Privacy

The short version: there is nothing here to log in to, nothing to subscribe to, no comments, and no advertising. The site sets no cookies of its own and runs no scripts of its own. The one thing worth reading properly is the section on the book links, because those are built to carry a measurement tag and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.

What the site is, structurally

These pages are plain files. They are written, checked and turned into HTML before anyone visits, and what arrives in your browser is text and one stylesheet. No JavaScript, no web fonts, no embedded video, no social buttons, no chat widget, no consent banner — and no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to, not as a design flourish.

That is not a privacy feature the site is claiming credit for. It is a consequence of how the site is built, and the practical result is the same either way: nothing on these pages is watching you read, and nothing here follows you to the next site you visit.

What a web server sees regardless

Every web server records requests. Whoever hosts this site will hold ordinary access logs — the address the request came from, the time, the page asked for, the browser string it announced itself with, and the page you came from if your browser sent one. That happens for every website you have ever opened and it is not something a site owner opts out of by preference.

Those logs exist to keep the site up and to see when something is scraping it aggressively. They are not joined to a name, not built into a profile of anybody, and not sold or handed to anyone for marketing. If the hosting arrangement ever changes in a way that changes any of that, this page changes with it.

The book links, and the tag they carry

This is the section that would be easy to bury, so it is not buried.

The author of this site also wrote a book, and some pages link to it. Those outbound links are built to carry an Amazon Attribution measurement tag. Here is exactly what that is and is not.

What it is. Amazon Attribution is a measurement product. A tag on an outbound link lets the person who owns the link see, in aggregate, how many people clicked through from a given page and what happened afterwards on Amazon's side. It answers "did anybody actually follow that link" and nothing more granular than that.

What it is not. It is not an Amazon Associates tag. Associates is the affiliate programme, where a commission is paid on qualifying purchases. The author of this site is not an Amazon Associate and holds no Associates tag, so no commission is earned on any link here — not on the book, not on canners, not on jars, not on anything. Nothing on this site is a paid placement, and the pages that tell you not to buy or not to do something carry no book link at all.

What it means for you. Following a tagged link tells Amazon you arrived from this site. From the moment you leave these pages you are on Amazon's site under Amazon's own privacy notice, which is theirs to explain and not something this site controls or can promise anything about. If you would rather not pass that along, look the book up by its ISBN instead — the number is on the book page and it works in any library catalogue or bookshop system.

Why it is written here in advance. This disclosure was drafted before the tag existed rather than added after somebody noticed it. That is the correct order for a disclosure, and it means you can hold the site to it from day one.

What this site will not tell you

It will not tell you it uses no tracking of any kind.

A measurement tag is tracking, of a narrow and specific kind, and a site that prints "we don't track you" at the top of a page while carrying tagged outbound links at the bottom has written a sentence that is false in its own source code. That exact self-contradiction is what gets sites like this one audited, and rightly — it is checkable by anybody in the time it takes to look at a link.

So: one measurement tag on outbound book links, disclosed above, earning nothing, with a way around it. That is the complete list, and if it ever stops being the complete list this page is the first thing that changes.

If you write to me

A message sent through contact lands in an inbox and is read by one person. It is used to answer you and to fix whatever the message is about, and for nothing else. It does not go onto a mailing list, because there is no mailing list and none is planned. If a correction of yours changes a page, the page changes — your name does not go on it unless you ask for it to.

If you want a message you sent deleted, say so and it will be.

Links out of this site

This site links out constantly and on purpose. Extension services, the National Center for Home Food Preservation, CDC, and in a few places a manufacturer or a piece of journalism named for what it is. Reading the sources yourself is the entire point of how these pages are built.

Every one of those sites has its own privacy practices, which are theirs, and following a link tells them your browser came from here in the ordinary way any link does. Outbound links here carry no tracking parameters other than the book tag disclosed above.

Analytics

None at the time of writing. If measurement is ever added, this page will name the tool, say what it collects, and say whether it sets a cookie — and it will say it here before the tool goes on the site, not afterwards. A privacy page updated in arrears is a privacy page that has already failed.

Everything else

This site is written for adults doing something practical in a kitchen. Nothing here is aimed at children and nothing on the site knowingly collects information from anybody at all.

There is very little personal data in this arrangement to exercise a right over — the site holds no accounts, no profiles and no lists. If you are somewhere with statutory data rights and you want to know what exists relating to you, ask, and you will get a straight answer, which will usually be "an email you sent, and nothing else".

This page carries a date at the top, exactly like every other page on this site, and the date means the same thing here as it does everywhere else: that is when a person last went through it.