Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [101]
August brings on a surplus of nearly every vegetable we grow, along with the soft summer fruits. Squash are vegetable rabbits in terms of reproductive excess, but right behind them are the green beans, which in high season must be picked every day. They’re best when young, slender, and super-fresh, sautéed and served with a dash of balsamic vinegar, but they don’t stay young and slender for long. We’ve found or invented a fair number of disappearing-bean recipes; best is a pureed, bright green dip or spread that’s a huge crowd pleaser until you announce that it’s green bean paté. It keeps and freezes well, but needs a more cunning title. Our best effort so far is “frijole guacamole,” Holy Mole for short.
We process and put up almost every kind of fruit and vegetable in late summer, but somehow it’s the tomatoes, with their sunny flavor and short shelf life, that demand the most attention. We wish for them at leisure, and repent in haste. Rare is the August evening when I’m not slicing, canning, roasting, and drying tomatoes—often all at the same time. Tomatoes take over our life. When Lily was too young to help, she had to sit out some of the season at the kitchen table with her crayons while she watched me work. The summer she was five, she wrote and illustrated a small book entitled “Mama the Tomato Queen,” which fully exhausted the red spectrum of her Crayola box.
Some moment of every summer finds me all out of canning jars. So I go to town and stand in line at the hardware store carrying one or two boxes of canning jars and lids, renewing my membership in a secret society. Elderly women and some men, too, will smile their approval or ask outright, “What are you canning?” These folks must see me as an anomaly of my generation, an earnest holdout, while the younger clientele see me as a primordial nerdhead, if they even notice. I suppose I’m both. If I even notice.
But canning doesn’t deserve its reputation as an archaic enterprise murderous to women’s freedom and sanity. It’s straightforward, and for tomato and fruit products doesn’t require much special equipment. Botulism—the famously deadly bacterium that grows in airless, sealed containers and thus can spoil canned goods—can’t grow in a low-pH environment. That means acidic tomatoes, grapes, and tree fruits can safely be canned in a simple boiling water bath. All other vegetables must be processed in a pressure canner that exposes them to higher-than-boiling temperatures; it takes at least 240°F to kill botulism spores. The USDA advises that pH 4.6 is the botulism-safe divide between these two methods. Since 1990, test kitchens have found that some low-acid tomato varieties sit right on the fence, so tomato-canning instructions published years ago may not be safe. Modern recipes advise adding lemon juice or citric acid to water-bath-canned tomatoes. Botulism is one of the most potent neurotoxins on our planet, and not a visitor you want to mess with.
Acidity is the key to safety, so all kinds of pickles preserved in vinegar are fair game. In various parts of the world, pickling is a preservation method of choice for everything from asparagus to zucchini chutney; I have an Indian recipe for cinnamon-spiced pickled peaches. But our Appalachian standard for the noncucumber pickle is the Dilly Bean, essentially dill pickles made of green beans. This year when I was canning them on a July Saturday, Lily and a friend came indoors from playing and marched into the kitchen holding their noses, wanting to know why the whole house smelled like cider vinegar. I pointed my spoon at the cauldron bubbling on the stove and explained I was making pickles. I do wonder what my kids’ friends go home to tell their parents about us. This one dubiously surveyed the kitchen: me in my apron, the steaming kettle, the mountain of beans I was trimming to fit into the jars, the corners where my witch’s broom might lurk. “I didn’t know you could make pickles from beans,” she countered. I assured her you could make almost anything into pickles. She came back