Friend, reader and blogger extraordinaire Rachel Lauden writes in to say: This is all music to my ears because growing up in an English farm family, the late summer was spent making jam and bottling fruit (never called either canning) and that was what we had for the next year. The one exception was marmalade […]
READ ONWhen I was a child, there was a woman on our block who used to bring my mother small jars of various jams in the summertime. It was good stuff…mostly marmalade as I recall. Yet the thing that made the jars so memorable to me wasn’t what was inside, but what was on top. Under […]
READ ONTwo years is the rule of thumb, assuming the jars stay in good shape and have been stored properly. By that I mean in a relatively cool and especially dark spot away from direct sunlight. When I canned in my apartment back home in Chicago (it contained a gloriously outdated white enamel stove from the […]
READ ONunny how so many innovations in food preservation can be traced to armed conflict. But it’s no wonder why. Une armée marche à son estomac, as Napoleon famously said. A large force sitting still will consume every edible resource within reach in two days’ time. Historically, keeping such an army from starving has required either long supply lines or on-the-go, off-the-land foraging. But there are drawbacks to each. Long supply lines make easy targets for the enemy (see Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow), and foraging has a way of ruining civilian morale (ask anyone in the South about Sherman’s March to the Sea…150 years later at they’re still P.O.’d about it). But if you can take your supplies with you, you have a tremendous strategic and tactical advantage.
READ ONIt seems like every summer for, oh, the past several decades, the Ball Corporation (or more precisely their parent companies, Alltrista and most recently Jarden Home Brands) has declared a “great return to home canning”. Here for example: www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/072408/lif_308049209.shtml. This year the claim has taken on extra weight, what with the drastic increases in food […]
READ ONThe most exciting food fad at the Los Angeles Times this week is high-end chefs going “down market” and opening their own fast food restaurants. Yet the Los Angeles City Council is about to pass an ordinance to ban fast food restaurants. How’s that going to play out when Paul Bocuse tries to open one […]
READ ONIt all started back when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor… …or so quite a lot of people seem to think. World War II may have been the historical high water mark for home canning, but preserving the harvest in jars is a tradition that goes quite a bit further back. As I mentioned, it was […]
READ ONGot a couple of emails last night wondering what it was I was canning in the photos below. Well, it started out as apricot jam, but for some reason the fruit discolored. I can’t say I know what happened exactly, I didn’t cook it too long, the consistency was perfect…I put the right amount of […]
READ ONIt was not so very long ago that canning was commonplace enough that most people had at least seen it done. That’s not true anymore, hence this little photo-primer. Like my jam-making instructions, there’s no recipe included here, though the procedures apply to pretty much any recipe that calls for a boiling water canner. Which […]
READ ONBelow I talked a bit about what the canning process does to rid a jar of micro-critters, but the physics of how canning works is every bit as interesting. Wait — where are you going? There’s no need to…what do you mean you’d rather be water skiing? Don’t hit that quit button, I was just […]
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