August 23, 2017

When I was younger, I couldn’t help but notice that I had either time, or money, in surplus but not both, never both at the same time. If I was working full time, then I never had time to do the things I enjoyed doing. On those rare occasions when I was out of work, I had lots of time, but not too much in discretionary dollars to spend. During those stretches, I would peruse the farmers’ markets in my area, and buy up bushels of cucumbers or beets, or baskets of peaches, strawberries or blueberries. The more stuff I could make – and in those days, it was cheaper to produce home made – then the more money I could shave off the grocery bill.

In my canning career, I’ve made everything my mother made except for one thing: sauerkraut. That whole process just seems like too much work to me. Plus, she had a marvelous stone crock, and I’ve never had one of those. Truly, for the amount of sauerkraut my husband and I consume here (the kids never cared for it) it’s better all the way around, to just buy it.

But I’ve made lots of jam, as some of my friends will attest. Strawberry, blueberry, cherry, peach, I’ve made them all and in copious quantities. I’ve made bread and butter pickles—and of all the things I have canned they were the most labor intensive to produce. There was the washing (scrubbing) and slicing and then covering them in ice for a few hours. Then packing the jars, interspersing the cucumber pieces with green and red pepper chunks, and pieces of onion. I tried using those tiny onions but oh my goodness, those little suckers are a lot of work to peel.

I’ve made dill pickles more than any other kind of pickled produce, and I’ve made sweet pickled beets.

I’ve also made sweet green relish, sourced from cucumbers. That was one of my mother’s specialties. Recalling the first time I made that after my mother died never fails to put a rueful smile on my face. As the pot full of ground cucs with a few onions, and vinegar and sugar and the “bouquet garni” simmered away, filling my house with that loved, yet dreaded scent of autumn, I stared at the mixture in the pot and began to howl with laughter.

You see, when I was a kid I hated helping mom make the relish, because my job was slicing the cucumbers length-wise and then scraping the seeds out of each half and into a bucket. Bushel after bushel after bushel of those ugly green cucs waited for me and my spoon. And here was my first solo batch of my mother’s recipe sweet green relish—bubbling away slowly, seeds and all. I guess my memory had hidden from me the scraping part, as it would any other past horrible trauma.

The other condiment my mother made, and that my mother-in-law also made, was chili sauce. I’m not sure why it’s called that. Does anyone know? There are no chili peppers in it. There are tomatoes and green and red peppers, and onions; in my mother-in-law’s version, there were also peaches. I’ve incorporated peaches into my sauce. There’s vinegar and salt and sugar and spices: ground cloves, ground allspice, and ground cinnamon. I put everything into a large pot, and let science take over. There is a slow gentle simmering, and an aroma filling the air, an aroma that takes me back in time. The chili sauce only simmers for hours, as opposed to how my mother, and now I, prepared the green relish, which was a slow simmer for 3 or 4 hours for each of 3 or 4 days.

The scent of mom’s relish would sear my nostrils every autumn. I swear it sometimes was absorbed by my bedding, it was so rife throughout the entire the house!

I don’t make much these days, as it really takes a lot out of me. But this past Monday, I decided to make some chili sauce. I used a recipe I found in an old cook book of my mother’s, a book that dates back to the 1940s. It was a large yield recipe and I tried my hand at dividing it into thirds, so I made a third of it. The peaches were a guess, because, as I said, that had been my mother-in-law’s add-in and weren’t included in the original recipe.

 The aroma did take me back, as I said, and was pleasant without crossing that line the green sweet relish always crossed in the first hour of its cooking.

And the final product—seeing something I made filling a couple of jars on the table—that was pure satisfaction in and of itself. It always is. That sight was nod to whatever instincts that reside within each of us that hark back to the beginning of time, when we had to live by our wits and our work, the sight of those jars was a signal that I have done my job, I had provided for my family, to help get us through the lean months of the coming winter. That is a kind of satisfaction I have found nowhere else.

The taste test was last night at supper. Mr. Ashbury gave it two thumbs up.

Love,
Morgan
http://www.morganashbury.com
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury