Kirby: Home canning: Crime in a bottle

I once thought my maternal grandmother was a witch. In my 5-year-old mind, I still see her standing at the stove in her steaming kitchen, stirring an evil smelling mess in a large cauldron.

Periodically, Nana would lift a spoon from which dripped something red and stringy. It was easy to imagine that the pot contained a small child, perhaps a missing neighbor or even a previously unknown sibling of mine she had fattened in the basement.

Later, I understood Nana was just canning tomatoes, something she preserved every fall along with peaches, beans, squash, beets, pickles and anything else she could fit into a Mason jar.

NOTE: "Anything" is a bit of a stretch. From personal observation (and a couple of minor injuries), I can tell you that it's not a good idea to can live ammunition, firecrackers, candy bars, lighter fluid, modeling glue and spiders.

Home canning is a bit of a misnomer in that it doesn't really involve a can at all. Technically, it's "jarring," because that's what people use. Nana had 4 million Mason jars stored in her garage.

It looked like someone had parked a beat up Ford Falcon in a pathology lab. The walls were lined with shelves of bottles of various sizes containing everything imaginable, including stuff that still had feet and eyeballs.

Today, I understand that Nana was a product of the Great Depression. Food for her was something that had to be put up against that terrible day when dinner was either bottled okra or a slightly more delicious pair of galoshes.

My mom inherited the canning gene. Coupled with a truly scary imagination, she bottled everything from pumpkin butter, to fish, to nonfood items like spare car keys. She then gave most of it away. In my basement right now, is an entire cow in 651 individual quart jars.

I thought I escaped canning when I got married, but one day my wife decided she wanted to bottle fruit. Peaches were all, she said. They were so expensive in the store.

We bought all the necessary items -- steamer, hose, bottles, pots, sugar and even the peaches. Not counting our time, the burn on my neck, and the bottle that exploded and ruined the kitchen curtains, our first batch of home-canned peaches cost $61.50 a quart.

But we stuck with it. Today we have all the canning laboratory equipment. We also have a garden and fruit trees that produce the things we bottle -- provided, of course, we spend the summer giving them the same care and attention normally afforded ICU patients.

Then, if everything works out, we reap the bounty of our labor. First, though, there's a hell of a lot more labor with the picking, lugging, washing, cutting, slicing, cooking and lugging downstairs into the basement.

Today, our cost for a pint of homegrown, handcrafted, and highly nutritious peach jam is right around $19. It's a bargain if I remember to keep my mouth shut.