Judy P's Tickle Trunk

 I come by my canning obsession honestly. When I think back to my childhood I have mostly vague recollections of the things which made my mother happy: a whole fresh halibut, seeing us cleaned and polished and lined up in our Sunday best on the way out the door to church, any one of us (excepting Peter) wearing a fresh new frock she had made herself (this of course would only be a fleeting happiness because before many hours had passed my silky ribbon would have been lost, allowing my ever unruly hair to hang in the vicinity of my mouth and the hem of the dress would have been rent beyond repair after getting hooked on the point of a picket of Peckford’s back fence), or a large enamel jug brimming with freshly picked berries. But as sure as there are little green marshmallow clovers in Lucky Charms cereal, my mother’s greatest happiness was, and I assume still is, hearing the tops pop as a row of freshly bottled preserves cooled in a neat row on the kitchen counter. My mother was a master of canning. Nothing was safe; not the fruit of the vine, the beast of the field, nor birds of the air. Actually, canning was not a word we ever used back then. Foolish as it might seem, we called it bottling and reserved the word canning for the process of putting food in cans.

Willie made this batch of gooseberry jelly but often he would bring the berries to Mom and she would make the jelly and split the batch with him.

 Mom made jam from any berries she could get her hands on. Wild raspberry jam, blueberry or partridgeberry or rhubarb jam, and some years damson jam which I loved. Even more special was jelly; gooseberry, raspberry or squashberry, which I didn’t like because of it’s sourness but that just left more for Dad who liked nothing better for dessert than a slice of buttered bread piled high with the stuff. For the split second between plate and mouth I would admire the bright red shimmering globs reminiscent of stained glass. Mom also put up pickles, rhubarb relish, and pickled beets. Then there was turrs, rabbit, moose and sealmeat.  What would a jig’s dinner or a Sunday supper have been at all without Mom’s labours? There would be sweet mustard pickles to give flavour to the sliced Klik or Kam, a bottle of rabbit (which I despised because of its browsey taste), a beet salad made from the potatoes left over from Sunday dinner mashed with chopped pickled beets and Miracle Whip, and for dessert a partridgeberry jam pie with a dollop of Nestlé’s cream from a tin – opened right at the table after each of us got to give it a shake to help thicken it.

Jigg’s dinner

Funny, I don’t recall where Mom kept her preserves. I have no mental recollection of any rows of jars in any given cupboard or on any given shelf. Did we eat them so fast that they didn’t need storing (we would polish off a whole bottle of rhubarb relish in one sitting when there were fishcakes) or were they hidden to discourage any frivolous consumption? After all, molasses was good enough for bread most days.

This is my own 2013 Milton Preserve collection:

From Annapolis Valley cukes…..

…come bread and butter pickles. Shown with pickled beets made the same day.

Under-ripe crabapples; I love their pink seeds…

….and blackberries from our riverbank….

…to blackberry-apple jelly.

     Today I attempted something my mother has certainly never bottled: pickled peaches. I have wanted to do so ever since the year Lance wrote me from Alabama saying that he had just purchased a jar of pickled peaches from the Piggly Wiggly store. This would be another attempt to guarantee the place in Lance’s heart which I had found via his stomach when I successfully reproduced the conga bars his mother used to make. She also made pickled peaches which was a lot easier for her, living in Virginia, which is maggoty with peach orchards. When I was little I thought that peaches grew in cans, in two shapes, halves or slices. I recall asking my mother not to cut my orange but to break it up into ‘peaches’. I digress. Anyhow, pickled peaches are way outside of my comfort zone. Thus far I am not impressed. They look overcooked and the broth of straight vinegar with sugar made my eyes cross as my eyebrows retracted. I’ll give them a couple of weeks to mature in the jars before I pass judgement but am already thinking pessimistically “better luck next year.

Pickled Peaches 2013

A full morning’s work for three jars of preserves. Worth it? Always.

(c) Judy Parsons 2013