When home freezers came in, home canning lost favor (until recently, perhaps). But when I was a teenager, canning was a routine part of life.
I remember the hot July days of 1942, when the green beans were ready for harvest. Dad said they must be picked before they grew too large. Our “Victory Garden” was flourishing.
In the equally hot kitchen, there were rows of canning jars, sterilized and waiting, as my father brought up an enormous pile (to my young eyes) of green beans, or string beans as they were called.
I sat down to my assigned task and start snapping ends off. “Snap, snap, snap.” Then I proceeded to cut the beans into approximately uniform pieces for my mother to wash off under cold running water.
My younger sister tried to help, but she was pretty slow at snapping. And it always seemed that just as we reached the end of one pile, my father would arrive with plenty more.
One such day, I resigned myself to an entire morning of snapping and cutting. “No bike ride to the Ashfield Lake today,” I thought. My mother already had eight quarts washed and packed into the jars, ready to start processing them in the large blue enamel canning kettle. This could go on into the evening hours, as it required three hours in a boiling water bath to process each eight-quart batch.
As summer progressed, there were blueberries, which were fun to pick in a neighbor’s pasture, but picking was followed by more hours of washing and canning in batches.
Then there were the tomatoes! What fun it was dipping them in hot water and slipping off the skins. Then they’d be put into the prepped jars and their hot water bath, which must be perfectly done. Tomatoes can be “touchy” — no bubbles allowed.
The work on those summer days and family garden produce fed us well in the cold, cold days of our New England winters.