Pickling and Preserving: The Foxfire Americana Library - Foxfire Students (2011)

PRESERVING, CANNING, AND PICKLING

Before the era of deep freezes, store-bought fruits and vegetables, and restaurants, not only did people depend on their ability to grow food on the farm, they also depended on saving what they had grown. To provide fruits and vegetables year-round, methods of preservation such as canning and pickling were devised. Even today many families prefer the vegetables they can “put up” themselves to those bought from the store. Thus, canning and making jams and jellies are still late-summer rituals in many families, including my own. Though the actual work is occasionally tedious, the results are always worth the effort.

PRESERVING FRUIT

ILLUSTRATION 1 Lessie Conner

Lessie Conner remembered her family’s methods for preserving fruits and vegetables. “Before we bought our deep freeze—people ain’t had deep freezes so long, you know—in the fall of the year, we’d put up a big barrel of bleached fruit, apples. (Just peel ’em and bleach ’em in sulfur.) We’d have a barrel of bleached fruit, and we’d have a barrel of kraut, and that’s the way we spent the winter—with stuff like that to eat.”

As Mrs. Conner mentioned, one of the methods of preserving fruit was bleaching it. Several people told us that unless the fruit was prepared with too much water when it was later cooked, they could not taste the sulfur used in the process, and the bleached fruit was actually quite good. As Susie Smith said, “That fruit was just as pretty and white [as it could be].” Her brother Clive Smith also remembers bleached fruits. “My mother, aunts, and sisters would cut up apples to smoke them in the fall. They’d cut ’em up and put ’em in a basket with an iron pan. Then sprinkle a little sulfur in it to preserve the apples. They’d store ’em in a churn. We had fresh fruit all winter. You don’t hear of smoked fruit anymore.”

ILLUSTRATION 2 Furman Arvey

Furman Arvey spoke of what his family did with the fruit after it was bleached. “Applesauce and stuff like that, they usually made it out of bleached fruit. They take it and get a big barrel and put a run of that in there, and they’d get sulfur or brimstone—that brimstone was hard, and it’d burn—and they’d cover that [barrel] up and let it smoke. That’s what cured it. Turned it real white. And give it a good taste. Then they put it in jars. It stayed soft. It wouldn’t dry out. It’d keep. If they wanted to, they could just leave it in the barrel and use it out of the barrel. It’d keep right in that barrel. Be big oal barrels, you know, back then.”

Susie Smith graciously gave us specific directions for bleaching apples. She said that the first step is to find an airtight container or box approximately thirty-six inches deep. She remembers her family using an old cement box with a quilt draped over the top of it. They placed a hot stove eye from the top of their wood-stove in the bottom of the box on which they placed one teaspoon of sulfur and one teaspoon of cream of tartar. The sliced apples should be placed in a basket—she used an old market basket—and suspended from the top of the box and covered with a quilt. The sulfur and cream of tartar will burn on the hot plate, producing smoke, which will, in turn, bleach the fruit. (If the stove plate wasn’t hot enough to burn the sulfur and cream of tartar, they were lit with a match to make them burn.) The bleaching process takes about forty-five minutes to one hour.

DRYING APPLES

ILLUSTRATION 3 Ruby Eller

Another commonly used method of fruit preservation was drying. Ruby Eller recalled how people found a way to make the chore of peeling the apples to be dried a social event. “There were candy drawings, corn shuckings, apple peelings [for social get-togethers]. In the summer when the apples would get ripe, people dried a lot of them. They’d meet at somebody’s home one night to peel a bunch of apples and have them ready to set out in the sun to dry the next day. They’d go to a different house each night and help each other.”

ILLUSTRATION 4 Lucy York

Lucy York found a slightly more convenient way to dry apples, especially in times of rainy or bad weather. “I would peel my apples and slice them and put them in the oven when I finished cooking a meal. I’d slip the trays in there and leave the oven door open. It would take several days for them to dry because I would leave them in there only until the oven cooled down.

“Now I dry them over my hot water heater because it’s a low heat yet it dries the apples out. I can stack three trays of apples up on the heater by putting pieces of wood across and separating the trays.”

Lettie Chastain told us how she stores her apples once they are dried. “I’ve always dried apples out in the sunshine. Then I put them in the stove and heat them, get them hot all the way through. I pack them in gallon jugs while they’re real hot, and they just keep real good. We didn’t have gallon jugs years back, and we used large crocks.”

Furman Arvey summarized the whole process. “We didn’t have refrigerators or freezers. Had to dry most of our food to keep it. We had one kiln. That old kiln—I can’t recollect when it was built. The sides were four feet wide by eight feet long by two feet high built of rock. Then there was rock over the top of it. They tried to make it about four inches thick. That’s what you laid your fruit on. They didn’t burn their fruit that a-way. See, they just got that rock over the top of the fire hot, and it stayed a certain temperature. Then they took flour back then and made a paste out of it and stuck old newspapers—all kinds of papers—to the rock cover. It was clean, you know, about layin’ your apple on. I recollect that. Then they’d peel ’em and just cut ’em wide open and quarter ’em, you know, and took the cores out. They’d dry better and dry even that way. It’d take about twenty-four hours to dry a run, and then they’d put a new run in. It wouldn’t be over a couple of layers thick on the [furnace]. Stir it up ever’ three or four hours. Just go in and stir it, you know.

“Then they’d take it off and put it in sacks, and on them good sunny days, they’d take that sack and lay it out on the porch where the sun could hit it, and they’d go and turn it over ever’ once in a while so it’d dry out good, keep good. I seen a room one time—a little old pantry they called it—and I seen it stacked full of sacks of dried fruit.”

BURYING APPLES, BEETS, CABBAGE,
POTATOES, AND TURNIPS

Although drying was a common method of preservation, it was by no means the only one used. Burying fruits and vegetables was both an excellent means of preserving food and a testament to the ingenuity of the mountaineers. In order for the food to keep, the hole had to be well drained and insulated to prevent water accumulation and freezing. Sallie Beaty remembered well her family’s potato hole. “Another way we kept our food was by putting it in a hole in the ground. We did our potatoes like this. [After] we dug up our potatoes in the fall, we would dig a hole [in the ground and put them in it]. We put straw or whatever we could find around them. Then we’d hill them up. [Next we] put dirt on top of them to keep ’em from freezing. Then we took an old piece of board or tin and put over the—we called it a hill—so it wouldn’t get so wet. You could do turnips and cabbage the same way. Then, as you wanted a mess, you would go out there and get whatever you wanted at a time.”

Ada Kelly also recalled her family’s hole. “They’d dig a hole to put the apples in, put some hay, straw, or something in there, and just pour them in that hole. They they covered it over with leaves or straw and then heavy soil. Turnips, apples, and potatoes are all buried that way.”

The logical question of how the fruits and vegetables were removed from the hole during the winter was answered by Roberta Hicks. “You would hoe up the potatoes in the garden, then put them in a hole, then put hay in the hole, and place your potatoes in the hole. Then you leave a place to where you can reach in and get them out.”

ILLUSTRATION 5 Gertrude Mull

Gertrude Mull also told us about storing fruits and vegetables in this manner. She felt, however, that perhaps due to changing weather patterns, burying fruits and vegetables would not be as effective today as it was years ago. “Back in them days, they just dried fruit and holed up their taters—get ’em off the trees and carry them to the cellar. We packed leaves in there and put the apples down in them. Then we’d cover the apples over with more leaves. They kept all winter. Nowadays they wouldn’t keep over a week. They’d be rotten. [Apples] don’t keep like they used to. I don’t know why. It’s just the weather changing.”

Mrs. Mull recalled that beets were also stored in a hole before canning became common. “We buried our beets [to keep them through the winter]. We never canned beets. We didn’t know nothing about canning beets then. [When we cooked them,] we fixed them up with a lot of syrup.”

In spite of the skepticism about their effectiveness today, holes for fruits and vegetables were an excellent method of preservation, especially in this climate where the winters are cool, but not too cold. As Roberta Hicks noted, the fruits and vegetables “would stay good all winter if it did not get too cold.”

CANNING

“Back then there wasn’t no money, much, and we had to grow what we had to eat. We grew beans, cabbage, tomatoes, everything like that [in our garden]. We canned everything we grew. We dried fruit too. My mother dried blackberries. She just put ’em on a cloth and let ’em dry. After she dried ’em, she cooked ’em with a little water. Then she’d sweeten ’em. You could make pies out of ’em or anything you wanted to. Why, they was good! They aren’t as good dried as they was canned, but back then they didn’t have too many cans to can in.”

ILLUSTRATION 6 “Back then, there wasn’t no money, much, and we had to grow what we had to eat.”—Minnie Dailey

This quote from Minnie Dailey summarizes one of the changes in food preservation that have taken place in the past century in the mountains—the advent of canning. Although definitely one of the better means of keeping food, canning could not be used until glass jars became common and cheap enough for the average family to afford.

By the 1930s, when glass jars became readily available, canning quickly became widespread and is still very common today. Roberta Hicks said, “I grew corn, green beans, taters, okra, and tomatoes in my garden. In those days, you had to can everything. I canned beans in half-gallon jars and jelly in quart jars. I canned a lot of tomatoes. One year I canned a thousand jars. I had eighteen different kinds of jams and jellies. I had seven or eight dozen jars of applesauce, and a hundred and fifty cans of green beans, and about a hundred and something quarts of peaches. We also had cows and pigs. We raised most of our own meat, but I say most of our food was from things that I had canned.”

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.”

ILLUSTRATION 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.”