An adventure in canning
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008I’m not entirely sure why lately I’ve become so obsessed with being able to take care of myself. The main way that I see this concern is a desire to stock up on food. I’m sure that one contributor to this development is Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which describes her family’s year of living locally. As she describes that year, the chapter on August is called “Living in a Red State”–talking about the endless harvesting, and, more important for the family, preserving, of their harvest of tomatoes.
Lately, I’ve been subscribing to a CSA–community supported agriculture. The farm delivers a box of seasonal organic vegetables to me–actually, to me at work–once every two weeks. [They come every week, but, as a single person, I can’t get through it all in one week.] In a recent newsletter, the farm mentioned that it was possible to special order a 20 lb. box of Roma tomatoes. So, with a recipe in hand, I ordered the box.
When it arrived, I found that 20 lbs. is a lot more than I thought. So I planned my strategy. I started peeling, seeding and pureeing the tomatoes, and put the resulting puree in a container in the fridge. By the time I was done, it came to 6 quarts of puree. I have to say that the hint for peeling tomatoes from the Joy of Cooking really worked. I put a batch of tomatoes in a single layer in a roasting pan, then covered them with boiling water. By the time the water was cool, the tomatoes were easy to peel.
Then there was turning tomato puree into spaghetti sauce. The recipe was very insistent on the importance of following the recipe exactly for reasons of food safety. I’d just as soon not experience botulism, thank you very much. And the thing that protects from it is either acid or high heat–higher than boiling water.
I was interested to taste the result–the recipe includes powdered dried lemon peel, which turns out to be an ingredient that I may need to add to my repertoire. The recipe also include cinnamon and nutmeg, which add a bit of a Mediterranean accent–entirely welcome to my mind.
After a bit of exploration with the equipment that I had on hand, I realized that it was going to be necessary to acquire a canning kettle. Not too much later, I had seven pints of sauce. I suppose that I could have put it up in quarts, but as a usually single person, pints seemed more useful, and the canner holds only seven jars at a time.
As the jars cooled off, I was delighted to find that the seals held. So now they’re acting as silent witnesses in my cupboard. And I’ve moved on to pondering a pressure canner, so that I can put up pears. I have to admit that I have a dreadful weakness for canned pears, but they have to be canned in a pressure cooker for food safety.
I’ve been trying to figure out the answer to the question: If I had to live for a year on just the tomatoes that I canned myself, how much do I need? I’m pretty sure that the answer is between a pint per week, and a pint every two weeks. In either case, it really represents an investment of my time.
Once again, as a “city kid”, I’m confronted with the fact that farm life is hard work–and apparently unending. I can’t begin to imagine how hard it must have been for people, probably women, to just get the harvest in and preserved for the winter, to say nothing of the rest of the year to come.
To circle back to Barbara Kingsolver’s book. The answer to “What do you eat in January?” is “Everything”, but the time to think about it is August.
Bob