“Plant ’em in the spring, eat ’em in the summer; all winter without ’em’s a culinary bummer!”
–The late, great John Denver, from his song, “Homegrown Tomatoes.”–
Hello! And welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook! I’m glad you’re here.
This week, we’re exploring ways to preserve tomatoes to prevent winter from being a “culinary bummer.” On Monday, I shared my method of oven-drying tomatoes. Today, we’re going to start our discussion about canning.
But before I get into the nitty-gritty, let’s take a brief look back at the history of preserving food.
Preserving food for the long winters has been a way of life throughout history, and while canning was actually developed in France in the early 1800’s, canning in jars didn’t really become a thing in the U.S. until the late 1850’s. Prior to that, methods for preserving food mostly included drying, fermenting, smoking and salting food.
If you’re like me, you read the Little House on the Prairie books when you were a kid. I recently went back and re-read all of them–from start to finish. I was struck by how much of the books were devoted to fretting over crops, harvesting, hunting and preserving the food for the winter. Preserving food for the long winter months was essential to life. Naturally, without a good crop, there would be no money, but without the preserved foodstuffs, life wasn’t just a “culinary bummer,” it meant starvation. As I mentioned, canning came onto the scene in the late 1850’s, but most of the preservation described in the Little House books was of the more traditional type of preserving food in the U.S. at that time, namely drying, fermenting, smoking and salting.
In the first book, “Little House in the Big Woods,” Laura describes her parents spending days smoking venison in a tall smoker, salting fish down and storing it in a huge barrel, hanging strings of onions, peppers and dried herbs in the attic and storing the potatoes, beets and carrots in the cold cellar. Later, in the book “The Long Winter,” when the winter hit tragically early and then lasted until May, Laura describes the unrelenting days of eating nothing but a little bit of bread made from seed wheat they have to grind up in a coffee mill because the winter had hit too early for them to do their usual food preservation.
I can only imagine that canning would have been a luxury compared to the more traditional means of preserving food. Canning jars were patented by John Landis Mason in 1858, and while a revolution for preserving food, they were probably an expense that most had to think twice about. But canning did catch on in a big way and is still popular today, and even enjoyed a bit of a renaissance during the pandemic. Ironically, JL Mason, for some reason, patented the canning jar he invented, but not the lid mechanism. Another manufacturer swooped in and patented it before Mason could correct his oversight and legend has it that Mason died penniless.
Last week, I had the pleasure of canning tomatoes with my friend Em.
She and her family have converted most of their backyard into an impressive little urban farm. They have about 50 tomato plants, some eggplant, squash and pepper plants, several fruit trees and chickens. She invited me over to harvest some of her late summer bounty and do a little canning–all I had to bring were canning jars. I leapt at the opportunity, since I’ve never canned before and we had a super fun and productive day.
We needed about 20 pounds of tomatoes to can seven quarter of tomatoes. We started by going out into her little backyard farm and harvesting the tomatoes:
Em first directed me to the long, slender “San Marzano” tomato variety. Any tomatoes can be used for canning, but San Marzano are the traditional canning tomatoes because they tend to have a stronger tomato flavor, are less acidic than other tomatoes and tend to have fewer seeds.
The bulk of what we harvested were San Marzano tomatoes, and we filled out our 20 pounds with some other globe variety tomatoes:
Tune in later in the week to see the rest of the canning fun!
Until then,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
