My wife Nancy has become quite the “canner”. We have more Mason jars in our basement than Wal-Mart. Regularly, Nancy cans jalapeno peppers, tomatoes, pickles, doorknob peppers, pickled okra, beets and whatever our gardens produce. She is also into jams and jellies and put up 9 pints of peach preserves that were simply delicious. She calls it her “Liquid Gold”. Really yummy. I recently gave her an electric canner and she has put it to good use.
Yes, she is now quite the canner, but it wasn’t always that way.
When we were first married, we had a crab apple tree in our front yard and one fall it produced a bountiful crop and my young wife decided she would make crab apple jelly. Before this, I think the only experience she had with canning and preserves was maybe popping open a can of pork and beans, but we accumulated some jars and lids and Nancy pored over the directions which called for straining the apple juice. She did, several times, but as long as there was liquid coming through the cheese cloth, she continued straining. It was her intent to strain out all the liquid and leave only the essence of apples.
With the apples still dripping a bit of liquid here and there, she strung cheese cloth hammocks from the end of our bed to the handle on the dresser. I think she strained the apples for several days, then set about to can the pulp. She added sugar and whatever else, boiled the stuff and ladled it into jars, then put the jars in scalding water till the jelly was canned and the lids popped.
A day or so later, I was eager to sample from one of the very few pints we had – maybe three or four. I opened the jars and tries to force a knife into the “jelly”. It was impenetrable. I believe if there was a hole on the bottom of the Queen Mary, one pint of Nancy’s jelly would have sealed it permanently.
As it turns out, Nancy wasn’t supposed to have strained every last ounce of liquid from the apples. The straining part was simply to keep out seeds, peels, and such. Nancy had made what we called Apple Rubber Jelly.
It had the consistency of a Michelin Tire, but when you tasted it, you know, it was pretty good.
