CANNING: A granny from West Virginia taught me “of a mornin’“how to can like her mother and grandmother taught her. There are a lot of short cuts that are not ALWAYS considered safe, but with certain foods they are. I’d read many canning and how-to books, but her practical advice is what keeps me willing to can.
Her mother would boil quarts of green beans wrapped in rags (so they wouldn’t bump against each other and break) in a galvanized wash tub over a wood fire outdoors for three hours. As long as there was a pile of wood there, and they kept a general eye on things, they could do other things while it boiled, and not have to keep so close an eye on it as with a pressure cooker. Plus, there would be so many jars in that one batch, it would take less time than the same amount of jars in pressure canners/water bath canners on a stovetop.
For tomatoes, since the older heirloom varieties were more acidic, if the jars, lids, and “‘maters” were very hot/boiling, she never water bathed them after they were in the jars, and there were surprisingly few jars that I lost that way due to inadequate seal. If the seal was good on a jar of tomatoes, the tomatoes inside were always good, since they go bad differently than low acid foods like beans or meat.
Since beans have low acid, if they go bad (botulism, etc.), it is harder to tell, since the seal may be intact. When ready to serve them, bringing all beans to a boil in an uncovered pot destroys the bolusim toxin and renders them safe. DO NOT EVEN SNIFF questionable beans before they have been boiled IN AN UNCOVERED POT. (Friend told me she learned that firsthand.)
Tomatoes, and jellies (fruits), on the other hand, have more acid, and therefore spoil by molding. My grandmother (and her mother) would just skim the bit of mold off the wax-sealed jellies and it would be fine. I think some of the modern canning books from the government extention service try to make us afraid to can, and therefore less self sufficient and more reliant on the “agricultural-industrial machine.”
“Granny Sally” (from West Virginia) would squeeze the peeled, cored tomatoes in the big pot before bringing them to a boil to get a lot of the clear liquid (“water”) out and poured off, so that what ended up in her jars was more tomato flesh, and she wouldn’t have half a jar of clear liquid in her finished jars.
Granny Sally was the third-born of about eight boys and girls, and she was big and strong, so her father would keep her home from school when it was time to butcher the hogs, etc. She always regretted not getting “real book larnin’,” but I told her I’d trade some of my college education (remember Steve Martin’s song"Strive For Mediocrity”?) to know what she knew.
CONCERNING FOOD PRESERVATION:
Since the advent of refrigeration, knowledge of food preservation by lacto-fermentation or drying has gone down the memory hole, conveniently for the people who sell the oil to make the electricity to power our refrigerators and freezers. Sally Fallon’s book, “Nourishing Traditions,” has many practical, easy, small quantity recipes to do your own counter-top food preserving that actually ADDS nutrition to food instead of destroying it like canning does. It is full of encyclopedic snippets from our wise forefathers’ and mothers’ food preparation ways.
