Canning Jars For The Soul

Although I have never canned so much as a single bean, my kitchen is full of canning jars.  Some are squat, some tall, some blue, and some clear.  Some have bubbles in the glass, and many have the old bail fasteners, grown gray and dull with age.  The oldest have glass-lined zinc screw tops, also gray and dull.

I collect jars the way some people collect cats--I wait for them to come to me.  It started with some wide-mouth, gallon-size jars that were left behind by the couple who sold us our first house.  The jars, with their geometric embossed designs, have a 1940s look. Their green tops have been screwed and unscrewed so many times that the threads are hopelessly worn, and the only way to get them to stay on is to line them with wax paper. We have lived in eight houses since that first one, and in each house those three jars--one holding white flour, one holding whole-wheat flour, and one holding the incredibly hot red peppers that I grow and dry--have held pride of place on the kitchen counter.

 
 But my most important acquisition, the one that told me in no uncertain terms that the universe intended for me to be a keeper of jars, took place at the town dump.
Unlike many of my friends and neighbors, I do not enjoy my monthly trips to the dump.  In fact, that is the one time when I wish I lived elsewhere than in my green Vermont--somewhere with curb-side trash pick-up and recycling.  But one hot summer day, while I was concentrating on breathing through my mouth to avoid the dump fug, I saw, next to the old recliners and dinette sets and boxes of paperbacks, two cardboard boxes filled with antique canning jars, the jetsam of some dead grandmother's pantry. 

I rushed them home as if they were a box of kittens, gave them a good wash, and set them out on the counter.  The afternoon light coming through the window shone right through them as I ramsacked the pantry for pasta, beans, quinoa (the ancient grain of the Incas!), chia seeds, scottish oatmeal, barley, and lentils.  Then I cut open the store packaging and poured the contents into my heaven-sent  jars. 

Since then I have added to my collection by more traditional means.  I have bought a few old jars at a yard sale, and a couple of brand-new Italian ones from a fancy kitchen store in a mall somewhere.  And when people give me little jars of jelly or preserves that they have made, I always find something to put in them after I've eaten the contents--herbs for tea, or a small bag of pumpkin seeds.

Why so many canning jars, when I don't can?  I like their looks--I'd rather have a row of bright jars full of staples on a shelf than a row of cellophane bags or cardboard boxes.  And the jars allow me to fantasize that my food comes not from the supermarket but from the bins of some idealized and non-existent village general store.

Most of all, the jars enable me to maintain an illusion of old-fashioned domesticity, without the unremitting labor and monotony.   I can pretend that those homely and charming vessels are daily used by a cheerful female presence, the angel of the house--someone not remotely like me.

Sometimes I look at those jars and imagine my daughters kneeling among packing boxes--some marked "trash," others "Goodwill"--in the kitchen after my death, saying to each other, "Why do you suppose she had such a thing for canning jars?  God knows she never canned anything."

A Change Of Tempo

As I write, in the kitchen tomato sauce is bubbling, eggplants are roasting, and bread dough, I hope, is rising.

This is only a fraction of what I should be doing:  making pesto out of kale, and freezing industrial quantities of broccoli, chard, arugula and rhubarb.  It's the time of year when I almost dread going out to the garden to see what is screaming to be picked right now.

And then, of course, I want to write here about it, all of which sometimes leads to mental as well as physical exhaustion.  If I am to survive this season--and I do realize that choosing this moment to start baking bread again is insane, but I found a source of terrific flour that I'll tell you about soon--I am going to have to slow down the pace of my posting.

I could, of course, choose to not harvest, not bake, not walk the dogs, but then what would I write about?

So I hope that you will be more patient than the tomatoes and the eggplants and the peppers and the greens and not dry up on me or turn away in disgust.  My aim is to post regularly, two or three times a week, with illustrations, and in between give the well time to replenish itself.  Writing and drawing here gives shape to my life and joy to my days.  I wouldn't dream of quitting.

September 13, 2008 "In Squirrel Mode"

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• Oct 8, 2008
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We bring in the harvest

It's late summer, and the garden is in its manic phase again. Everything is happening at once: the tomatoes are (finally!) ripening; and must be made into sauce. The eggplants are getting bigger by the minute, and if I don't pick them at their peak, they will lose their sweetness. Meanwhile, the cool weather crops, which in Vermont endure through the summer, continue to need harvesting, or go to waste.

But the most dramatic onslaught comes from the beans. One day there are only flowers on the bushes. The next, fully adult beans are hanging from the stems. Quick! I must get them while they're tender. I spend hours picking, snapping, blanching, cooling, packing. The next day, strolling through the garden looking for some chard, I part a couple of bean plants out of idle curiosity and lo! pounds more beans have ripened overnight.

All day long, basket in hand, I run from garden to kitchen and down the basement steps to the humming freezer, exclaiming that this is ridiculous, how can these plants produce so much from plain dirt, I haven't time to deal with all this, when will it end? I bemoan my compulsion to not let a single smidgeon go to waste. Those overgrown zucchini should go to the chickens. I could boil up some of that extra chard and kale and mix it with the dogs' food—it's good for them and it would save some of the outrageously expensive kibble I feed them. A saner person would turn her back on the late summer garden and say enough! But I am not that person.

In reality, I am never happier than when I am “putting food by.” Every summer I grow pounds and pounds of produce in my little garden, give it away to my children and to the local food bank. The rest I dry or freeze for my husband and me and for the dogs and chickens (who like nothing more than a handful of steamed veggies on a cold winter day). It gives me an atavistic feeling of security. Who needs stocks and bonds when there are jars of dried tomatoes on the kitchen counter and strings of hot peppers hanging at the kitchen window?

Compared to the preserving habits of our great-grandmothers, my squirrel techniques border on the primitive. I don't dry meats, or can vegetables, or preserve eggs in lard, or make those gorgeous jars of jams and jellies and pickles. I just freeze a bunch of stuff, and dry tomatoes and peppers. But even as I manipulate stove, dryer, and freezer I am echoing the activities of the animals in the woods behind the house: the bear fattening on berries (lucky beast, he carries his food-stores under his skin); the field mice carting off bits of laying mash that the chickens spill; and the squirrels, maniacally storing nuts. Are they anxious, I wonder? Do they dread the coming snows and bitter winds? But I see the perky motions of the squirrels, the way they hold up their fluffy tails, their air of busy self-importance, and I know that for them, too, this is a happy time of year.