Putting up

When I was a kid, summers were punctuated with the occasional excursion to a local farm where all available family members were pressed into service picking the vegetable or fruit du jour. Maybe it was green beans. Maybe tomatoes. Maybe peaches. My own personal favorite was apples, since with those a guy got to climb a tree and not get in trouble. Sure, we kids were warned to be careful not to drop the pretty ones, but it was a sanctioned tree climbing event and, well, it didn’t get much better than that on a summer morning.

Once Mom and Dad had us pick green beans at Stoner’s Farm on Little York Road, up north from where we lived in Dayton’s Belmont neighborhood. It was a tough pick that day because the beans were planted among corn stalks. We survived with a pretty good pick, but I remember later that day when we had those beans for dinner. Oh, my! They were terrible! I didn’t know what ‘string beans’ meant then, but I sure do now. To this day when I shop for beans I avoid anything with the word ‘string’ in it. Maybe we didn’t prepare them right, but when we kids put a fork-full in our mouths and began to chew, we were met with nasty strings that we couldn’t swallow. I remember well how brother Mike was indignant about his portion and was forced to sit at the table until he finished. It seemed like an hour before he was released for after dinner play. By that time he had our mother laughing, though, after he created a little sarcastic ditty about Schaefer’s cords. From his perspective, these beans went well beyond strings.

I can remember busy summer days in the kitchen when Mom would be scurrying around blanching produce, sterilizing jars, and peeling, peeling, and peeling some more. Then it was newly bottled hot food into a hot water bath on the stove for a round of Pasteurization. The finished jars would be set out on the kitchen table then, covered with a towel. Throughout the rest of the day Mom waited to hear the pop of the lids setting, confirming that the canned food was ready for storage in the basement.

Heavens, but I loved Mom’s applesauce! We were one of the few lucky bunch of kids at school who lived close enough to come home for lunch. Trust me, at the end of most of my lunches a bowl of Mom’s applesauce awaited me. More often than not it was accompanied by a stack of graham crackers. I mean, when you have graham crackers, who needs a spoon? By the time grahamy bears made it to our table, I had mine doing swan dives off my milk glass into the sauce. Mom got more than one chuckle out of that, too.

I write about canning and freezing today because I don’t think many people put up any more. Buying what the family needs in a bag or can is easier at Kroger or Meijer or WhichEver Mart that happens to be closest to the house. Life seems too busy to allot time to put food up for family consumption outside the growing season. Modern households, it would seem, can’t waste time on such mundane endeavors with jobs, soccer games, and other responsibilities that take up most hours in the day.

And with that, I contend, modern families have lost a point of grace I suspect we’ll never recover. Besides being another lost cultural art form, canning and freezing focused family energy on a common cause that drew all together in a simple but beautiful ritual of sustenance. Sure, Mom did most of the sweating in the kitchen, but all knew the food she lovingly prepared was going to make it to our place on the table, and therein was tasty anticipation and a security that, even with our large family, food would be on the table. That’s comforting for a kid to know.

Undoubtedly canning is a product of an agrarian culture that most families had to know two or three generations ago. My folks weren’t farmers, but my dad spent time on family farms in Mercer county when he was a kid. Mom learned her technique from her urbanized mother three-quarters of a century ago. I know my sisters learned plenty kitchen stuff from Mom, though I know nobody these days puts up what Mom put up back then.

The image that accompanies this blog is a batch of my very own stewed home-grown tomatoes cooked up in my very own kitchen just yesterday. Today they will be ladled into quart bags and carefully placed into the freezer for winter consumption.

It is funny though. As much as Cindy and I love our stewed tomatoes, I hate to pull ‘em out of the freezer. The other day I came across a bag labeled ‘2008‘ and figured its time had come. Oh, man. With a can of tomato paste, a pound of lean hamburger, and half a bag of boiled up bow tie pasta, they were transformed into an amazing casserole that Cindy contends still had the taste of sunshine.

And that’s something my kids and grandkids will never find at WalMart.

Today’s elder idea: Canning is something I was expected to learn. It kept the cost of feeding my family down, too, and was an efficient use of the garden. No waste.

Gertrude Schaefer, my mom

12 August 2010