Yes, we can. And pickle, and preserve, and cellar. In a normal year, whatever that may be, though almost everyone agrees that this growing season was not very normal, this is a powerfully busy time. Whatever I do put away to eat later this year is terribly more important than usual because we a running a bit scant on some old favorites and won’t enjoy our usual variety. “Please pass the chard.” Oh, not again.
Can you imagine, however, how a season like this must have seemed to people who couldn’t run to the store for canned California tomatoes or Midwestern canned corn? For people whose eating was within a 100-mile radius not because it was fashionable to be a locovore but because it was necessary? The prospect in a bad year probably included lots of boiled turnip and salt pork and out of pocket expenses for bread-making material if any could be found. We don’t even think about it.
Maybe this year, though, we did. Many people started gardens for the first time ever this year. The stores stocked up on canning jars and lids. A local department store showed rows and rows of enamel canners. The poor economy pushed along the idea that growing our own and putting it up was prudent. It was, or ought to have been.
People who have gardened a long time, 20 or 30 years, know that there is the odd bad year-too much rain, too little rain, too many insects of one sort or another. Even in good years, some plants don’t fare as well as they do in other years. Variability is pretty normal.
All season long, I mourned along with neighbors as slugs feasted night after night, seeds rotted in the ground or were washed out as the rain pounded, drizzled, and sat damply on us day after day after day. Then came the late blight, a product of just in time sales of tomato plant seedlings from Texas, potted up in Maine where the disease spread from plant to plant, and then was dispersed on plants by consumers looking for cheap seedlings at big box stores. Some of my island neighbors lost their tomatoes and potatoes both. Don’t ask me how come we were lucky, but we still have ours; so far so good.
Tomatoes at this house are never great shakes though. The warm night air flies up the rise in the back of the barn into the night sky, leaving the tomatoes a little chilled in their cages. Sometimes I get enough to put up six to ten pints of stewed tomatoes, or if very lucky can put away a few quarts of sauce. Not this year.
For some reason our cucumbers turned in a desultory performance. This year I went out in the garden to speak encouragingly to plants whose leaves were affected with some virus or other. They did their best, but where I used to dread going out to find cukes that turned into hand grenades seemingly overnight, this year, I picked one and set it aside then another until I could finally accumulate enough for a batch of relish, then a few jars of bread and butters, four pints of dills, not enough sweet and sours.
Green beans, pole beans and peaches are this year’s success stories. We have two peach trees, and they have done well. Yes, we can peaches. They taste like heaven in February. Yes, we can green beans, too. This year, for the first time, I canned plain old green beans, having been amazed to discover that my husband of 28 years also likes canned green beans. “You do?” “Yeah, sometimes they taste really good.” Well, I’ll be. So my island neighbor Norma came over and showed me how to proceed with a pressure canner. Usually I do dilly beans, so boiling water bath is sufficient, as it is for other pickles but pressure is needed for canned beans.
Now we are watching the beets, carrots, and apples. Early-blooming apples have set reasonably well, but those that bloomed a little later were pollination-challenged. The potatoes are turning in a disappointing performance, too. We’ll have some of all these to put down cellar and the winter keeping squash look fine indeed.
There were enough peaches for jam that I made according to the centuries old pound-for-pound method, no pectin. Equals quantities of fruit and sugar cooked until it sheets off your spoon. I learned a fascinating and dreadful thing this week. The Food and Drug Administration, probably at the behest of commercial jam and jelly makers, now defines jam as containing 65 percent sugar. So if you make jam or jelly to sell according to the ancient recipe for it, you cannot officially call it jam or jelly. The commercial preserve maker I learned this fact from gets around this by labeling her jars with her business name which is Bonnie’s Jams and Jellies, then she merely indicates the flavor on the jar.
So all of us home cooks who have been making jams and jellies all these years are producing what the FDA calls “spread.” I say to hell with that. We can make jam and jelly and give it to our friends or trade it. We can fill our cellars with whatever we manage to harvest, and cross fingers for a better garden year next time. We can sidestep a lot of commercial silliness.
Yes, we can, as long as we can.
Sandra Oliver cooks and writes on Islesboro.