Canning season

Here in Northern Kentucky, except for apples and pumpkins, canning season is over. I used to can veggies and fruits and make jams and jellies, but I found freezing was easier on the back, and store-bought jelly is pretty cheap. On the other hand, nothing, and I mean nothing, tastes as good as home-made ketchup or home-made tomato sauce, made with fresh tomatoes, not canned tomatoes. But since I'm "elderly" my body doesn't tolerate this activity. So, I now am relegated to using canned tomatoes to make my spaghetti sauce. Also, the heat of the kitchen is not something I get along with either. Those hot flashes are enough for me, without adding more heat to my life. But, I digress.

When I was a child, mom canned. Every summer, she canned. And she stored the jars of food she canned under the cellar steps where there was this really neat closet which my dad had me convinced had a false back which opened and led to a tunnel that connected to the church. Yeah, right! And there was a wonderful jelly cabinet, which my sister is concepting restoring, where mom stored the rest of her yield.

Now, folks, there was no such thing as air conditioning in those days. We had fans. I think the large department stores in Philly had a/c, but our homes did not. And canning was a hot, steamy process.

Mom would first boil the jars to sterilize them. Meanwhile she was stewing up tomatoes or peaches or green beans or pickles or apples with her special seasonings. She did make up spaghetti sauce, she just canned the tomatoes whole. I think she did that because daddy loved stewed tomatoes, especially the Italian way (no peppers) and if she opened a can of tomatoes she could get double duty from it. Make the stewed tomatoes, used the left over and make spaghetti sauce.

I know she made jelly, and would melt the wax in another pan that was all dented and good for nothing, except melting wax. The wax was carefully poured on top of the jelly mixture. Now, most folks use sure-jell when they make jelly, but "back in the day" we just cooked down the fruit and sugar until it thickened naturally, and then poured it into the jars.

My first canning job was to make sure the jars which had been sterilized were turned right-side-up just before the fruit or vegetable was put into the jar, and then to plop the lid on and tighten the screwy part. When the seal took, the dot in the middle bent downward. If the seal didn't set, then we had to eat those veggies real soon.

I think my favorite thing mom made was peach jam -- or peach-pit jam. She would can the peaches in sugar water, and then boil the pits, which still had some bits and pieces of peaches on them (no freestones were used), and those bits and pieces would boil off the pits and when you took the pits out of the mess and added sugar, cooked it down a little longer, you had wonderful peach jam.

One time someone gave us a large bag of oranges, brought back from someone's Florida trip, and mom made marmelaide with them. That's how I learned to make marmelaide, which I did quite often when I was doing my own canning.

I recalled a couple of years she made grape jelly -- what a mess. That had to be pressed through a sieve -- my job, sort of like Lucy stomping the grapes in that famous episode of I love Lucy except the stomping was done with a wooden spoon and a sieve and you pushed the juice and bits of cooked fruit through that into a pan, then added the sugar, then boiled it again until it started to thicken, then you put it in a jar, covered it with wax, and you had grape jelly. Daddy loved it.

Grape jelly was never my favorite because it always went with peanut butter, and I have to say I never in my life liked PB&J.