And When She Looked There, The Cupboard Was NOT Bare...

Is there anything more beautiful than rows of canning jars, filled with the bright goodness of the growing season? Bright red tomatoes, deep purple grape juice, brilliant green pickles, all lined up and waiting to be enjoyed. Canning is far from over for me this year. It has been nearly a month since I've blogged, and I blame canning and the start of school. Things are supposed to be returning to a "normal" school and work routine for me, yet the work of preserving the harvest still awaits me.

Two weeks ago, my parents brought me a cooler full of grapes from their prolific vines. I managed to squeeze--literally--six quarts of my own grape juice "concentrate" from my struggling vineyard this year. For this I am grateful, since I had given them up as lost for yet another year mid-summer. Gray mold or some other fungal disease has begun to infect the clusters, and each grape after promising green Concord grape turned dark, not a sweet purple but a rotten brown. But as the bad grapes dropped to the ground, I diligently picked them up and pruned off infected clusters in an attempt to forestall a total crop loss. And I had some success. The first flush of grapes were large-ish and juicy, and I just had to pick out the infected ones. As the summer and the drought wore on, the grapes became smaller and much less juicy, but I used what I could.

Mom's grapes were fat and fragrant and I was able to get eight quarts of juice from those she brought me. In fact, I revisited my childhood (as characterized in my last blog) this Labor Day, as Mom and Dad and I sat on my deck with trays full of washed grapes, picking out the good ones and tossing them into a large stockpot. My brother came out, took one look at us, and pulled up an obligatory seat to the party. The tedious job took about a half an hour; it would have taken me at least 4 times that alone. The juice tasted that much sweeter.

This year, in an attempt to keep the heat from boiling water for hours on end out of the kitchen, I invested in a "patio stove." Basically, it's a 16 x 16 inch steel frame with a burner, attached to a medium-sized propane tank. Apparently, people use it to cook enormous batches of gumbo and to fry turkeys--well, we've all heard how turkey-frying usually goes. The number of precautions and warning went on for two pages. Nonetheless, my husband helped me hook it up in the shade of a tree and I was able to boil water to scald the skins off the tomatoes and then set the 5 gallon pot to process the jars on to boil while I peeled. The water boiled in record time and I was cool (well cool-er) in my kitchen.

I'm canning more quarts than pints of tomatoes this year, and opened up two boxes of hand-me-down quart jars from a friend who owns a gift shops. She frequents yard sales and discount stores and going out of business sales in search of amazing bargains. I had a good time pulling out the jars she'd given me, all of varying ages. I know none of them are old to the point of being valuable, but they recall a time when you could find more than one style of canning jar at the local store: Kerr Self-Sealing Mason, Atlas Mason, Ball Mason and one simple "Mason" with an anchor design embossed on it. My mother still has some old blue canning jars around the house, including some with the glass lid that clamps down, which she displays but no longer uses. As a historian but not a collector, I appreciate objects like canning jars for their simplicity and their functionality, particularly when they change very little after over 100 years. I found a nice summary of the history of the canning jar at pickyourown.org.

The Delmarva Peninsula was once populated by canneries from one end to the other. The cannery provided seasonal work for farmers and laborers alike. Sixty years ago, my grandfather was manager of the cannery in Church Creek for several months out of the year, his one source of steady, guaranteed income. My mother recalls that in those early years, they canned in tin cans at home as well, and she sometimes helped to crimp on the lids. As a child, I vaguely remember visiting the cannery during its last years in operation. They were canning pork and beans for Campbell's; my only memory is that I thought it was funny that they dropped only one small piece of pork or bacon into the can before sealing it up. I don't remember hearing anything about how critical the canneries had been to the local economy, and how their decline spelled the end of an era when produce was both grown and processed on the Eastern Shore. That was thirty years ago. Perhaps the stories I've heard about the cannery, along with our family tradition of growing and canning food at home, are what lead me to continue home canning year after year.
(Workers at the Kent Packing Co. in Rock Hall)

© 2008 Jenifer Dolde