Every summer my mother put up several pints of bread-and-butter pickles. It was the only canning she did, and she had a very specific reason for doing it: Her signature recipes for tuna salad and egg salad could not be made without bread-and-butter pickles, and they simply weren’t commercially available. Even though bread-and-butter pickles were so popular and so common before World War II that they were given the name “bread and butter,” dill pickles and dill pickle chips were the only pickles grocery stores in our region carried. (I also doubt that any commercially made bread-and-butter pickles would have met her standards, but that’s a different story.)
My reasons for putting up certain pickles, jams, and preserves are the same as my mother’s: There are some things that you just can’t buy at the store. Some, like my mother’s bread-and-butter pickles, I can to re-create the flavors of home; some, like Fredericksburg peach butter, I can to capture the unique flavors of Central Texas; and some I can to supply a need, such as organic pickled jalapeños.
On top of which, home canning can be a lot like a fun art project, especially at first! You start out with a flat of blackberries or peaches or a mound of cucumbers, and you finish with glowing rows of brightly colored and delicious jams, jellies, pickles, and preserves that can be enjoyed all winter. In fact, the first year I canned, the results were so lovely that I displayed them on shelves in front of a window in full sunlight and never actually ate them all. (Good thing, too! Because exposing canned goods to sunlight and heat is probably the best way to totally ruin them.)
Over time, I’ve also figured out what our family will actually use up. These days, my home canning list includes tart red plum jam, Texas ruby red grapefruit marmalade, strawberry jam, Frederickburg peaches, peach butter and spiced peach butter, apple butter, bread-and-butter pickles, garden marinara sauce, pickled jalapeños (classic Mexican, with onion, garlic, and bay leaves, and Thai, with rice wine vinegar and sugar), and organic blackberry jelly.
Along the way I’ve learned a few basic guidelines: First of all, don’t can a lot of something that you never normally eat, because you won’t eat it. Do you eat one jar of jelly a year? Don’t put up 30 pints of jelly. For instance, I have a big organic garden, and every year there’s at least one crop that does spectacularly well. Several years ago, my green bean harvest was phenomenal. “Why not can them?” I thought. Perhaps this might have worked out well for someone who likes canned green beans, but my whole reason for growing fresh beans was because I hate the flavor of canned green beans. So I put up 10 quarts of green beans, and then threw them away a few years later, after I had (surprisingly) never actually felt like eating them.
Another gem of wisdom: Follow the recipe. In normal cooking, you can vary the amount of sugar or vinegar to suit your tastes, but do not try this with canning. There are very specific chemical reasons for the amounts of sugar and vinegar called for, and if you depart from the recipe even a little, be prepared for jelly that won’t ever gel, or pickles that turn soft or slimy.
Home canning can deliver flavor and quality that far surpass similar store-bought products. This summer, Central Texas is having the best peach season in a decade, and farmers’ markets have been overflowing with red plums, blackberries, and cucumbers; it’s the perfect time to try your hand at capturing the flavors that make Austin fabulous.
This article appears in July 9 • 2010.
