Pickling and Preserving: The Foxfire Americana Library (3) Read online

  ILLUSTRATION 7 Lola Cannon

  Over the years, the process of canning has changed. Now we have pressure cookers and stove timers to help us can. However, years ago, food had to be canned by the open-kettle method. Lola Cannon said, “I learned to can by the open-kettle method. That was where you cooked your food in an open kettle and had your jars sterilized and standing right there. You put your hot food in the jars and sealed them from the heat in the food. It was hard to keep. You pretty well have to process your jars after they’re sealed. Later on, several different types of canners came along. We had a pressure canner.”

  I LLUSTRATION 8 Bessie Underwood

  Bessie Underwood also remembered canning in an open washtub. “I have canned beans on the woodstove in a washtub. I boiled them three hours.”

  Sallie Beaty gave a detailed account of this method of canning. “[When] we canned our beans, we would pick them, string them, and then break them up. Then we would cook them outside for three hours in a big old washtub [over a] fire. This would [help the beans] keep [longer]. Most of our vegetables we did like this. We put tomatoes, corn, and okra in our homemade soup. We scalded our tomatoes and pulled the skin off them. Then we cut our corn and our okra up and mixed [the corn, okra, tomatoes, and one teaspoon of salt] up. Then we either cooked it in a hot water bath on top of the stove or outside in a washtub with a fire around it.”

  These days the process of canning is much simpler, although it still involves hard work, and an afternoon of canning can turn even a well air-conditioned house into a sauna. The method of canning used today that utilizes pressure cookers is much easier than it was years ago. This change can be seen in Gladys Nichols’s description of how she cans now. “I boil my tomatoes real good around thirty minutes and put them in a can and seal them. I process the cans about ten to fifteen minutes. I hardly ever lose any canned stuff.”

  PICKLING

  Although bleaching, drying, burying, and canning were all excellent methods of preserving food, they did not give much variety to the diet. Another means of keeping food was pickling. Many foods, from beans to beets and cabbage to cucumbers, could be pickled. Not only did pickling preserve the food, it also provided a different taste and texture. Margaret Norton remembered pickled foods. “People grew and preserved everything for the winter to come. They had huge wooden barrels they used for kraut, pickled beans, and different types of pickles. They were all made with salt. They’d keep through the winter. I don’t make sour pickles. They don’t like me, and I don’t like them.”

  Eva Vinson also recalled pickling as an effective means of food preservation even before canning became common. “People would think it was funny now to see a fifty- or sixty-gallon barrel of kraut or pickled beans. But they made ’em back then! And they kept all winter. And I don’t know how they did because you can make a churn jar full now and seem like it won’t last. They didn’t put anything but salt [in with it], and as you chop it in the barrel, it makes its own juice. And salt it, you see, to taste—not so it won’t work. It has to work. [Let stand ten days, or as long as needed in order to pickle.] And then they put boards over that. They had ’em special, you know, that they’d had hewed out. Then put rocks on top of [the boards] to hold them down, white flint rocks. They didn’t have any way to can anything.”

  JELLY AND PRESERVES

  Making jellies and preserves was yet another way of keeping fruits. Daisy Justice told us, “We canned berries, peaches, and apples. For instance, with blackberries, we’d put them in a big aluminum dishpan, and when they come to a boil, you started dipping them into your jars that you’ve already washed and scalded and sterilized. We’d seal them as we went.”

  Sallie Beaty gave specific directions for making jellies and preserves. “[To make our jellies,] we would boil our fruit peelings. We would boil ’em half an hour to one hour and then strain [the] juice out. [We] used [the juice] to make our jelly. [Then] we would use one cup of sugar to one cup of juice and boil it down on top of the stove till it was thick like we wanted it.”

  BLACKBERRY JELLY

  1 quart of Blackberries to make 3¾ cups juice

  1 box Sure-Jell (or pectin)

  4½ cups sugar

  Boil blackberries with ½ cup water to make a juice. Mash berries to see when they are done. Strain berries and place juice and Sure-Jell in pot. Stir while cooking. Let boil and then add sugar. Stir and cook until mixture jells.

  —Leona Carver

  PRESERVES

  Lettie Chastain shared her mother’s method for making preserves. “My mother made fruit preserves by putting whatever fruit she was using, pears or figs or whatever, into a pot on the stove. She’d add her sugar and a little water and any spices she might like, and let the mixture boil while she was cooking breakfast. Then, when she finished the meal and the fire was beginning to go out, she’d cover her pan up. Then the next time she started the fire in the stove up, she’d let the fruit get to boiling again. Sometimes it’d take her a couple of days to get the preserves ready, but they’d sure be good. They were better than any I’ve ever made.”

  PEAR PRESERVES

  Wash pears, peel, and cut into quarters. Rinse and place a layer of sugar and a layer of pears until all the fruit has been used. Let this stand overnight. Put over moderate heat and cook until well done and a syrup has been made from the mixture. Put into sterile jars and seal.

  MINT JELLY FROM APPLE JUICE

  One cup mint leaves (chopped fine and packed tight). Pour boiling water over the clean mint leaves, cover and allow to steep for one hour. Press juice from the leaves and add 2 tablespoons of this extract to 1 cup apple juice and ¾ cup sugar. Boil until jelly test is reached. Add green food coloring. Pour into hot glasses and seal.

  QUINCE HONEY

  1 quart (2 pounds) sugar

  1 pint water

  3 quinces

  Grate quinces. Boil sugar and water and add grated quinces and let boil twenty minutes. Seal in jars. Pear honey is made the same way.

  SORGHUM

  Years ago, when sugar was hard to get, sorghum and honey were often the only sweeteners available to farm families. So, in typical mountain fashion, families grew sorghum cane; usually one or two families in the community had a sorghum mill; and neighbors helped neighbors harvest and produce sorghum, sharing the final product. Minyard Conner remembered fondly the times his family worked together with his neighbor Bill Lamb at sorghum-harvesting time. “We growed sorghum cane here, and [Lessie, his wife] and the young’uns hauled it in a one-horse wagon [over to Bill Lamb’s farm]. Bill had one horse over there, and we’d use his’n when we had to double up. Bill had a big ol’ syrup mill over there, and Lessie and the boys would strip the cane here and carry it over there on our wagon. [They’d help Bill make his syrup, and he’d help them.] We’d get a barrel of syrup, you know. Just living at home, wasn’t we!”

  We wanted to mention sorghum because of its importance to the diet of most mountaineers. However, for in-depth information on sorghum making and diagrams, please refer to the last chapter.

  APPLES

  Although frequently used in desserts, apples are also cooked and quite often served on the dinner table with the vegetables and meat. The following recipes are just a few of the many ways apples can be prepared to go with a meal.

  APPLESAUCE

  Peel your apples but leave the core in them, because there’s something around the core that makes the applesauce thicken. Use about 12 apples and cut them up into 4 or 5 pieces each. Put about 1 cup of water in a large pot and put your apples in there. Put them on top of the stove and cook until the apples are done, very soft. Run the apples through an applesauce grinder or ricer. Sugar may be added, but it’s not necessary.

  —Margaret Norton

  COOKED APPLES

  Peel and core your apples and slice them. Put them in a pan, add sugar and butter to taste, and cook them until they’re tender and the syrup thickens. I usually add cinnamon, but you can add whatever spices
suit you. These are good served with baked ham and sauerkraut.

  —Bessie Underwood

  SCALLOPED APPLES

  6 tart cooking apples

  ¾ cup sugar

  ⅛ teaspoon cinnamon

  Graham crackers to make 1 cup crumbs

  Margarine

  Water

  Pare, core, and slice apples. Mix sugar and cinnamon. Roll out crackers and add sugar-cinnamon mixture. Arrange apples in baking dish in layers, covering each layer with crumbs and dotting with margarine. Add hot water to moisten. Bake in oven at 350°F for 45 minutes to 1 hour or until apples are well cooked and the crumbs browned.

  SOFT-BAKED APPLES

  ILLUSTRATION 9 Addie Norton

  Peel and core 12 apples. Cut each into 8 or 10 pieces. Place in a shallow baking pan and sprinkle with sugar. Add a small amount of water and cook on top of the stove until apples are tender. Put the pan inside the oven and bake a while longer.

  Serve the apples as is, although the guests usually will mash them, as they are very soft.

  —Addie Norton

  VEGETABLES

  The following recipes for fresh or canned vegetables come from interviewees who used them to feed their own families for many years. Many of these recipes were passed down from mother to daughter for generations and still frequently grace the kitchen tables of grateful families throughout northeastern Georgia.

  BAKED BEANS

  Pick [white half-runner] beans when they turn yellow. Shell them out. Place the beans in a pot and cook in water until they’re tender. Drain water and put some onions in them, then add bacon, salt, tomato catsup, and a little vinegar. Pour them into pint canning jars and let them come to a boil, in a pan on the stove, to seal them.

  —Margaret Norton

  BEETS

  Choose small beets and wash them with the skins on. Then cut the tops off, leaving about an inch of the top on the beets so they won’t bleed. Then you boil them until they’re tender with the skin still on. When they are done boiling, cool and just slip the skins off with your hands and slice the beets up. For buttered beets, add enough water to cover them, salt and butter to taste, and simmer for around 10 minutes. For pickled beets, instead of adding butter and salt, you add, again, enough water to cover them, and then vinegar and sugar to taste, and simmer for 10 minutes.

  —Juanita Kilby

  CABBAGE

  For fried cabbage, you wash and coarsely chop a head of cabbage. Then you cook it in about a cup of salt water with streak o’ lean drippings [streak o’ lean is pork meat that is salt-cured and has one streak of lean meat running through fat meat] and about a teaspoon of sugar until it is tender.

  —Juanita Kilby

  CORN

  Select about 6 ripe ears of corn and shuck, wash, and silk them. Then cut the corn off the cob and scrape the cob. Combine this with ½ cup of water and ¼ stick of margarine in a black skillet and cook in the oven, stirring it every now and then. It needs to cook approximately 30 minutes.

  —Juanita Kilby

  GREEN BEANS

  I LLUSTRATION 10 Bertha Waldroop

  Pick the green beans from the garden. Wash them and string them. Put them in a pot and cover them with water. I add Wesson oil, but you can put a piece of fatback [a piece of fat pork meat] in them too. Add salt to taste. Let them cook down until they’re tender and almost dry.

  —Bertha Waldroop

  HOMINY

  The various methods of preservation lent different tastes and textures to ordinary garden vegetables. These methods helped women provide many tasty and interesting meals for their families with a small number of vegetable choices.

  Certain vegetables seem to have been more versatile than others. Corn, for example, had many uses, from vegetable to meal for bread, from snack to decoration of the family Christmas tree. Another use for corn was making hominy. Served as a starch, hominy is a delicious variation of a very prevalent vegetable in the mountains.

  Although the making of hominy is generations old, the method has changed little through the years. In fact, Belle Wilburn Henslee, who learned how to make hominy from her mother, told us, “The process of makin’ it hasn’t changed any except according to what you lye it with. I used soda to lye mine, but old people used to use lye off of ashes, corncob ashes or hickory wood ashes.”

  For those who don’t use “bought lye,” making the lye with which to make the hominy is the first step in the process. To make the lye, water is dripped through oak or hickory ashes that have been saved from the fireplace. The ashes are placed in a metal barrel (which may be made of iron, plastic, or porcelain, but not aluminum, as it corrodes in the presence of the lye) with a spouted hole in its bottom. A few gallons of water are slowly poured over the ashes and allowed to drip into another bucket beneath the metal barrel, yielding the lye. The lye-making process should take about two hours.

  Once the lye is made, approximately a peck [¼ bushel] of dried corn is shucked, silked, and, according to Mrs. Algie Norton, shelled by hand “so y’ could get all the sorry grains and things out of it” and placed in a large washpot along with one part lye and two parts water to cook over a fire. After several hours of boiling, the skins and shells of the corn should begin to come off, at which point the pot is taken off the fire, and the corn is removed. The next step is to thoroughly wash the lye off the corn. Belle Henslee stated that “you wash it an’ wash it—I don’t know, about a dozen times or more!” Mrs. Norton agreed with her, saying that “you’d have t’ wash it through maybe a dozen waters and rub it t’ get all that skin off.”

  After being washed to remove all the lye, the corn is placed in a pot and put back on to boil until it is tender. Once the corn is tender, it is ready to be consumed by those eager for the rewards of their hard work, fried with bacon grease, or “put up” by either freezing or canning it. According to Mrs. Norton, once the corn has been cooked, “y’ take it out when it’s good and tender and done. Then y’ had some good eatin’.”

  I LLUSTRATION 11 Granny Carrie McCurry

  Granny Carrie McCurry told us her method of making lye. “For hominy, I always take hickory wood and burn it and take them ashes and put it up and drip the lye to use. Or you can keep the hot ashes and tie ’em up in a rag and do it. Fill your pot with water and put the corn in and the lye in and boil that until the skin [of the corn] comes off, and then you take the corn out and wash it, parboil it, soak it, and get the lye out of it.” If you’re doing it with a bag of ashes instead of lye, she adds, just get a handful and tie it up in a rag, stick it down in the pot, and boil it with the corn.

  The best place to cook hominy, Mrs. Norton and Belle Henslee agree, is in a big, black iron washpot. Belle Henslee suggests waiting for a clear day in order to get a good fire and to make washing the hominy numerous times much more pleasant. Mrs. Norton added that “y’ always make it in the wintertime. Houses were open enough ’til y’ had plenty of ice, and anything y’ had froze in it. Out somewhere away from the chimney or fireplace, it’d keep for a week.”

  MUSTARD GREENS

  Pick a mess of greens and wash them at least 4 or 5 times until the water is clear. Then take out the stem and boil the greens in salt water until they are tender. This takes about 1 hour. Then take them out of the water and place them in a skillet with streak o’ lean drippings, add about a teaspoon of sugar, and fry them for about 10 minutes.

  —Juanita Kilby

  PARCHING PEANUTS

  Preheat your oven to a moderate temperature. Be careful not to let the stove get too hot. Put the raw, dried peanuts in a shallow pan and place in the oven. Test them every few minutes to see if they are parched to your satisfaction. It will usually take 15 to 20 minutes.

  —Ruth Cabe

  COOKING PICKLED BEANS

  ILLUSTRATION 12 Ruth Cabe

  Wash pickled beans once to get the salt and vinegar taste out. Then cook in a small amount of water with 1 tablespoon bacon grease for 15 to 20 minutes, just long enough to heat t
hem throughout and to cook the water out.

  —Lucy York

  POTATO SALAD

  For 6 to 8 servings of potato salad, peel, wash, and dice 6 Irish potatoes. Then boil and drain them. Add about ¼ cup cubed pickles or relish, a tablespoon of mayonnaise, a teaspoon of mustard, 3 chopped boiled eggs, and salt to taste, and mix.

  —Juanita Kilby

  RUTABAGAS

  Peel them and slice them, and cook them in salt water to cover with approximately ¼ cup of brown sugar and drippings of streak o’ lean. They should be cooked until they are tender and almost dry.

  —Juanita Kilby

  SAUERKRAUT

  Another vegetable that was transformed by good cooks into many different, tasty dishes is cabbage. Aside from the obvious slaw and fried or boiled cabbage, sauerkraut is an ingenious way of both preserving an easily grown vegetable and providing more variety at the dinner table.