August 12, 2009

Tuesday, 11 August 2009

“Standing over her stove in a sweltering-hot July kitchen, my grandmother, surrounded by buckets of fruit and dozens and dozens of empty glass jars, stirred cauldrons of chopped fruit for jam and simmered huge kettles of fruit to serve whole,”  recalls Californian, Georgeanne Brennan in The Glass Pantry  (Chronicle 1994).  Such scenes are part of the collective American unconscious.       My own family had its star preserver in the form of my Great Aunt Millie. Late in life, she and my Great Uncle John settled into a house by a lake, and in between the house and Uncle John’s chair by the lake, stood a series of make shift sheds.  Inside one of the sheds, they stored furniture and various objects from their old home that never found a spot in the lake house.  Inside another was my Uncle John’s boating gear, his lawnmower, and wheelbarrow.  In the third was Aunt Millie’s larder.     A testament to her hard work, the larder was a somber temple of home economy.  Oddly shaped bottles and jars filled with things from the garden shone like stained glass windows in the dim light reflected off the lake.  Oddly shaped because, against advice found in all the books I’ve ever seen on home canning, Aunt Millie used only recycled jars. Of course no one used the word "recycled" then, they just called them old.     “I just use old mayonnaise and pickle jars,” she once said.  “I can’t see puttin’ out good money for fancy canning jars and throwin’ these away.”  She took no uncertain pride in “making do,” and “getting by on next to nothing.”       Sometimes I imagine that what I saw in Aunt Millie’s larder was the passing of an era. Home canning, once a vital part of homemaking had been reduced to a craft practiced only by a few odd souls living on the edges of modern towns and cities.  Once many tons of produce went into jars to insure that winter tables would be brightened with some of summer’s bounty, now only a trickle of produce gets into jars.     The older adults who had to perform the daunting task of processing those jars, were probably happy to see the old era end.  For them the very words canning and preserving conjure images of hard labor.     Our parents’ generation, liberated by modern supermarkets swore they’d never go the way their grandmother’s went.  Canning might have died.  Instead, it has been romanticized into a treasured handicraft, widely practiced, but in a whole new way.  “After my grandmother’s death,” writes Brennan “The only canning I witnessed was my mother’s yearly half-dozen jars of clove-pierced pickled peaches.”            So the days of serious canning were over; but for a new generation of homemakers, the age of leisure canning had just begun.  Most people who practice home preserving today put up only small amounts of food from their backyard gardens and local farmer’s markets largely out of nostalgia and a lingering hunger for the taste for homemade pickles and preserves.     As for me, I never got a hold of Aunt Millie’s recipes for pickles and jams, but I think of her every time I wash out a jar to be used for pickling or canning. Surrounded by an almost incredible abundance of fresh produce as we often are, I suppose it is only natural that West Coast cooks would feel compelled to put some of that bounty into jars to preserve it. Excerpted from West Coast Cooking (Sasquatch 2006)

 

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