Arts & Entertainment
Preserving the Art of Preserving Food
For many it's too much work, but some of us feel preserving local foods is a tasty tradition that should be passed on to the next generation.
I COME from a long line of food preservationists. Though it seems like an exotic notion in this day in age, the fact is that we all come from a long line of food preservationists. It wasn’t until the last generation that the knowledge of canning and preserving food disappeared, mainly from lack of necessity. Refrigerators and food corporations have replaced the mason jars and water bath canners.
Woodinville Patch editor Annie Archer recently succinctly summed up most people’s attitude towards canning saying, “Too big an effort for too little payoff.”
My grandparents were children of Midwest farmers. When they moved to Washington with their children, they always planted a huge garden, partly out of habit and partly out of necessity. Growing and preserving their own fruits and vegetables literally put food on the table and in the mouths of their ten kids.
It was a long tradition in Kirkland too. In the 1930s, the federal Works Progress Administration built the Kirkland Cannery, which for decades served as a free public cannery for local families who brought in their homegrown fruits and vegetables to preserve for the winter.
While my parents didn’t carry on the tradition of growing rows of corn and acres of beans, they did often stop in Eastern Washington each summer to pick up boxes of peaches or cherries. Fun summertime outings regularly included picking strawberries or blueberries at a U-pick farm, or mountains of blackberries from our own wild acreage.
Admittedly, canning peaches looked like hard work -- shocking them in boiling water before slipping off the skins, slicing, pitting, packing in jars before adding the syrup, then boiling in a water bath until all the air bubbles had escaped and the lids sealed. Mind you, all of this boiling usually took place on a 90-degree late summer day.
Now a grown woman with a family of my own, I find myself impressed by people who know these time-tested methods to preserve summer’s bounty. The pioneer in my DNA compels me roll up my sleeves and get it done. It is hard work. But like most things that require sweat equity, it provides a good deal of satisfaction.
I began my own quest towards learning the art of food preservation three years ago. My third child was just six weeks old when I signed up for my first class at a local , entitled something inspiring like “Sunshine in a Jar.” I nursed my baby and sped off for three hours of instruction on food safety, canning methods and demonstrations. Recipes included tomato-peach chutney, mango-pineapple preserves and whole fruit canning.
The next day, I bought a case of mason jars, two-part lids, a canning utensils set and a half-flat of strawberries at Bellevue’s annual Strawberry Festival. An old man watched me buy the berries and commented on how his mother had forced him to remove strawberry stems as a child, staining his fingers red.
“You won’t catch me doing that anymore -- I had enough of that as a kid,” he said with a smirk, looking at me like I was crazy for voluntarily adding work to my afternoon.
BUT NOTHING is better than homemade jam. Northwest strawberries outshine those tough and often flavorless giants from California -- the kind that have been bred to not get all smushy during the 1,500 mile journey north.
We go through a lot of jam in a year, so I have to put up quite a few pints of jam. I also make a good load of decorative half-pints, which serve as excellent and always appreciated hostess or birthday gifts.
Jam requires four components: fruit, sugar, pectin and sometimes lemon juice. Each component can significantly affect the jam. Try a local Northwest berry like the Hood or Shuksan varieties, which can be picked up at a farmer’s market like the downtown Kirkland Wednesday Market or the Juanita Friday Market.
The type of pectin used will determine the amount of sugar needed. Pectin is a natural thickening agent found in many fruits, but particularly in citrus rinds. The traditional method for thickening jam is to cook the berries with a wedge of citrus fruit.
The most common supermarket pectins require vast amounts of sugar to set -- as much as two parts sugar for one part fruit. For example, four cups of fruit would need eight cups of sugar -- that’s a lot of sugar!
At the PCC cooking class, my instructor clued us into a different brand of pectin. Pomona’s Universal Pectin is activated not by sugar, but by an included packet of calcium. Recipes in the box call for a maximum of two cups of sugar per four cups of fruit all the way down to no sugar-added options. Honey, concentrated fruit juice, stevia, maple syrup and even agave can be substituted for cane sugar, all in varying degrees.
That first summer, I made jam, chutney, canned peaches and cherries and planned to do much more. Applesauce, pears, salsa, pickles -- the list was long and perhaps a bit ambitious for a mom in the suburbs with three kids and a very small garden. While the list has changed from year to year, one thing remains the same. The jam that kick-started my canning and food-writing career is always at the top.
And I know my grandma approves -- out of the myriad of grandkids, I was awarded guardianship of the substantial Kain family canner. I look forward to passing on both the canner and the satisfaction of food preservation to my kids. They may roll their eyes at their crazy mom for a while, but one of them is bound to have the pioneer gene.
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To watch my first "How-To" jam video, click here. For more funny food stories, check out my early writing on Julie Jams.