I could go on, but my personal experience is this: if you would like to hobby farm, be successful at it, and have fun doing it, you’ll need the best information you can get. For most of us, this means a few A-list, reliable, practical, concise, understandable reference books. Despite its length and sometimes charming autobiographical features, there’s no reason why you should buy “The Encyclopedia of Country Living” when so many other books on country living now are superior to it.
I have the first, home-printed edition of this book, as well as the latest edition.When I read the various comments, I see some misunderstanding of the nature of this book.Carla’s book is not just a reference (there are better ones in specific areas)but an autobiography as well. We learn about a lifestyle many of us will never know, but find facinating. We learn of the struggles and successes of one family. And along the way, we learn a great deal about small subsistance farms (not hobby farms). Use Carla’s book for reference, but also entertainment and education. It’s a fun read, and need not be done in one sitting or in any order. Just enjoy!
“The Encyclopedia of Country Living” is an expansive volume of collected wisdom, techniques, recipes, and other information for living in the country. To a great extent it is a volume on self-sufficiency without harming the environment in any substantial way. The only assumption that seems to be made is that the land you purchase will have a house on it or you will have one built. Everything else, from buying the land, to what plants to plant, when to plant them, where to get them, how to grow them, and how to harvest them to what animals to raise, how to raise them, how to use them for food and dairy to how to deal with child birthing in the wilderness (where you may be alone when it happens), dealing with pollution, enriching your soil, and even worm farming. This is an exhaustive study in country living with very detailed and thorough sections on farming. In addition the author includes page after page of other sources of information, where to purchase things, catalogue sources, websites, and just about every other conceivable way to get the items mentioned in the text. If there was a way to take all the old-timers in the country, get them all together, draw out all the skills they have learned over the years and distill it into a book this is the book that you would create. “The Encyclopedia of Country Living, 9th Edition” is a very highly recommended read not only for those looking to move to the country after a lifetime in the city, but also for those who, like me, have that backyard garden and could use the extensive information presented here to make it even more successful and fun.