Canning (NOT 'Cannon') Time

Article by Jerry L. Martin ... Mr. Martin and Mrs. Campbell are pictured.

  I had mentioned to some people prior to this meeting that I was going to attend a “canning” class during the ladies meeting. With my poor pronunciation, it came out like a “cannon” class. My audience asked me why would a church have a class about “cannons.” I’ll have to work on my Southern accent!

On Saturday, July 22, 2023, the ladies of Faith Temple, Taylors, SC, met for a time of fellowship and learning. The fellowship was led by Mrs. Amanda Campbell, and the learning portion of the event was conducted by Amanda and her mother, Mrs. Lois Dean of Spartanburg.

In attendance were Mrs. Frances Long (Sandra Martin’s mother), Sandra Martin (my wife), Ann Burrows and her sister Mrs. Donna Auwarter, Brittany Saunders, Linda Trammell, Sandy Brown, Fronda Bailey, Roseanne Phillips, and the lone male — me. (The other guys who said they’d come abandoned me!)

Amanda Campbell presented a poem by Mr. James Whitcomb Riley entitled “When the Frost is On the Punkin” for the devotional. The devotional extolled the benefits and recalled fond memories of those days when families and family members gathered their harvest for the season and spent time together preparing and canning the year’s bounty. This was in keeping with the topic of the ladies meeting as they were there to learn (or learn more) about the process of home canning (NOT cannon) of foods.

Home canning recalls the days when our lives and the lives of our parents were simpler and much more self-sufficient. This practice was encouraged by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the dark days of WWII as a part of every American “doing their part” for the country and the “war effort.” 

For the meeting, Amanda and Lois brought two bushels of green beans from the Farmers Market in Spartanburg. While this doesn’t seem like a great deal of food, it took two hours of combined effort of the 12 people there (yours truly included) to separate, clean, and “snap” all the beans. This is a whole lot of effort beyond what you normally experience in taking the frozen beans out of a freezer for cooking. 

Once the beans were prepped and washed, they were loaded into the wide-mouthed canning jars that had been scrupulously cleaned and the mouths of the jars wiped down with vinegar in preparation for making a good seal to the jar lids. It was stressed that the cleanliness of the jar and lid (seal) was what determined how successful and how long the food could be shelf-stored without danger of bacteria entering and spoiling the food. Just about everyone had stories of glass jars “exploding” in the dark recesses of the pantry as a result of jars that weren’t cleaned correctly.

Amanda and Ms. Lois talked about the various methods used to can food over the years. Hot water bath method (simply boiling the filled jars in an open pot) was what many of the attendees remembered from their years at home.    

Following this method was the use of a stove-top pressure canner which heated up to six jars under pressure and thus shortened the time required in order to get the food successfully preserved. Finally, the use of modern electric and programmable pressure canners was discussed which allowed for preserving several jars to process at one time under strict time and pressure controls. These canners didn’t need to be heated on a stove top, which would keep the heat in the kitchen down. Everyone liked this feature! 

Most everyone had different interests as to what types of food were preferable for the canning process, and the most popular were vegetables of all kinds. Green beans, corn, okra, tomatoes, fruit, vegetable soup, meats (Jerry), and a variety of complete “meals-in-a-jar” were discussed.

Home canning would be, for some folks, a new way of preserving your own home-cooked foods, while, for many, it would be a return to skills and habits learned long ago. In either case it would be a self-sufficient way to keep the wholesome and flavorful food that we cook at home today.

My thanks to the ladies of Faith Temple for allowing me to attend (“party-crash”) their group.

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