Canning, Part II

I last wrote about canning Bread & Butter pickles, and it made me reminiscent of my childhood when my mom and grandmother canned tomatoes. I love homegrown, homemade canned tomatoes!! As I mentioned previously, as a teen I tended to find other things to do when it came to canning. Climbing trees, riding my pony, going down over the hill…anything to escape the steam bath that the kitchen became as canning commenced. And now I’m paying the price for skipping out.

I gave in and took the tomato canning class anyway, and was disappointed to discover it was only a lecture. The speaker was fairly knowledgeable, but she’d only been canning for a couple of years, and sometimes I just wasn’t sure of her answers to the questions that were asked. What I WAS sure about was that if my grandma was canning today, the FDA would probably shut her down!

The speaker did explain a few things that were brought to life by her sometimes sardonic tone and her examples of what to do and not do. This was much better than just reading it in the canning books. She was a smaller version of Alton Brown. At least I got my money’s worth for the class.

But honestly. My grandma would have looked at her and shook her head over some of the techniques that are now being insisted on by the Co-op, or the University Extension, the FDA, whomever. Most of the procedures are fine in modern kitchens, with long counters and lots of space, but a small farmhouse kitchen? You had to make do with what you had! Counters weren’t always as generous as they are nowadays, for all the scratch cooking that was done back then.

Jars and rings were washed by hand, then placed in large canners of boiling water to sterilize. Then they were placed in other canners of extremely hot but not boiling water, to wait their turn to be filled. The lids were place in hot water (not boiling, or it melted the sealing rings too much), ready to be placed on top of the newly filled jars. There was some sort of assembly line going with the two women in the kitchen, and us kids were sometimes drafted to carry finished jars out to the porch to put on a table set up there for the cool down.

(My grandparents, and the first motorized vehicle I learned to drive. Even driving the tractor, grandma was a lady!)

I can picture my grandma at the gas stove canning. She comes in clear as a bell, but I see her actions as if through a badly warped glass. She always wore a dress, with a full apron tied on. I think the only times I ever saw her in pants was during haying or the time she stood with my foundered pony in the cold creek water. Everything was done in a dress. Oh, and sensible, no nonsense shoes. By the end of the day her hair would be dripping, and you could probably squeeze a couple of cups of sweat from the dress and apron. But I’m willing to bet that you could never get sick from anything that was made in that kitchen. It was made with love and sweat, at temperatures more closely resembling the surface of the sun than mid-summer Ohio.

So now with my faulty memory augmented by my Ball canning books, I may be able to actually put up a batch or two of my beloved tomatoes, no matter what the form. Juice, whole, diced, you just can’t go wrong with tomatoes. Unless you add celery … ICK!!