Comfort foods and my canner

My bronchitis is still with me but subsiding nicely…finally. Last weekend when I was feeling my worst, I decided we needed to have some homemade soup. That always is the best medicine isn’t it? So I whipped up a great big pot of minestrone, and I do mean a BIG pot! One of these days I have to remember that we no longer have bottomless pit teenagers in the house to feed! LOL! So this pot was so big that we were either going to be eating it all week long just to get rid of it, or it had to be canned. The canner doesn’t get used much anymore because my stove here is electric. Anyone who uses a canner understands why that just doesn’t work very efficiently! With these new fangled electric stoves that heat up then cut off make it almost impossible to control the pressure in a canner. It can be done though with alot of babysitting and persistence and here is the result!

Three quarts of minestrone any time we want it! Yay! A much better option than eating it until we can’t stand the sight of it and then not having it when we do want it.

The soup is in front of the canner that made the trip down from NH with me. It came down packed all by itself in its own rubbermaid storage box surrounded by bubblewrap and ‘popcorn’. It’s heavy so it was not cheap to mail either. When Alysia and I moved down here, we couldn’t afford a U-Haul for any of the furniture and everything we brought had to be mailed ahead or fit into the tiny little car I had along with the three of us, or into the ‘turtle’ we bought in order to get the huge 100 year old antique framed print I inherited, something else I refused to leave behind.

So why all this fuss about a canner? It was because of its history and who gave it to me. When I was a young wife and mother I started canning. Only jams and jellies though since it didn’t require a pressure canner which I couldn’t afford. I was getting alot of advice from my grandmother though who was a very experienced canner having been married during the Depression. My grandmother, as so many of her era, could ‘squeeze a nickel until it screamed’ as they say! LOL! And she also never threw anything out. If anyone in the family needed something, all they had to do was mention it at one of the weekly Sunday gatherings at her house and more times than not, she just happened to have an extra one. One time that stands out in memory was when my Mom needed a sugar bowl and of course Grammy brought out another one identical to the one on the table. When my Mom got home with it and went to wash it, she discovered she had taken the one full of sugar! The family sure had a laugh the next week over that one! LOL!

One Sunday Grammy offered me a bag full of green tomatoes from her garden and also offered me her recipe to make piccalilli since she just didn’t want to do it anymore. I disappointedly told her I couldn’t since I didn’t have a canner and she said to let her talk to her sister about that. I didn’t understand what she meant but in the next couple of weeks I found out. She and her sister, my Aunt Sarah, had chipped in together years and years earlier to buy a new canner for their mother. She had needed a new one but couldn’t afford it. They gave it to her on her last birthday but unfortunately she passed away before she could use it even once. When they closed up her house, the canner ended up being stored at my grandparents house forgotten…until I also needed one but couldn’t afford it. My grandmother and aunt agreed I should have it and my grandfather even went out and scoured the old hardware stores until he found a new gasket for it as it was so old by that time that the original gasket had deteriorated! I still remember how excited I was as Grandpa came up from the cellar carrying that gorgeous canner and presenting it to me! So when it came time to pick and choose what would be making the move with us, leaving that canner behind was not an option. Dennis knew how much it meant to me and was on the lookout for it and he very sweetly called me the moment it arrived to let me know it was safe and sound.

I love using this old canner and something about the food that comes out of it just seems so much more comforting than anything we could get from the grocery store.