I spent the morning peeling and slicing the golden peaches that will bring a taste of summertime to winter meals. The peaches are just the latest in the annual ritual of preserving the bounty of spring and summer that began in April with the maple syrup from our trees. June’s rhubarb has been chopped and frozen for pies, made into sauce, and baked into breads. In July we picked wild blueberries now put by to be baked into pies and sprinkled over cereal throughout the winter months. Every other year the last weeks of August are spent making gallons of applesauce, but this is an off-year, so there’s more room in the freezer for the quarts of frozen peaches. These will soon be followed by pints of green and yellow beans to be cooked into winter soups and stews. The chipmunks have eaten nearly all the zucchini this year, and have nibbled on every ripening tomato, so I’ve had to harvest the tomatoes before they ripen. The piano is adorned with a trayful of Romas, planted for the first time this year in hopes of making our own sauce and paste. They’ll be next to be preserved if the indoor ripening works.
It’s that time of year -- time to “put food by.” “To ‘put by’ is an early nineteenth-century way of saying to ‘save something you don’t have to use now, against the time when you’ll need it.’ . . . applied to food it is prudence and involvement and a return to the old simplicities.” So begins my copy of the food preservation bible, Putting Food By. I bought it, along with my copy of Diet for a Small Planet, when I was a young woman living in central Minnesota farm country and was deeply involved in the food co-op and whole foods movement. Growing up in ‘50s suburbia, despite my mom seeking out the best of fresh vegetables from local farmers in the summer, the rest of the year I was raised on the new convenience foods -- Minute Rice, Campbell’s soup, Birdseye frozen broccoli and peas, Libby’s fruit cocktail, Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks, Bisquick pancake mix, Betty Crocker cake mixes, Jell-o, Wonder Bread, and for a real treat, Swanson’s TV dinners. Now, wanting to “return to the old simplicities,” my pantry was filled with brown and wild rice, bulgar, barley, lentils, dried beans, chickpeas, soybeans, and whole wheat flour. I wanted to be involved in growing and preserving my own food, so we grew corn, beans, beets, carrots, zucchini, cukes, and more in our garden and patronized local pick-your-own apple and berry farms. And I was determined to learn how to put food by. So with my copy of Putting Food By as my guide, and my new canning kettle, Ball canning jars, and paraffin, I set about to preserve the summer’s harvest.
My first attempt was strawberry jam from the buckets of strawberries from the nearby pick-your-own farm. Little did I know how much jam a few buckets of strawberries would make. After the tenth hour and the fiftieth pint of jam, I was done in and nearly gave up on preserving for good. But I’ve learned that’s how the days of putting food by are. The years that our sauce tree bears, for two weeks I spend three to four hours every day cleaning, cooking, milling, and freezing pints and quarts of applesauce. That sauce will delight friends and family and keep us well-fed for the next two years. Preparing and freezing the peaches takes several intense hours over two to three days, but the sweet summery flavors reward us well into the winter. Beans are relatively quick, requiring only a few hours of cleaning, cutting, blanching, and freezing.
Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – her chronicling of her family’s year of eating only foods grown locally – inspired me years ago to eat as locally as possible. This aspect of putting food by grows ever more important as we face the current climate crisis. As Kingsolver’s husband, Steve Hopp, noted, we in the US consume about 400 gallons of oil a year per person, about 17% of our nation’s energy use, for agriculture. Tractors, combines, harvesters, irrigation, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides all use oil and natural gas. Even more fossil fuels are consumed in the trip from farm to table – on average 1500 miles. Processing, packaging, and warehousing also use fossil fuels. If everyone in the US ate just one meal a week of locally and organically raised meat and produce, we would reduce the nation’s fuel consumption by 1.1 million barrels (that’s over 46 million gallons) of oil every week (Kingsolver, Animal, 5). In my efforts to eat locally, I can’t get more local than the syrup from our maples, the applesauce from the tree outside my front door, and the tomatoes and beans in my garden. Every jar I re-use is one less can in the mining/transportation/waste/recycle stream. And the composted detritus of stems and leaves feed next year’s garden.
I’ve come to love the whole process of planting, growing, harvesting, cutting, cooking, blanching, storing. I once dreamed of having a root cellar filled with carrots and onions and potatoes, shelves filled with canned goods, herbs hung from the ceiling to dry, sliced and dried fruits, but my vision has exceeded my grasp. Over the years I’ve pitted and dried cherries, sliced and dried apples, managed to keep carrots, squash, and potatoes for a couple months in a cool garage, but mostly I’ve opted for a freezer full of fruits and veggies, breads and sauces. Limited as it is, it is still incredibly satisfying, as nourishing for the soul as for the palate.
As I put these fresh, sweet peaches in jars, in my head I’m listening to Greg Brown’s lyrics:
Peaches on the shelf
Potatoes in the bin
Supper’s ready, everybody come on in, now
Taste a little of the summer . . .
Grandma’s put it all in jars.
Sources
Brown, Greg. 1983. “Canned Goods.” One Night.
Hertzberg, Ruth, Beatrice Vaughan, and Janet Greene. 1979. Putting Food By. Second Ed., Revised and Enlarged. New York: Bantam.
Kingsolver, Barbara. 2007. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. With Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
Lappé, Frances Moore. 1975. Diet for a Small Planet. New York: Ballantine Books.