Mette Nielsen

A beautiful, delicious celebration of two natural sweeteners in irresistible recipesHoney and maple syrup might be better for you than sugar. They might be better for the environment. But even better, and sweet as anything, is how these natural ingredients taste and the wonders they do for a dish. James Beard Award–winning cookbook author Beth Dooley and gifted photographer Mette Nielsen make the most of these flavors in this celebration of honey and maple syrup in traditional kitchens as well as cutting-edge food culture. Full of easy ideas that include honey and maple syrup in foods both savory and sweet, this book features a wide range of irresistible recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for snacks and salads, condiments and vegetables, entrées and desserts, syrups, cocktails, and elixirs. Sweeten your table with rosemary honey butter, green tomato chutney, curry marinated herring, brown butter honey popcorn, savory maple black pepper biscotti, oven-roasted chicken thighs with pomegranate molasses, honey-glazed salmon salad, maple vanilla half-pound cake, elderberry throat coat, bourbon maple smash, and more. With its innovative recipes, practical tips, conversion charts, historical and scientific facts, information on nutritional value, suggestions for storage and sourcing, and above all Mette Nielsen’s remarkable photographs, Sweet Nature invites us to fully enjoy these two iconic ingredients from nature’s pantry.

“Let’s dispense with the usual old notions of preserving,” Beth Dooley suggests, leading us into Mette Nielsen’s kitchen, where old-world Danish traditions meld with the freshest ideas and latest techniques to fill the pantry with the best of the season, all year long. Because those seasons can prove especially challenging in the northern heartland, Nielsen’s Nordic heritage is handy as she and Dooley show cooks, first-time and experienced canners alike, how to make the most of a short growing season. Their approach combines the brightness and bold flavors of the Nordic cuisines with an emphasis on the local, the practical, and the freshest ingredients to turn each season’s produce into a bounty of condiments. From corn salsa to carrot lemon marmalade with ginger and cardamom, crispy pickled red onions to garlic scape pesto with lemon thyme, and caramel apple butter with lemongrass to puttanesca sauce to “Fit for a Queen Jam”-these recipes bring the best of the sweet and the savory to every menu. Low tech, simple, and fast, they eschew hot-water-bath methods in favor of chilling and freezing, keeping flavors and colors bold and bright; and they ease up on sugar to make way for the true savory sweetness of nature’s finest food. Savory Sweet is not your grandmother’s canning cookbook-but it is likely to be your grandchildren’s.