The elusive quince and the Judy bird

All fall, I've been eagerly anticipating finding quinces in my local markets. One of my favorite party snacks is manchego (a Spanish sheep's milk cheese) with membrillo, and I've been wanting to make that quince paste for the holiday season. The doctor and I thought we'd found a quince tree in Sonoma (much to our amusement it was later identified by our friend Paul as a buckeye tree), which made me realize I'd never actually seen a quince in person even though I'd eaten the cooked fruit and enjoyed it greatly. (Ironic given my family connections to Latin America and Iran.) I felt like I was on some kind of treasure hunt as I looked in every major supermarket and a couple of farmers' markets for the yellow-skinned fruit, until I finally found a boatload of organic quinces at the lovely Bi-Rite Market (where the checkout guy laconically informed me, "yeah, we've got 'em every fall").

I cooked up 4 lbs of the fruit and promptly packed a care package for our jaunt to Florida for Thanksgiving. The membrillo accompanied a bag full of other preserves, gifts for my relatives, who are still bemused (and sometimes stunned) when they receive various preserves and chutneys. The membrillo turned out well, although next year I'll be experimenting with lowering the sugar. Strangely, the quince turned out to be anti-climactic compared to cooking a Thanksgiving turkey for 10 people, which was my job this year (keep in mind this is for my relatives, who are a discerning - read picky! - bunch of mostly Southerners, and they know their turkey!). I chose to do a brined turkey, but at the last minute found a new recipe for a dry brined turkey, the Judy Bird (named after its originator, Judy Rodgers of the Zuni Cafe, one of my favorite restaurants in SF). Luckily for me, it came out well (although we did have a back-up ham in place), and was delicious! I'll be cooking that one again.

Happy Thanksgiving one and all!

Can-a-lot!

Ah the bounty of summer! I've been meaning to post these magnificent photos (courtesy of the doctor), both to chronicle our efforts and just to have as eye candy. So much to enjoy this winter! (Although, since I neglected to label everything right away, it may be interesting to open some of these jars in several months....)

After a visit to the farmers' market, I plan to indulge in a dinner of freshly made pear chutney, goat sausage, brussels sprouts, and caramelized onions, and welcome the first hints of fall (even in the midst of what my friend Michael calls "the glorious 60" of Bay Area summer).

A pear proposition from the marketeer

My friend Kate the marketeer called with a proposition - she had a bunch of pears fresh off the trees of her in-laws' farm and wanted to learn how to put 'em up. So I gathered a few recipes online, and headed off to her place armed with some half pint jars and lids. The view from their place is magnificent, and it was grandly pleasing to have a sweeping view of the city and Golden Gate Bridge while surrounded by freshly picked pears (Bartlett, Bosc, and one other kind whose name I've since forgotten). 

I like doing a bit of savory with sweet, so we made some pear chutney first, and followed it with a very simple pear preserve. Kate had the brilliant idea of adding a bit of cardamom to the lot, which really enhances the pears (we also added a bit of vanilla bean in each jar).

Turns out Kate is a natural canner, and she ended up using the same recipe the next day (she has a lot of pears to use!) - this time, however, the mixture was more caramelized since she cooked it down quite a bit. I tried some today over plain yogurt and it's amazing stuff - a light ruby mixture of chunks of lemony pear with that cardamom/vanilla spice combo. YUM!

The more you ask...

Having said I don't really come from a canning family (although they do preserve many and sundry other things, especially genealogy, bits of paper, and car-related items), I have been greatly surprised by the memories of those a generation older than I who were children when their parents and grandparents canned. But I also got a great response from the Swiss side of my family with a more recent memory related to my pear posting (see below). Of course, I'm now wondering if I could get the doctor to experiment with the pears in this way next year (it might also be a good way of animal-proofing the pear tree!).

Mike's sister, Auntie Gita, learned to make a special "pear preserve" in Geneva, thanks to her husband, Yann. He showed Gita how to grow and ripen a pear inside the shallow neck of a suitable flask, RIGHT ON THE PEAR TREE. When it reached maturity and dropped into the flask, he just covered it with a suitable pear "schnapps" and thus making their own brand of "Poire Yann." The pear is preserved so long as it remains immersed in the booze. The following year, Yann succeeded in growing TWO pears inside the same flask; now they have "double strength Poire Yann"!

In a free fall, it sometimes helps to look back

After a really awful day in politics and the markets, there have been more pontificating talking heads darkly referencing the Depression. Since for many people canning evokes images of the Depression and World War II, I thought I'd ask some of my relatives about their family memories of canning. And boy did I get some great responses! I particularly loved the notion of cooperative canneries, which make so much sense given the room required to can a lot of stuff. (I think the doctor would have a chortle over the idea of her kitchen being a cooperative cannery, however!)

So this posting is dedicated to my wonderful family (anyone else have family stories like this?). Enjoy!

• Since you are in the business of preserving, perhaps the following memories are worth preserving, as well. When I was a little boy, starting when I was about four years old, I remember that my father and mother would drive to Indiana and Michigan and buy pears, rhubarb and peaches by the bushel and berries by the peck. Once home, we would cover the kitchen floor with newspaper to catch the peels and prevent the staining of the linoleum, then my father, brothers and I would sit around in a semi-circle and peel away, wearing as little clothing as possible and keeping the oscillating fan on high. I was allowed to wield a very dull paring knife - what joy, whittling! The skinned and pitted fruit would be cooked and then "put up" in Mason jars closed with rubber gaskets and screw tops. The berries would be put up with pectin and sugar and sealed with wax in smaller jars. But the best of the fruit would not be preserved but used by my mother to make my favorite "cobblers." Yummm! We also "canned" green beans and tomatoes. All of this would be taken to the basement larder for the winter, when fresh fruit and produce were unavailable from October through April. Opening the fruit would bring back sweet memories of summer, sun and our adventure in prudence and family self-sufficiency.
• Mr. Nalls, the man at the farm who basically did the farming and took care of the livestock, would pick the vegetables and such fruit as there was (I vaguely remember raspberry bushes just beyond the flower garden) and bring them to the kitchen. There were tomatoes, green beans, lima beans, corn, cucumbers. The cukes were used for pickling along with watermelon rind for pickling with mustard and spices, yummy. We ate various pickles all year long, enhancing meat dishes. Everything was put into Mason jars, and I can still see the steam coming from the huge pots at the cannery as the jars were placed into the baths. My favorite were the tomatoes, many of which were squeezed into juice; in the middle of gray winters, the yellow juice in particular was especially welcome. Everything was well seasoned. Nana also made Nesselrode sauce to put over vanilla ice cream for dessert. Just try to find that today!!!
• Nana used to do a lot of canning in late summer. My memories are of lots of jars being sterilized, the kitchen very hot (no air conditioning in those days), big pots on the stove top and hours in that hot kitchen. My memories are of beans, corn, tomatoes (yellow and red), etc. and my favorite, yellow tomato juice!!!
• The vegetables were put into the car, and while Cy drove us over the railroad tracks, Nana, mother and I sat eagerly awaiting the task ahead. I just remember there being a number of other women at the cannery; Nana seemed to know some of them if not all. And I don't remember if we left to do other errands and came back to pick up the jars later.
• Yes...I remember the cannery well....Charlie and I used to ride in the back of the big truck with Mr Nalls driving...we got into trouble once throwing tomatoes off the truck on to the windshields of the cars behind us and laughing as they splattered...such fun...remember it well!!!! And the delicious and well seasoned yellow tomato juice and "Cy's crackers" before dinner and wonderful Lima beans.

Why you should never play Guitar Hero when canning

This weekend, I was determined to start the fall "harvest" of preserved goods, and decided I'd make pear/apple butter. I headed over to the doctor's, who had plenty of homegrown, lovely looking apples. I picked some pears from her trees, and then we chopped up the lot along with apples for some fruit butter. I tended the batch carefully, following the recipe, and once it was cooked down enough to add the sugar, in went 4 lbs. (Sounds like a lot, but trust me - we had a lot of fruit!)

I stirred the batch around a bit, and thought the sugar was dissolved. And wouldn't you know it, the recipe called for cooking it all down for a couple of hours. So what better thing to do to while away the time than play Guitar Hero? I just had to get past a certain "medium" level challenge. Ah, the perils of heavy metal and the kitchen - I suddenly smelled something really wrong (but I was in the middle of a song!), and when I rushed into the kitchen, realized that the sugar was happily crusting on the bottom of the pot, and had now lent a certain caramelized  flavor. Read - burnt! Now, I had managed to go for a quick swim, but somehow, the intense challenges of Guitar Hero (medium!) had ruined my batch of carefully selected pears and apples. And I didn't even win my battle. Jammit all!

I'm only consoled by the fact that the doctor put too much cinnamon into the applesauce so we had to compensate by putting in more apples. Maybe there was something in that pool water today, or maybe it was because our political junkie mavens weren't with us (and thus, MSNBC was far too quiet)....

Oh well, at least the dog had a successful day in the country garden!

Pear as madeleine

The doctor and I canned pears in eau de vie last weekend (well, technically it was aquavit, because that's what was on hand). I've had a bee in my bonnet about putting up whole pears in alcohol, but hadn't ever had the appropriate facilities to try it. The doctor had kindly selected some d'Anjou pears from the local farmers' market, so I poured in the required sugar and alcohol, and dropped a vanilla bean in each jar.

As I stood back to admire these 4 jars (the contents of which won't be ready to be consumed for another 3-4 months), I realized they reminded me of Poire William, a digestif I learned to appreciate thanks to my Anglo/Swiss Uncle Mike. Mike was Rabelaisian in his appreciation of life, and the shortness of his life belied the impact he had on his stepchildren and step nieces and nephews. He was a man of great excesses (including humor), and a true gourmand. His approach to a family dinner (it didn't matter what the season!) was to pull out the raclette grill and fire it up, scraping the cheese over our potatoes while booming at us all to "pass your plates!" Fondue was a similar affair, only in this case the command was "stir, dammit, STIR!" so we didn't let the cheese clump in the pot. He taught me a lot about appreciating life, and his admonition to drink some Poire William after dinner to cut the effects of our cheesy feasts still rings in my ears every time I partake of a melted cheese supper. I miss him to this day, but think he’d be pleased (and bemused) to know that I’ll toast him when I finally open a jar at Christmastime, and taste a lovely, liquor-infused pear.

Stocks and stocks

The markets took a brutal beating today; while I normally don't associate canning with financial markets, I found this quote (from an AP article) to be fascinating :

One blogger, Michele Catalano of Long Island, posted this on Wednesday: "Dreamed about AIG and the stock market, woke up with the urge to stock up on canned goods and shotguns."

Is what we're seeing a fundamental market correction, or a panicked slide into something much worse? And what do we preserve when stocks drop to these levels? This past weekend, I saw a home jerky maker for sale in a cookware store -at the time, I imagined that it was for all those folks who care about drying organic or sustainably raised meat, but I now wonder if it isn't a sign of the times. I've decided to do some research to see if there is a rise in the inclination to preserve - if anyone has any anecdotal evidence, I'd be interested in hearing it.

Why tomatoes?

There's something supremely seasonal about tomatoes; in the middle of winter, no matter where they've been imported from, store-bought tomatoes just don't taste like summer. My mother and I have a keen appreciation for heirloom tomatoes, and I've hopped on several cross-country flights toting a large sack of them for her. Living in New Jersey, she scours her local farmers' markets for them, and while this year wasn't a great year for heirlooms, there has been some tomato excitement given the reappearance of the elusive Ramapo, a NJ native.

Given this familial thrill about tomatoes in season, I was quite happy when, in mid-August, the doctor invited me up to Sonoma for the weekend to "put up" some of the tomatoes in their garden. It was a chance to preserve that evanescent taste of summer! (My friend Dr W has been threatening to open a farmstand in front of their house, and their tomatoes are already Net famous, having been profiled in friends' blogs.) So we hot packed a bunch of heirlooms, from Early Girls to Green Zebras, and created some lovely tableaux.

Strangely though, I was most taken with our experimentation with sweet preserves. We had a large batch of tomatoes, and after the hot pack was done, we made tomato preserves from a 1948 recipe I found in the NY Timesand followed that the next day with the tomato preserves ice cream from Tilth, in Seattle. Both were a revelation - the preserves were a beautiful ruby color, with slices of lemon peeking through the chunky redness. And the ice cream was delicate and velvety rich.

Yum! The perfect reward for a long day's work.

Oh Preserve Me!

My friend the doctor (and fellow canner) will be amazed that I'm blogging, having sworn that I'd never do such a silly thing. But then I realized that I can funnel my strange (certainly to me as I have no exposure to it in my background), new-ish obsession with preserving food into a blog on the subject. My friends and family - to whom I gleefully bestow these canned goods - can now read about my canning efforts instead of having to listen to me blather on about the joys of larder stocking. So here goes.

My bible for this is a book which is now out of print: Oded Schwartz's Preserving, available on Amazon (and well worth the price!). I found it long ago in a used book store, and it has inspired me to try to do something that is far outside my experience (never having lived on a farm or through a Depression). Somehow, the act of preserving fruit and vegetables at the height of the season provides me with great satisfaction.

And maybe - just maybe - stocking the larder has some bearing on larger life issues. ;>