Missoula News

Column: Savagemama

Canning with (and for) Baby

By Jennifer Savage, 7-06-07

It’s a season in our house, the putting away of food. And the season is almost here.

A few weeks ago Eliza finished our last bag of frozen peaches. The same week Seth and I finished our last jar of tomato sauce we’d canned, bleary-eyed, last fall.

These days our freezer seems to have limitless space, our kitchen shelves are bare. Last season’s food is gone and the strawberries are in at the farm down the road. In a few weeks the cherries will come in at the farm by the lake, the raspberries will be ready in our neighbor’s patch. Slowly, our own garden will start to produce. In a few months, we’ll pull tomatoes, onions, potatoes, carrots and squash. We’ll pick basil. We’ll pick beans. We’ll freeze, we’ll dry, we’ll can.

Lately, I find myself collecting glass jars of all sizes from yard sales, thrift stores and various shelves in my kitchen. I inspect the seals of thin metal lids I find at the bottom of drawers and make round screw top bands time has bent into awkward ovals. I count the jars, the lids, the bands. I try to guess how many pints I’ll need, how many quarts, how many tiny jars for jam and apple butter.

I wash each jar by hand in hot, soapy water. I wash lids, I wash bands. I line the jars up on clean kitchen towels to dry. Quarts. Jam. Wide-mouth pints. I survey the jars, clean and warm to the touch from their hot water soak. I like the possibility of them.

As the heat of a July afternoon fills my kitchen, I remember standing here a year ago. Last year as the growing season was coming to an end, I could only wash a few jars before I had to prop up my swollen ankles. I could see my distended feet over the rise of my belly stretched tight from a baby that was running out of room. From where I sat I could also see the scatter of jars in my kitchen, the disorderliness of them and the slow slipping away of any hopes I had last year of canning anything.

In the weeks after Eliza was born, we stared down the harvest crowding the corners of our house. Tomatoes in the kitchen, plums by the stairs, pears in the utility room. Then one night with six-week-old Eliza in a sling across his long torso, Seth pulled the water-bath canner down from its shelf and filled it with water. He looked at me as if for a nod of agreement. Canning is a commitment. 

I put another stockpot of water on the stove. As I waited for it to boil, I gathered bags and bags of tomatoes from all over our kitchen. I let them, large and small, tumble into the sink. When the water in the stockpot was ready, I blanched tomato after tomato.

We’d begun.

When the tomatoes cooled, Seth peeled and crushed them with his thick hands into another pot. I chopped and sauted onions, garlic, basil, green pepper and oregano, all from our garden, while Seth added tomato paste to the crushed tomatoes. I slid the onion mix from a skillet into the bubbling tomatoes. We opened a bottle of red wine and poured a little into the sauce. 

Canning serves for me this need to make sure we have enough. When I look at the jars of sauce sitting in a perfect row on our kitchen shelf I know that in February when the hills here turn white, then brown, then white again, we’ll have something warm to eat. I know when the nights come early and stay late, we’ll eat cherry preserves and taste briefly the lake in summer. We’ll remember that the cold darkness will pass and another growing season will come again.

So on a night last fall we threw in a few bay leaves, pepper, salt, a touch of sage. We let the sauce simmer. As we finished the jar preparation I’d abandoned weeks earlier, two friends dropped by for a visit. We don’t have swing-by visitors everyday so I considered it a good sign.

We would can our sauce.

Our friends quickly fell into our rhythm. One held the baby; the other wiped clean the jar rims after I’d ladled sauce into them. He sealed metal lids and loosely tightened bands. Seth put the jars into the canner and we all watched the clock. Thirty five minutes for pints, forty for quarts. I lifted the jars one by one out of the canner and let them cool on towels lining the countertops. As our friends drove the twenty-five miles to town and we carried our sleeping daughter up to bed, we could hear the popping of lids sealing tight.

This year as I putter around my kitchen searching for lost jars and lids, Eliza follows me and climbs my legs. In the garden she crawls through our bed of greens, nibbles on arugula and swats at our tomato plants. This winter when the snow flies, she’ll eat the sauce we’ll can a few months from now. She’ll taste in it warm wind and I’ll know as she drifts off to sleep that our work has served her well, that we all have enough.

Jennifer Savage writes about being a Western mom on her own blog here on NewWest.Net. Read more from “Savagemama” at www.newwest.net/savagemama.

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