Georgia Varozza - The Amish Canning Cookbook: Plain and Simple Living at Its Homemade Best

Table of Contents

HARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS

EUGENE , OREGON

To my family

Who would have thought that all those hours

I spent in the kitchen, attempting to assuage

your prodigious hunger pangs, would lead to this?

I love being your mom!

C ONTENTS

M any of us today are choosing to go back to basics by simplifying our lives and concentrating on making our homes restful and joyful havens from the distractions and cares of fast-paced modern living. As we look for ways to accomplish this, we often turn to the tried and true methods of our forebears. Their self-reliance and knowledge of how to care for their families give us plenty of tools for creating a successful homemade life for ourselves and our loved ones. But unlike them, we are free to pick and choose what is meaningful for our particular situations and interests, and we can decide which of these newfound skills would have significance for our families. Learning to can our own food is one of the foundations of this chosen lifestyle.

Canning has been in existence for some two hundred years, and for much of that time, homemakers needed to preserve their harvest in order to feed their families during the lean winter months when gardens were bare. But with the advent of grocery stores and inexpensive canned food readily available anytime during the year, home canning fell by the wayside. However, the last several years have seen a resurgence in its popularity, and canning has once again taken center stage. With this resurgence comes the need for up-to-date canning instructions that take into account the very latest in safety guidelinesthis is not the place to haul out your grandmothers old canning receipts or even to refer to books written in the 1970s (the last time canning enjoyed a revival as a result of the back to the land movement).

Whether you are new to canning or have been putting up food for many years now, The Homestead Canning Cookbook will find a place in your kitchen. In this book, youll find recipes for almost any food, and whatever piques your canning interests can likely be satisfied within these pages. And you can trust that these recipes offer you the most up-to-date data available. You wont find anything fancy here, but you will find recipes guaranteed to please your family. This is good, wholesome fare that can be the start of many tasty meals, and even the pickiest eaters will enjoy the fruits of your efforts. Plus, seeing all those jars lining your pantry shelves is pure pleasure. I like to think the food tastes better than store-bought, which it likely does because you have been able to exercise control over such things as freshness and qualitybut I also fancy that it tastes better because it was made with love.

Canning as a Way of Life

As far back as I can remember I have memories of helping my mother make jelly. In those days, we would ladle the hot jelly into any jars we could lay our hands on and then pour a thin layer of melted paraffin wax over the top to seal them.

The years passed and when I was preparing to get married, my gift list included everything I could possibly need to process food in my own home. In fact, one of my favorite gifts was an All-American pressure canner and several cases of jars. I was set, and it didnt take long before I began canning in earnest.

In my first year of married life, I remember canning 25 quarts of tomato sauce, which seemed like a staggering amount of food to me. I loved to open up my pantry door and just gaze at all those quarts of tomatoey goodnessit made me feel rich because I knew that come what may, I could feed my little family. But when the next harvest season came around, I had well over half of those jars still sitting there. I found it hard at first to actually use the food Id taken the time to produce. I quickly realized that if I wasnt going to use the food I took such pains to process, it wouldnt benefit my family, and worse, we would be throwing away our money. So when the next season came around, I canned more tomato sauce, some peaches, green beans, and stew, and I made two batches of jellygrape jelly using purchased grape juice (easy!) and strawberry jamand I vowed to use every bit of it over the winter. We did, and some weeks our food budget was noticeably less. I realized I was onto something good.

As my family grew, so did my yearly canning count. Before long, I was annually canning many hundreds of jars of foodeverything from my beloved tomato sauce and jelly to dried beans, meat, tuna and salmon, soups and stews, and plenty of fruits and vegetables. In the fall I could look at my pantry shelves absolutely brimming with the fruits of my efforts and be confident that, though the winter storms might blow, my family would be fed. And even more happily, I knew exactly what was in those jarshealthy, organic, and preservative-free food.

Moving to the country and adding a large vegetable garden, berry bushes and vines, and a few fruit trees gave me even more opportunities to feed my family with what we produced. We also raised our own meat, and my canning count rose higher still.

By 1999, I had been canning for more than 20 years, and I decided to become a certified master food preserver through our local university extension service. Even though I knew a lot about canning food and had pretty much canned it all, it was a great learning experience for me, and I loved being able to give back to my community through outreach programs, the telephone hotline, and classes. Probably the best part of becoming certified was that I became more aware of safety issues and best practices, and I developed the habit of maintaining up-to-date knowledge of the latest studies coming out of government and university research programs. Over the years Ive had to retire or rework some old-time favorite recipes, but for me thats such a small price to pay for the confidence that when I open one of my home-canned jars of food to nourish a grandchild, I know they are eating safe, healthy, natural food with nothing in it but what comes from earths bounty.

How to Fit Canning into Your Busy Life

For many years I was a stay-at-home wife and mother, so living a from scratch life fit fairly easily within my daily routine. But I want to encourage you that even though you might work away from home part- or full-time, you can find the time to avail yourself of these same joys. It requires making choices based on your desires and being willing to give up certain things in order to gain something better.