At the end of last summer, my aunt passed the canning torch to me: she gave me my Nana's pressure cooker and an over sized box of assorted sized glass jars, along with various and sundry lids and rings. I have been looking forward to canning all year; it makes me feel kind of like a squirrel gathering nuts for the winter. It's the same feeling I have about logging for firewood (surely a blog entry for another day), making batch after batch of freezer jam, experimenting with pestos, and making and freezing zucchini muffins. It's the pioneer part of me coming out, and I think about how my ancestors used to do the activity; usually it's how DID they ever do this without modern conveniences?
Today my mom and I picked up her farm box that she gets every week from Helsing Junction Farm, and we bought additional beets at their farm stand. They were beautiful, purple beets, of a uniform size - perfect for our day's project. All together, I think we bought 17 pounds of beets. We had read all sorts of directions and how-to guides on line, as well as the original cookbook that came with the canner (very good recipes for squirrel, if you are interested) about how to can beets. We had all the jars we needed and we bought an extra box of lids and rings just to be on the safe side.
After reading every instruction under the sun, we put a pot of water to boil on every burner, and felt that we were prepared to deliver a baby as well. A pot to sterilize the jars, a pot to boil the lids, and two pots to cook the beets - already we were out of burners! How did people used to do this? We were wishing for our old wood cook stove at this point. Once one pot of beets was cooked then we could swap that out for a pot to boil the water to pour over the beets in the jar.
Mom's job was to peel and slice the beets after they were cooked. My job was to remove the jar from boiling water (with special jar tongs, I felt pretty important), fill it with freshly sliced beets, pour hot water over the top of the beets, leaving an inch of head space, of course. We felt very intellectual using our new vocabulary. I wiped the rim of the jar, used a magnetic lid grabber (another fancy tool!) to retrieve a lid from boiling water, put it on the jar and screwed on a ring. I'm sure for people who have canned before that this is not a big deal, but I was sure I was splitting atoms or decoding the human genome.
After I filled 7 pint-sized jars, we were ready to put them in the old pressure cooker (which we had gotten professionally tested earlier in the summer - a post for another day). We followed the directions to a T, loading the canner properly on to the rack, putting the lid on tightly, and leaving the petcock (more fascinating vocabulary) open until steam escaped for 10 minutes. Then the petcock was closed and we started watching the pressure gauge rise.
I had no idea it would be so nerve wracking. We waited for the pressure to get to 11 psi, then set the timer for 30 minutes. The pressure continued to rise past 11 pounds. Trying to hold down our panic, as well as the climbing pressure, Mom turned the temperature down. The pressure paid no attention to our efforts and continued to increase. We moved the canner to the side of the burner. The pressure advanced steadily toward the 15 psi mark. We yelled at Sofie to not come through the kitchen until we got the situation under control. By the time we arrested the ascending temperature, I felt like I had just saved the space shuttle. It was difficult to hold at bay the visions of the canner lid shooting off the top, blowing a hole in the ceiling and knocking me to ground in the process. Mom called out to me that there were only 13 minutes left and we remarked about the relief we both felt that it was over half-way through, wiping the sweat from our respective brows.
Meanwhile, we still had a truck-load of beets. The directions that we had been following had been a little lax in accurately detailing how many beets we would need to make a load in the canner. Mom put another pot of beets on to cook. She washed up some quart jars and I continued to fill them. We marveled at the difference in speed that the quart jars made in our process. I could easily keep up with her; I felt like a professional.
By the time we started the second batch, we were able to juggle the lids, the jars, the beets, the canner, and the hot water like pros. We were still not managing our nerves very well, but the important part was that we hadn't blown up the house. When the last timer beeped, and it was time to remove the jars from the canner, we lovingly extracted each one with the jar tongs and placed it on the marble slab. Each one was cooed over, as we exclaimed how beautiful it was.
As we ate dinner, we smiled proudly each time we heard the tinny POP coming from the beet jars. We knew the feeling of satisfaction that the squirrel feels when he sneaks the hard-earned acorn into the cache, knowing it will be there when he needs it in the winter. As we ate the beets on our dinner plates, I was already planning what we would can next.
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