A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [226]
In my few years with the North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service, my first job was to teach 4-H Club girls how to can what they had grown—usually tomatoes, cucumbers, butter beans, yellow squash, peaches, and apples. To be honest, they knew more than I.
Later, as the extension’s woman’s editor in the Raleigh office, I coauthored (with food preservation specialist Rose Ellwood Bryan) step-by-step pamphlets on the correct way to make jams, jellies, and so forth. I even doubled for Rose Ellwood on UNC-TV demonstrating how to can peaches—LIVE for one solid hour with no breaks or commercials. Unfortunately, I became so rattled that I canned the pits instead of the peaches, then got the silly giggles. That ended any dreams of a television career.
Every summer when I was little, my mother flew into an orgy of watermelon-rind pickling using a recipe supplied by a southern friend (you’ll find that recipe on Chapter 7). And during World War Two, she faithfully preserved much of what my father grew in our Victory Garden: strawberries and tomatoes, for sure, but also asparagus, corn cut from the cob, and an end-of-summer soup made of garden gleanings. The jiggling gauge on the lid of Mother’s big pressure canner scared me to bits because I’d heard tales of nasty explosions.
Canning and pickling fell from favor after the war, but once again, thanks to the recent proliferation of farmer’s markets and the dewy produce they sell, Southerners are trying their hands at what their grandmothers had done almost on auto-pilot. Today’s plunge into pickling and preserving, however, has little to do with necessity as it did in grandmother’s day. It’s mainly for fun. Or maybe to take the blue ribbon at the state fair.
Fortunately, twenty-first-century picklers and preservers can use food processors to speed the slicing, dicing, chopping, and puréeing—no matter how old the recipe. That’s something those eighteenth-and nineteenth-century food conservationists would surely have welcomed.
JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE PICKLE RELISH
MAKES ABOUT 6 HALF-PINTS
When I worked as an assistant home demonstration agent in Iredell County, North Carolina, I loved to prowl the countryside and ferret out the local food specialties. Early on I discovered Dixie Dames, a small shop just outside Statesville that sold heavenly homemade pickles and relishes. If memory serves, there were two Dixie Dames (elderly sisters) and the things they sold were made from handed-down family recipes. There were Plantation Circles (watermelon rind pickles the color of celadon) and bread and butter pickles, but my own favorite was the Jerusalem Artichoke Pickle Relish. Jerusalem artichokes, which run wild all over North Carolina, are a type of sunflower in no way related to the prickly green globe artichokes. The Jerusalem part of their name is said to be a corruption of girasole, the Italian word for sunflower. These artichokes are faun-skinned, knobby tubers, supremely crisp, nut-sweet, and low in calories because their starch (inulin) is a form that the body cannot metabolize. Today they’re sold as sunchokes and nearly every green market sells them in season (fall and winter). The recipe that follows is my attempt to reproduce that wonderful Dixie Dames Jerusalem Artichoke Pickle Relish of my youth.
2 to 2½ pounds Jerusalem artichokes, skins scraped off and the tubers coarsely chopped (you will need exactly 1 quart of prepared artichokes)
1 pint coarsely chopped cored and seeded red bell peppers (about 4 large peppers)
1 pint coarsely chopped yellow onions (about 3 large onions)
1 gallon cold water mixed with 1 cup pickling salt (brine)
11/3 cups sugar
2½ cups cider vinegar
1½ tablespoons mustard seeds
1 tablespoon ground