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Yes We Can!

The art of preserving is passed down from mother to son.

by Don Genova

Only a buck: for helping his mom with the preserving, Don got to keep the proceeds from pumpkin sales.

I always have a hard time figuring out my favourite season of the year. I’ve narrowed it down to spring and fall: spring for the asparagus, the wild morels, the early strawberries; fall for the apples, the pumpkins, and the chanterelles. I think I have more vibrant memories from the fall because our house was always so busy. My father would start tearing out the remaining tomato vines and cornstalks, getting ready to plow our large field and work in the pungent manure he picked up at a nearby farm.

But my fondest memories are of my mother canning the last of the tomatoes, making applesauce, and preserving pears in a not-too-sweet syrup. Our pear tree always produced, but if the apple trees were having an off year we would journey to the area’s apple orchards to pick our own for eating and gather bags of windfalls for Mom’s thick and chunky applesauce that went so well with her baked pork chops.

As she grew older and I grew stronger, I helped more with the canning. I remember carrying heavy pots of steaming hot tomato juice downstairs to her canning kitchen, using my oomph to put crown caps on the bottles of juice, and sticking my body halfway into the freezer to rearrange the boxes of vegetables, putting the new ones at the bottom and rotating last year’s to the top.

To reward me, Mom would let me keep the money from the sales of the pumpkins my dad grew on our property. I would load up the little trailer attached to our Ford garden tractor and drive it to the bottom of our driveway. I would sit on the tractor seat and hope the cars would stop. They did. Fifty cents for a small pumpkin, a dollar for a large one.

In the genes: Don’s mom taught him everything he knows about canning.

My mom would have laughed if she had seen me trying to can this year. Our kitchen was under renovation all summer. The canning kitchen consisted of a feeble electric hot plate on a table under the deck. A large propane burner sat nearby to seal my preserves in a hot water bath. Washing and brining and cutting and packing were done in the laundry room. It wasn’t easy, but I guess I really inherited my mom’s preserving genes. We grew our own garlic, dill, and cucumbers this year, so I have a few dozen jars of dills, some pickled silverskin onions, preserved figs from our tree, and assorted fruit sauces and compotes from when I couldn’t resist the deals on blueberries and cherries at the nearby country market.

When I call my mom, I try to tell her about my canning triumphs. It’s hard to talk to her on the phone now as her hearing has deteriorated, and a stroke 11 years ago left her unable to do any more of her own canning. What I really want is to take her a jar of pickles or jam the next time I visit her in Toronto. But I can’t. Liquids of that volume are no longer allowed in a carry-on bag. And I used to be a baggage handler in another life, so I know the perils of packing a jar of pickles in a suitcase!

For many years I kept a jar of my mom’s tomato juice made in her last season of canning on a shelf in my pantry. I planned to open it and drink a toast to her upon her passing. But a few months ago, as I was shifting items in the pantry, I nudged the bottle off the shelf. It smashed into a million shards of glass and drops of bright red juice. I felt sick. I phoned my sister to see if my mom was OK (call it an Italian superstition). She was fine. Now I have to try to imitate her recipe so I can get another bottle on the shelf.

I have no kids of my own, but I love passing down my mother’s knowledge and techniques to a new generation of people eager to learn what to them, ironically, is a new way of eating. And whenever I hear the pop of a jar sealing as it cools, I am suddenly transported back to that underground canning kitchen where my wise and capable mother is putting up homegrown food for another year.

This is Don Genova’s last column with SharedVISION. Keep up with his culinary adventures at dongenova.com.