Comments On Canning

My online buddy Tommy runs the Freedom Guerilla blog.  He's an interesting guy who has worked for the forest service out West and got a medal from the Coast Guard for his involvement with the rescue effort when that jet landed in the Hudson River.  Now he is learning metal work and teaching at-risk NYC school kids how to garden.  He's not one to sit on his butt and pontificate.  A while back he did a post about how canning the food you grow is an essential part of self-reliance.  I added my comments about it there but I would also like to capture them here, just for my records.

Great post, Tommy! It touches off a string of memories… I was lucky to grow up in the country, not on a farm but surrounded by them, with enough of a yard for quite a large garden. One of my earliest memories is helping Dad plant tomatoes, then watching him use what he called a push-plow to make rows in which he planted beans & corn. We always ate the tomotoes & corn fresh, never canned them, but beans, yes, and as you say, a community event. I can picture my mom and her mom (Nannie) and maybe an aunt or neighbor or two, all settled in those folding aluminum lawn chairs, the kind that can snap a kid’s finger off, under the shade of that huge ash tree in the back yard. Several brown paper grocery bags, the tops cuffed over for easy access, would be distributed, brimming with fresh picked green beans. The women would commence to stringin’ and snappin’ the beans, all the while discussing family history & relations, or maybe what some of the folks at church were up to. I would most likely be nearby on a blanket applying calamine lotion to the many chigger bites I got from being primary bean-picker. They tended to cluster around the underwear elastic, occaisionally making it past that tightie-whitie bearier.

After the women finished prepping, the canning process took place. I remember lots of steam as the empty jars were sterilized then filled with raw beans. Was there a pressure cooker involved somewhere? I recall that it was treated as something as potentially dangerous as a nuclear reactor. We had to lay in front of the fan to cool off, never had AC. Quite a process, but in mid-winter mom could pull out a mason jar, unscrew the ring and pry up that lid with a “toink!” of the vacuum seal opening. Heat ‘em up, no butter – Nannie had a special little kitchen cannister embossed with the title “bacon grease” and kept on the stove top. Yum!