Summer is the time to take your pick in Texas’ can-do tradition
When a massive Ripley’sBelieve-It-or-Not fig tree grows in your backyard, a tree so big it looms over the roof of the house, you feel a special obligation to prevent hundreds of ripening figs from going to waste. That sense of obligation is what prompted four of us — wife Laura, friends Bob and Penne and me — to spend much of Sunday preserving a bit of the summer in clean, glass jars: harvesting the figs, clipping off the stems, carefully tending them on the stove as they jiggled in pots of boiling water and then ladling the beautiful golden preserves through a funnel into jars.
They not only tasted good, particularly on a buttered English muffin just out of the toaster, but the process brought us a sense of satisfaction. We city folks were heirs, at least for a little while, to a venerable tradition, one that sustained our forebears for untold generations. And we’re not the only ones. I’ve found recently that more Texans are discovering the satisfaction that comes from reclaiming old foodways like canning and preserving.
My primary chore on Sunday was to clamber barefoot among twin trunks the size of an elephant’s leg, plucking the justturning-purple fruit and trying to avoid the souring, gnat-attracting fig mash that’s beginning to carpet the bare ground beneath the tree. When my grandmother canned and preserved on a Central Texas farm long before I came along, my dad’s daily chore was to chop wood for the hot stove where she’d be preserving fruit and vegetables hour after hour, day after day for much of the summer.
Even though Dad fled the 40-acres-and-a-mule drudgery as soon as he could, he jumped at
the chance when my brothers and I were kids to buy a house on the edge of town with mature fruit trees and an adjacent lot for a large garden. Mom was a city girl — Bigfoot, population 250 — and spent more time behind the counter of her folks’ general store than she did learning to can and preserve nature’s bounty. But living in the semi-rural house that appealed to Dad’s farm-boy fantasies, she taught herself to preserve in Mason jars not only figs, but also green beans, black-eyed peas, tomatoes, okra and blackberries, not to mention plums, peaches, pears and apricots (even as she tried to corral three rambunctious boys). I have this vague memory of seeing her standing at the kitchen sink, steam rising from the boiling hot water, strands of dark hair plastered to her forehead as she sterilized jars. Let’s just say I had seen her look happier.
Of course, canning a one-tree harvest of figs the way we did on Sunday is nothing like canning a garden’s summer harvest. I suppose that’s why I can wax nostalgic about the time and effort it took for farmwives in decades past to make sure that nothing went to waste. Had I been in those stifling farm kitchens, I’d probably be writing paeans to refrigerators, air conditioning and well-stocked Central Market shelves, rather than a column about canning satisfaction.
The best description of canning’s tedium you’ll ever read is in the first volume of Robert Caro’s monumental LBJ biography, the chapter entitled “The Sad Irons.” He’s writing about Hill Country farm life that lasted into the 1940s.
“Since — because there was no electricity — there were no refrigerators in the Hill Country, vegetables or fruit had to be canned the very day they came ripe,” Caro writes. “And, from June through September, something was coming ripe almost every day, it seemed; on a single peach tree, the fruit on different branches would come ripe on different days. In a single orchard, the peaches might be reaching ripeness over a span as long as two weeks.”
Elderly farm wives recalled for Caro that after the peaches, the strawberries would begin getting ripe, then the gooseberries and the blueberries. The tomatoes would ripen before the okra, the okra before the zucchini and the zucchini before the corn. Canning went on all summer — along with hauling water every morning from a well or the nearest creek, cooking meals on a wood stove for family and farmhands, mending and washing clothes and smoothing out wrinkles with a 6-pound wedge of hot iron (“sad irons”), helping with the picking, plowing and sowing and, of course, tending to the kids.
Caro interviewed Kitty Clyde Ross Leonard, LBJ’s first girlfriend. “You’d have to cook for hours,” she told him. “Oh, that was a terrible thing. You wore as little as you could. I wore loose clothing so that it wouldn’t stick to me. But the perspiration would just pour down my face. I remember the perspiration pouring down my mother’s face, and when I grew up and had my own family, it poured down mine. That stove was so hot . . . . ”
You got tired, for sure, maybe you even felt faint or got sick peeling six dozen peaches in the fierce Hill Country heat, but once the canning process started you couldn’t stop. “Sick or not, in the Hill Country, when it was time to can,” Caro writes, “a woman canned, standing hour after hour, trapped between a blazing sun and a blazing wood fire.”
A Hill Country farmwoman named Gay Harris told him: “We had no choice, you see.”
These days, we do have choices, and many of us are choosing the old ways, said Terri Wilson, a park ranger at the Sauer-Beckmann Living History Farm at the Lyndon B. Johnson State Park & Historic Site. The farm functions just as it did more than a century ago.
“We get a lot of young people who want to learn about canning and preserving,” Wilson told me a few days ago. “We tell them what we do and how we do it and then advise them to talk to their county extension agent.”
The former elementary-school teacher wore a long dress in the style of the early 1900s as she peeled peaches in preparation for canning. She sat at a table in the dog run of the old house, where a breeze brought relief from the hot kitchen, the same sort of kitchen that bedeviled those farmwomen Caro interviewed. Standing next to the wood stove inside the kitchen, farm manager Hannah Kellogg handed me a black iron skillet as heavy as a bowling ball. We marveled at the strength and hardiness of those women.
I could tell you more about canning cucumbers, okra, squash, corn and beans the way Kellogg and Wilson are doing this summer, the way our forebears did a century ago, but I have to stop for now. I noticed through the window that another batch of figs has just turned pinkish-purple on our backyard Goliath.
Fig preserves, anybody? I hate to say it, but we may get tired of figs before the birds and squirrels do.