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

(No) Time For Canning

When I was eight, I held a position of honor in my family, particularly in the late summer. My hands were just small enough to shove a tomato all the way through the top of a regular-mouth canning jar. "Can Jenifer come down and help me can tomatoes?" my grandmother would call up and ask. I felt honored by this special position for about one season. After that, whenever I was "invited" to come canning I would wryly remark, "Yeah, my hands are small, I know."

I spent untold summer hours as a child at our kitchen table, a cake pan full of tomatoes and rows of empty jars in front of me. My much older brother and Dad served peeling duty as well, while my mother blanched old pillowcases full of tomatoes to remove their skins. Mom would regularly dump our tomato skins in the compost bucket and return full pans of steaming-hot tomatoes to be peeled. My hands would wrinkle and bleach clean from the acidity, except for my fingernails which had slivers of reddish black gunk under them. So why is it I look back on those days with such fondness? It must have been the family togetherness, the silliness we all shared, especially when a juicy tomato would squirt someone else in the face or a tomato would pop out of its skin onto the floor. It was a difficult job, but working together made it go more quickly.

Last night, I canned this year's first batch of tomatoes...alone. The kids are certainly old enough to help, but I tend to can late at night, when boiling a pot of water for hours on end doesn't make my non-air conditioned house totally unbearable. In 2006, I had such a bumper crop that I didn't can any tomatoes the following year. Now, my shelf is nearly bare and I'm longing to fill it with rows of bright, beautiful tomatoes. I didn't finish until midnight, and I'm feeling drained today. My mother used to put in batch after batch until well into the early morning, setting the timer and waking up every 45 minutes to take out the hot jars and put new ones in. No doubt about it, canning is hard work and you have to keep your mind on the reward that come from opening a jar in winter and eating a tomato that tastes almost as good a fresh one in August.

There was a time not so long ago, when everyone was busy canning this time of year. As committed as I am to growing and putting up my own food, though, I find it difficult to find the time. It was nearly dark two nights ago, when my Amish neighbor stopped by and said hello. I was digging the last few potato plants up, and she was carrying a basket with 15 bags of corn for the freezer. She looked a bit tired too. "It's a busy time of year," she said, smiling sympathetically. Leaning on my garden fork, I nodded in agreement, then related what I had put up so far this year, and talked about my crop successes and failures. It felt good to share with her, like it always does with my mother, because I know she understands that the work brings great rewards. "Don't work too hard," she said in parting. "I won't," I fibbed.

Nothing can compare to the feeling you get when that first very cool, crisp autumn day comes and you know you have a full freezer and shelves full of canned goods. I imagine I might be cooking up some applesauce, and decide to pull out a bag of June strawberries to sweeten the sauce. Or I might thaw some peaches for a cobbler to go with the beef roast simmering in a pot with onion and carrots from the basement and a jar of tomatoes from the pantry. After dinner, we might bundle up to take a short hike down to the river or start a bonfire in the backyard, our bellies full.

On late summer days, if I've spent several hours on my feet at the kitchen counter, I fall into bed exhausted, with back and legs aching and a feeling of great satisfaction. I've always been known as a planner, someone who looks ahead, prepares or perhaps over-prepares. I wonder if it has something to do with my rural upbringing, and learning to live each day connected to the growing season. Or,is it just me? Either way, I know that all the time I've invested since I first placed that seed order in February is finally coming to fruition, and I'd better find the time to preserve it now so I have something to show for my labors.

© 2008 Jenifer Dolde