Dalton Daily Citizen
DALTON — This time of year, in the middle of the dead of winter, I would go with my grandmother out the screen door of the back porch and around the back of the house to a wooden door that opened to a space underneath. It wasn’t a basement, but just an area with a dirt floor and room enough to stand up in. The dirt on the floor was like dust since it never rained under there. Along one wall of this cool, dark, dry space was a series of broad shelves. From the shelves she would shop, just as if she were walking down the aisle of a grocery store. She would make two or three selections from the shelves and then we would go back through the cold afternoon, closing the wooden door behind us, and make our way back into the house. The back porch door opened into kitchen. She would stop there and I would go on into the living room to watch the black and white television or play with toys. Within half an hour the house would fill with the smell of good things cooking for supper that night. Good, fresh things. Things that smelled of half a year ago. For you see, the items on that shelf in the dark, under the floor, were jars. And in those jars were summer.
Six months before, in July and August, every few days the kitchen would heat up like a Turkish steam bath. If you walked in to my grandmothers’ kitchen you would see the steam filling the air from pots of boiling water. She worked steadily, methodically and quickly. A strand or two of her bunned hair would have steamed itself loose and hung to the side. Her glasses would fog and clear as she moved from pot to sink to counter. Handfuls of the past couple of mornings of garden harvest were prepped as she pulled hot Mason jars from the cauldrons and put the veggies in, filling them with boiling water and screwing the lids on with a towel. She was canning. These preserved foods would be back months from now on our plates, as fresh and tasty as the morning they were picked.
Preserving food has been around since before cave paintings. The Indians would hang buffalo meat out in the sun and voila!... jerky. Vikings would bury fish (shark I think it was) in the ground with some herbs or spices and months later… voila!... Icky sour tasting rancid shark that you could eat without it killing you on long ocean voyages. Pirates of the Caribbean would put meat over coals and smoke it slowly so they could take the smoked meat on the ships with them. From the French word for that process we call them “Buccaneers”. I don’t know where the first canning in jars came from but I do remember reading that Napoleon’s army was the first army to take supplies like that with them on the march instead of just pillaging as they went. Civil War armies traveled with dried, salted beef and hardtack, a type of over cooked bread made into a wafer that looked like a giant saltine cracker. It wasn’t very good but you could eat it and in a jam the hardtack could be thrown at the enemy. In WWI the first troops got dried beef left over from the Spanish American war. In WWII the first troops got left over rations from WWI and so on to Vietnam and beyond. But here in the south, the purpose was to have something that would keep you fed until next season’s garden.
Canning, which seems a misnomer since we do it in jars, is a simple system where boiling water kills all the germs and then when the lid is put on, the cooling process seals the lid so no air can get in, which means no new germs so the food stays bacteria free until you open the jar months later. And then, if it fell off your plate, there’s still the 5-second rule. The food is kept in a state of suspended animation, fresh, green and nutritious. The main things I remember coming from the jars were green beans, corn, okra, tomatoes, beets and also pickles, pickled peaches and jams and jellies. Between fresh vegetables in the summer and fall and canned vegetables in winter and spring, we always ate good. If you go to California and order the “vegetable medley” at a restaurant you always get the same thing, carrots, broccoli and cauliflower. And always steamed. That’s not much on the “vegetables” if you ask me. Not much on the “medley” either.
When you go to the fair in the fall make sure you take a walk through the food contest section. Usually you go from giant pumpkin to giant sunflower to giant watermelon, mouth hanging open at the size and wondering if they got elephant manure for fertilizer when the circus was in town. But next time, slow down and try not to make it such a “Guinness World Record” tour and take the time to look at the canned goods. The colors and varieties of the vegetables and the fruit will surprise you. And you may even be surprised at what can be canned. Watermelon? Pickled eggs? Biscuits?
With almost all of our store bought food passing through some factory before it gets to our table, not near as many folks can as used to. There’s not a need. Back then it was life or death, now it’s pleasure, tradition or hobby. If you think about it, most of the processed food we eat now is not “cooked” by us, but rather just reheated or re-hydrated or both. Of course, there are a lot of preservatives that go along with that process. Except for some spices or herbs, nothing but nature itself goes into home canned goods.
The summer of third grade I spent an hour or so each morning breaking and stringing beans with my grandmother as she quizzed me on my multiplication tables. It’s a great memory now, but at the time I might as well have been in San Quentin or on the “Rock”. But months later, maybe at Thanksgiving, or a Sunday lunch in February, those beans would be invited to dinner. My grandmother would unscrew the lid and make sure it was still bent in to show its vacuum held. Then into the pot the contents would go. It might be January 12th outside. But on my plate it was Tuesday morning, July 22nd beans and late Thursday an hour before the dew burned off August 3rd pickles and corn from the back row along the fence Labor Day Weekend. Winter wind on your cheeks outside, summer breeze on your tongue inside.
My wife and I have canned a little bit at home but it’s a big chore when you’re an amateur. Boil the jars, check the directions book, slice the veggies, check the directions book, flip the cans upside down and listen for the POP when the lid sucks down from the cooling process, check the directions book. And one lesson missed in the directions book but learned just the same, just because the jar has cooled down enough for the lid to pop does NOT mean it has cooled down enough to pick up with your bare hand. Now, if we pick berries or have peaches from our tree, we just freeze, something that wasn’t an option until a generation or so ago.
When I was a kid, I was always a little scared going down under the house in that dark space where there were sure to be some cobwebs, but knowing what was waiting for us down there was worth the scare. And of course, with my grandmother next to me, well, she wasn’t scared of anything. Maybe snakes. But between her, the Lord and her garden hoe, the snakes didn’t have a chance. The point being, face the fear and get the food. Jars of garden goodness, delicious on the plate, months after the harvest. Who says you can’t keep time in a bottle?
Mark Hannah is a native of Dalton and works in film and video production.
