It is a thrill to possess shelves well stocked with home-canned food. In fact, you will find their inspection—often surreptitious—and the pleasure of serving the fruits of your labor comparable only to a clear conscience or a very becoming hat.
—IRMA S. ROMBAUER, The Joy of Cooking, 1931
Pretty soon, all the tomato plants in my garden were producing. At first we ate them raw, sliced and arranged on a plate with some of my sturdy green basil. Then we started making pasta sauce, and chilled tomato soups, and once I even tried to make my own sundried tomatoes in the oven (it didn’t work). I thought I’d tried every tomato recipe ever invented. As the season wore on, I even started to get a little bored with them. Everything, it seemed, was overripe. The garden was running amuck. I couldn’t keep up with it. It made me tired, just thinking about going out there and picking another tomato, and then having to bring it inside and decide what to do with it.
The squash plants were even worse. I had planted three kinds from a “summer squash sampler” of seeds I found at San Lorenzo, but somehow I got the seeds all mixed up when I planted them, and I didn’t know which plant was which. I didn’t think this would matter until one day I realized that what appeared to be a yellow crookneck squash had suddenly started growing as if spawned by aliens, turning a deep, hard yellow and swelling to the size of a large meatloaf. Every few days, I walked over and stood looking down at it, hoping it would have made some sort of change that would reveal to me whether I should harvest it or let it continue to grow. My friends came over for dinner one night and stood around staring at it. It was a freak of nature, springing out of an otherwise ordinary vegetable garden. It embarrassed me a little. It was enormous, excessive, ridiculous.
I WAS QUICKLY LEARNING that the biggest garden chore in August was dealing with all the extra vegetables. “August,” joked a woman down the street, “the month when everybody drives with their windows up for fear someone will sneak a zucchini in.” There is even a holiday—August 8—called National Sneak Some Zucchini on Your Neighbor’s Porch Night. I was ready for the holiday by the time it rolled around. I had been eating squash burritos, zucchini lasagna, and fried zucchini. I didn’t think I could face one more zucchini. I put my extras in a paper sack and left them on Charlie and Beverly’s front porch, along with a note reminding them of the holiday.
At last, the vegetable garden had taken off, and it looked like a farm stand gone wild: bean-laden vines reaching toward the sky, onions bursting out of the soil, Brandywines and Lillian’s Yellow Heirlooms turning red and gold at last. Mammy’s Holland tomatoes were so plentiful that I started making sauce of out of them and freezing it. A volunteer squash—perhaps it was a pumpkin—wound its way through the sunflowers. The oregano that I bought as a seedling in a two-inch pot sprawled into a three-foot-tall mound, sporting a dazzling display of pink flowers visited constantly by bees.
“Good God,” Scott said when he got home from work and wandered out into the vegetable garden. “What are you going to do with all this food? It’s practically leaping out of the ground!”
This is exactly what a garden full of ripe produce does: It leaps out at you, begging to be picked, demanding to be watered and fed so it can produce more. My Sungold cherry tomato plant spilled over its five-foot support and practically lunged at me when I walked past it, holding out branches heavy with fruit. At first, I thought of Sungolds as a light garden snack. I would pop one or two in my mouth when I walked by, then forget about them. In August, though, they started turning ripe so quickly and in such profusion that I felt obligated to stand in the garden and eat an entire meal of cherry tomatoes, just to keep them from going to waste. I began to feel like I was in some sort of reverse Little Shop of Horrors, in which a wild, overgrown plant feeds me and feeds me until I beg for mercy.
I would like to think that this sudden success in the garden had something to do with my own hard work. After all, I spent so much time adding manure and compost, fertilizing, and double-digging the beds. I turned a neglected patch of solid clay into the kind of soil that gardeners dream about: a loose, friable loam that is quick-draining and full of worms. I sprinkled it with fish emulsion, I planted calendula around its edges to draw in the pollinators. Whatever the reason, all I knew was that the Curse of Late Summer had arrived. I had more food in the garden than Scott and I could eat.
Giving surplus produce away seemed like the very best way to handle the overabundance. For a while an elderly man lived nearby and left sacks of lemon cucumbers on doorsteps all up and down the street. Charlie used to stop me in the morning on the way to work. “Could you use some lemon cucumbers?” he would ask, hopefully.
I always just smiled and hoisted my lunch of lemon cucumber sandwiches and lemon cucumber salad. “Nope! I’m all set!” I would say, and drive off quickly,
But now it was my turn to give away vegetables. I left zucchini and tomatoes on porches up and down the street and brought bags of mustard and lettuce greens into the office for my coworkers to take home for dinner. I bought a vegetable dehydrator and dried peppers, onions, and beans for winter soup. Finally, I decided to try my hand at canning.
Home canning is something that no child of the suburbs grows up knowing how to do. I had no memories of a grandmother’s farmhouse kitchen to draw on; my grandmothers were all too happy to stock their pantry from the supermarket. Canning for them had been a practical necessity; they saw no charm in it, and among the recipes I inherited from them when they died I found not a single mention of pickles or preserves.
Fortunately, Scott’s Aunt Barbara sent a copy of her mother’s famous dilly green tomato recipe. I decided to use this as a starting point for making not just green tomatoes, but also bread-and-butter pickles and tarragon-pickled green beans.
My great-grandmother Mammy had plenty of memories of canning. She approached it the way she approached everything else in her life—as a domestic art form, an ordinary experience that was magical nonetheless. She described the process to me in far greater detail than the brochure that came with the box of canning jars I bought at the hardware store. Boil the jars for a good long while, she said. It takes time to get the vegetables all picked and trimmed down to a size that will fit in the jars, so you may as well keep them sterilizing. Wrap a towel around the jars while you boil them so they won’t knock into each other in the rolling water. Keep one jar out, and use it to double-check that your green beans aren’t too long and that your cucumber slices aren’t too fat to fit in the jar. Don’t bother boiling the vegetables the way the cookbooks used to advise—the vinegar will kill the bacteria and the vegetables will stay crisper, anyway. And don’t use that fancy white wine vinegar they sell these days—the acidity is never exactly right, and besides, they sell plain white Heinz vinegar in big plastic jugs for just a couple of dollars. And isn’t the whole point to be economical? To save money?
She was very reassuring on the point of hygiene. “Scott’s afraid I’ll do this wrong and poison somebody,” I told her.
It was true. He didn’t want to come anywhere near my pickles.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mammy said. “I’ve put up thousands of jars of pickles and tomatoes and corn in my life, and I never lost a jar.”
When I told this to Scott, he looked at me, alarmed, over the top of his glasses. “Notice she said she’d never lost a jar,” he said. “What about a person?”
“Oh, right,” I said, laughing. “What’s wrong with canning, anyway? That’s how people used to get through the winter, you know. On the stuff they canned and dried and kept in the cellar.”
“Yeah, but who do you know who does that anymore? I swear, you must be the youngest person canning in America.”
He may have been right. I didn’t know anybody under the age of seventy who could give me any canning advice. But between Mammy’s reassurances and Aunt Barbara’s recipes, I got through it, filling each sterile jar with crisp raw vegetables, pouring in the vinegar and pickling spices, and screwing the lids on carefully, making sure I had a good seal before I put them back in their boiling water bath for one final processing. It was hot and steamy work, standing over vats of vinegar in the kitchen, but the would-be farmer in me liked the idea of preserving part of the harvest for the winter. At the end of the day, a row of pickled vegetables lined the windowsill, and the sun came through them, casting a pale green light around the room. I sat with my chin in my hand and looked at them, satisfied with my first year’s harvest canned and put away for winter.
Okay, so canning is no picnic. The kitchen is steaming hot, and it’s August to boot. Everything smells like vinegar. Your eyes water. You’ve used every pot in the kitchen. But there is something so worthwhile about the whole process, something so pastoral, about putting away the summer’s bounty for the winter.
So if you want to try it, you’re in luck. I have Aunt Barbara’s mother’s recipe for Dilly Green Tomatoes, and if you don’t have any green tomatoes you want to use, try it with green beans, cucumbers, or zucchini.
5 cloves garlic
5 stalks celery
5 small, hot green peppers like serrano or jalepeño
1 quart vinegar
1 cup salt
10-15 small to medium green tomatoes
Yield: 5 one-quart jars
Wash green tomatoes and cut into quarters if they are too large to fit into quart jars.
Sterilize quart jars and lids by boiling in hot water for 10 minutes, then pack in green tomatoes. To each jar, add a clove of garlic, a stalk of celery, a pepper, and a piece of dill.
Combine 2 quarts water with the vinegar and salt. Bring to a boil, then fill jars to one half-inch from the top with the hot liquid.
Seal jars tightly with lids and cook in a hot-water bath, ensuring that water covers the lids of the jars by one inch, for 20 minutes. Store for at least a month before using, and refrigerate after opening.