A Winter Pickle

(Another page out of a canner's notebook)

This summer Lisa and I made two main recipes for dill pickles. One of them we made with no sugar, no crisping agent, no brining. We only used dill, garlic, mustard seeds, and black pepper corns to season them. (Obviously we also used salt, vinegar, and water.) Those pickles turned out tart but super satisfyingly good. I've already gone through three quarts of them and we're not even in the darkest dark of winter yet. They aren't as crispy as some commercially bought pickles, but they turned out to have enough crispness to be pleasing.

The second recipe we tried involved an overnight brining. we layered the pickles with grape leaves (a crisping agent) and used (as per the recipe) celery seeds, dill, sugar (which we halved in one batch and completely omitted in the other two batches). We used an apple cider vinegar in this recipe as well. The results? I'm not going to give any of them away, I can promise you. Ahem...not because they're so delicious I need to hoard them. These pickles aren't good. I mean, they aren't going to make me gag or spit them out, but I can almost swear to you right here and now that I will still have them in my pantry come the new summer. I doubt I will eat any more of them.

The cider vinegar makes a cloudy pickling liquid for one thing. Not appealing. For another they have a much less clean taste. And lastly, for some mysterious reason, they turned out less crispy than the batches in which we used no crisping agent. How can that be?

What's wonderful about canning is that you hone your recipes each year until each one is tweaked exactly to suit your own tastes. You learn which methods create the most pleasing results. So after a couple of years you are using your own magic recipes. I've been finding out all kinds of interesting things too, like the fact that most canners must love sweeter pickles since there are almost no recipes out there that don't call for tons of sugar in the dill pickles.

I've also found out that lots of people out there have no idea what a good pickle is because most of the recipes call for pickling spices which include allspice, cinnamon (sometimes), star anise, bay leaves, celery seed, mustard seed, pepper corns, and sometimes other strange things that are capable of keeping the maggots at bay in a world where you ate your meat spiced or not at all. We don't live in that world now. We have this great thing called refridgeration. (OK, well, most of us do.) These pickling spices imbue pickles with a kind of sickly sweetish pot-pourri type of flavor and aroma. If you look at the recipes on dill pickles in the store, (I'm talking about the good pickles) they don't use pickling spices. WHY WOULD THEY?

I am pleased to report that I have been meeting other women around my age who are avid canners. Laurie (the owner of Red Fox Bakery) told me she loves canning, especially jams. Yesterday Betsy (the owner of Luigi's Daughter) told me she loves to can too. She even canned her own tuna this summer. When Sharon and I started canning together in the summer of 1999, and then Chelsea and I started canning together too, I had thought it would be cool to start some kind of canning club. The idea came from my collection of 1940's Redbook magazines in which you will find many ads for jelly making in which the women are part of a "Jelly Club" and suggest you start your own chapter because it's so much fun. It seems so amazingly hoaky, and at the same time, genuinely fun.

Partly it sounds fun because here we are, a collection of women I know who are artists, crafters, business women, modern moms, sophisticated ladies with no obligation to make jams and yet we've all found how satisfying and fun it is to make your own preserves. Modern homesteaders who are educated, well read, intelligent, and in no way yoked to their men-folks' plow. I love to talk to older ladies who've been canning their whole lives, they are so awesome, but isn't it fresh to find so many younger ladies taking up the post as preservers of one of our most important life skills?

I know, a lot of people don't view home canning as important life skills, because we all know how easy it is to run out to the store to buy (pretty cheaply) all those same goods. But what would happen if everyone stopped canning at home? What would happen if the only people who knew how to preserve food were huge corporations? What would happen if life changed drastically and suddenly we all had to do it for ourselves again? I realize how apocalyptic that sounds, but think about it. Survival skills don't include "how to run a corporation" "how to enter data in a computer" or "how to file taxes". All those things are important job skills in modern life, sure, but they aren't what I consider important skills for staying alive.

There are things that modern people need to never forget how to do: sew clothes and blankets, preserve food, build shelter, grow food and medicines, and cook. Everyone should know how to do at least a couple of these things. Home Economics class was the big joke in Junior High. But who's going to be laughing when deprived of ready-made everything?

If I don't shut up now you're all going to get that queasy feeling that I'm teetering on the edge of some cultish fire and brimstone armageddon lecture. Don't worry, I don't have a secret stash of weapons underneath my floor boards. I am 100% cult free. I just get so excited when I hear of so many younger people learning to keep the old arts alive. I think there are still a shit-load of young people out there who have no idea how much fun it is to get attacked by a blackberry bush, strip it of it's fruits, and capture that fleeting wild summer flavor that you will never find in commercially canned blackberry preserves. I've eaten them all out there, so I know. The only way to trap that wild evocative summer bloom in a jar to eat in the middle of winter when you most wish to remember what sunshine feels and tastes like is to preserve them yourself.