Putting Food By - Janet Greene [41]
Community Canning Kitchens
The concept of community canning kitchens was nothing new in the 1970s when they seemed to spring up by the dozen in every state: they actually went back several generations, and especially during the Great Depression they were a godsend. With varying degrees of sophistication and amounts of equipment, they offered householders without adequate means at home a place to bring their food for canning. Sometimes the facility was at a church or school, and the neighbors pooled their money to buy the canners and the containers. Today, many of these kitchens are fully equipped with retorts, blanchers, mechanized can-sealers if cans are used, and the cooling arrangements for jars. In many of these facilities, highly trained personnel operate the machinery, with the householders generally giving a hand with food preparation and the less technical jobs. Some of these kitchens also give classes in home-canning.
It is the general practice now for the kitchen to furnish containers and charge by the container.
Canning kitchens are particularly common in farming areas. Your county’s Cooperative Extension Service can give you information about ones in your region, and there are also listings available online.
Equipment for Canning Kitchens
Information about everything involved in canning in metal cans can be gotten from Dixie Canner Company, Inc., 786 East Broad Street, Athens, Georgia 30601 (www.dixiecanner.com; telephone 706-549-1914). Dixie designs canning equipment ranging from a sealer that can be clamped on a kitchen table and be used by one determined person, to what are assembly-line facilities. Dixie Canner does not sell the cans, but can steer you to a number of companies that do. One supplier of tin cans is Freund Container & Supply Company (www.freundcontainer.com; telephone 1-800-363-9822).
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Canning Fruits
There has been a resurgence of interest in canning fruit, now that it has been made inescapably plain that the average diet in the United States contains far too much sugar. The old idea that canned fruit must wallow in Heavy Syrup in order to be acceptable is a concept long discredited. Indeed, fruit may be canned without any added sweetness, because the amount of sweetening put into canned fruits is merely there to help hold color or to enhance flavor: it has no virtue to speak of as a preservative. So what does one use in place of a syrup, especially since water alone may be too blah for words?—fruit juice. It takes only a little more thought and a bit more time to extract it from fruit set apart for the purpose. The result is delightful.
As with all food that is being put by, fruit and berries must be in fine condition before they are canned. Therefore use only firm, just-ripe fruits and berries. They must be fresh—strictly fresh. They must be processed within hours of being brought into the house, or they must be refrigerated overnight.
If they are merely a shade overripe they have lost some of their natural acid content—and they’ll also be more likely to float to the top of the jar.
If they are extremely overripe they have lost a critical amount of acid, and, aside from the fact that their flavor and texture are disappointing, they might not be able to discourage growth of spoilers.
Never use “drops”—drops being fruit that has fallen from the tree or been shaken from the bush. These are on the verge of rotting, and they can all but ruin a good batch of food.
The individual instructions that follow use the Boiling–Water Bath at 212 F/100 C at the sea-level zone, with, to protect the flavor of juice alone, the Hot–Water Bath at 190 F/88 C at sea level. To people living at high altitudes we recommend another look at Correcting for Altitude in Chapter 3; and we’ve inserted just ahead of the specifics for each