Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [103]
6. Melt the ½ cup sugar in a small saucepan. Pour into the jar. It will crackle and harden the instant it touches the cool liquid, forming a crazy caramel spider, but in 20 minutes it will melt and disappear into the vermouth.
7. Decant into the empty wine bottle. Store in the refrigerator and serve well chilled. Invite friends over so you can show off.
Makes 1 bottle
COFFEE LIQUEUR
With very little effort, some sugar, vodka, and espresso powder, you can make coffee liqueur, though you will have to wait a few weeks to let it mellow before you mix that White Russian. The homemade liqueur tastes just like Kahlúa, which you can buy ready to pour from a thick brown bottle. They cost about the same.
Make it or buy it? Buy it.
CHAPTER 18
CANNING
And the canning season was on. How I dreaded it! Jelly, jam, preserves, canned raspberries, blackcaps, peas, spinach, beans, beets, carrots, blackberries, loganberries, wild blackberries, wild raspberries, applesauce, tomatoes, peaches, pears, plums, chickens, venison, beef, clams, salmon, rhubarb, cherries, corn, pickles and prunes. By fall the pantry shelves would groan and creak under nature’s bounty and the bitter thing was that we wouldn’t be able to eat one tenth of it. Canning is a mental quirk just like any form of hoarding. First you plant too much of everything in the garden; then you waste hours and hours in the boiling sun cultivating; then you buy a pressure cooker and can too much of everything so that it won’t be wasted.
Frankly I don’t like home-canned anything, and I spent all of my spare time reading up on botulism.
—Betty MacDonald, The Egg and I
I’m ambivalent about canning, despite the fact that—or more likely, because—I come from a long line of ace canners. My grandmother was a Mormon and if you’re unfamiliar with the faith, one tenet is that every family keep a year’s worth of food in the pantry in case of natural or financial catastrophe. In the back of the garage next to the washer and dryer was my grandmother’s “pantry,” its shelves sagging under the weight of mason jars filled with golden canned peaches and apricot halves bobbing in syrup, tomato sauce, bread and butter pickles, raspberry jam, currant jelly, spiced cherry syrup. There were also many boxes of Jell-O, bags of Lay’s potato chips, and cases of Postum, the decaffeinated coffee stand-in. This was not a beautiful Martha Stewart pantry.
No, that would have been my mother’s pantry, which occupied a corner of the basement under the stairs. Her reasons for canning were not religious but counterculture. She had to be one of the great commodity canners of the 1970s, making sure we would eat organic apricot halves in January rather than having to resort, God forbid, to Del Monte. Only children whose mothers weren’t paying attention let them eat fruit cocktail with maraschino cherries.
I remember well and not fondly the black graniteware kettle rattling and steaming on the electric stove, every surface given over to widemouthed jars into which, sweating and impatient, my young mother—a math major, one of three women to graduate from her law school class in 1964—funneled apricots and cherries and plums and tomatoes so I could come home from school and pop open a jar of golden peaches for a snack. They were delicious, but when I think about it now, it seems almost tragic, a sacrifice of time and youth and spirit when we would have grown up just fine eating Del Monte. Everyone I knew who ate Del Monte and Wonder bread and Skippy and Pringles turned out okay. I see these people around town all the time.
When they were in their early forties, my parents divorced. I never saw my mother can anything ever again. There was no more family and there was really no point in canning 100 pounds of apricots anymore. Had there ever been? She got a job, she bought season tickets to the ballet, she bought new clothes, she started to travel. She made fun of her earnest, industrious