I remember growing up going to my grandma’s house during the harvest and butchering season. We, all of us, gathered together as an extended family in Darke County Ohio to do the work of picking, canning, butchering, and packing. We also added a little hand-cranking of the old ice-cream maker and some fence mending, barn cleaning and hay-mount fort building, but alas, that has some “nostalgia” mixed in and lest I digress, I’ll hone it in a bit.
The men were in the butcher house. The women were in the kitchen and the garage which, for the time being, had been set up with long tables covered in plastic picnic style table cloths. Those under 5 feet tall we’re on hands and knees in the garden, while the littles kids were off in the corner with Crayola and butcher paper torn from a giant role that was placed at one end of the table. I was, apparently too young for the butcher house, with all the blood and cows hanging from their feet. I was too young to get my hands dirty in the grinding of meat or canning of green beans, and yet, a bit too old for coloring butcher-paper-placemats. And so I watched.
I remember that my grandmother, in her patient and soft presence, had a way of conducting the symphony of players during that weekend with an unhurried and yet directorial poise. Aunts and cousins in the kitchen with the sound of steam escaping pressure cookers and jars rattling in tune. Moms and Dads in the garage with thick slabs of meat and the sound of ripping white paper of the spool and the spinning of the tape-wheel as meat was wrapped, labeled and carried off to the freezer where later that afternoon, homemade fudge-cycles would be ready to sticky the hands of us all (a little more nostalgia).
I hated green beans. And we would have a cupboard full of them for the rest of the year. My Grandmother’s canning cupboard was 20 ft long and at least 6 ft high, and by the end of the day, it too would be full.
Together, we worked for food. We worked together, with the earth, with creation, and a tacitly understood presence of God in all of it.
I live in a very neo-hippie community, and I only know 1 person who knows how to can vegetables. A few years ago during a Saturday morning garage sale run in our community, I picked up a 1940’s canning cooker to satisfy my ever present penchant for things from that era. The women who sold it to me (for $2) told me of all the canning she had done over the years out of that cooker. She canned for more than 30 years. The pressure cooker caught my eye because I knew at a glance that it was from the 40’s and when I asked her what it was, her stare, a bit incredulous, told me that she was slightly surprised by my ignorance of something that had been a staple in her household.
My mother, I remember, had a pressure cooker—though I don’t remember canning vegetables. I’m sure she knew how to. But during the 1980’s, with microwave meals (of which we didn’t eat many) and a busying world all around, I’m sure it never even came to her mind to teach her son how to can vegetables. So, in just two generations, we have lost, at least in our family line (and I suspect in many others), the knowledge and appreciation of home grown canned veggies, yes, green beans even. My mother will likely read this and it will, without a doubt, bring up some nostalgia in her as well. She’ll wish she had taught her son how to can vegetables, less for the current need of know how, and more so for the desire to see the storied life of her own mother be passed on in some way through sound of hissing steam and wide-mouthed Mason Jars. It’s a good enough reason. Sometimes nostalgia isn’t so bad when what you long for from the past is something you need both now, and in the future.
Let’s bring back the Mason Jar. I’ll ask that one person I know to teach me how to can vegetables or invite the little old lady who sold me my pressure cooker to come for tea at harvest time.