Your next jam session
Young cooks discover canning and learn to preserve best of the season
Victoria Hobal’s students are skeptical when she tells them canning is worth the effort.
“‘This is what grandmas do,’ ” they’ll say. “I tell them it’s cool to be able to go into your cupboard mid-December and crack open a jar of cardamom peaches.”
Hobal trained as a chef and worked in high-end kitchens throughout her 20s but only after she became a teacher did she take an interest in preserving food. Now 32, she teaches culinary arts at the City Adult Learning Centre, a Toronto District School Board school for students 18-21 working to attain a high school diploma. Students there run the cafeteria and learn professional food preparation, including canning.
Both teacher and students are part of the new generation of cooks putting a modern spin on traditional methods of food preparation. Hobal learned the technique from her Aunt Giselle and Uncle Wally, who themselves preserved summer’s bounty out of necessity and economy.
Before long, Hobal started adding her own tweaks, such as those peaches, or apricots with amaretto or red pepper jelly with Chinese five-spice powder.
There was so much interest, she started selling her pineapple ketchup and hot sauces at a Riverdale farmers’ market for five bucks a jar under the name ToriEats. She plans to stage an informal canning workshop for friends before heading off to run the kitchen at a Muskoka summer camp where, yes, canning will be part of the curriculum.
Today, canning is part of a domestic DIY revolution but was initially dismissed as nothing more than a hipster tendency toward esoteric specialty food.
“Don’t mock the artisanal pickle-makers” cried a New York Times headline in 2012, a few years into the trend. There was, of course, a Portlandia episode in which everything from parking tickets to fallen ice cream cones was lovingly preserved in jars.
But the resurgence continued long enough to become part of the local food movement. Social media also encourages trying what once seemed too complicated: using some combination of acid, heat and sugar to seal in the taste of June’s cherries or July’s blueberries all year long.
Canning maven Christine Manning, 43, started preserving in earnest four years ago when her vegetable garden produced more than she and her husband could eat. Italian on her mother’s side, she learned from her mom and nonna, quitting the advertising industry when demand for her marmalades and zucchini relish led to a new career.
She now leads workshops all over Toronto, teaching novices to start with high-acid foods like fruits and pickles. A federal government website on home canning safety warns that tomatoes should only be preserved in a water bath if extra acid is added; a pressure canner is recommended. Manning says tomatoes are for intermediate-level canners.
For many new to canning, it starts as a “familial thing,” she says. “But people are interested in getting back into it because they want to know what they’re eating and they have more control when they take it into their own hands.”
Today there’s a slightly political bent to canning, such as a resistance to “Big Retail,” the same impulse contributing to the growth of the slow food movement generally, from fermentation to farmer’s markets, Manning says.
Joel MacCharles also learned, indirectly, from someone’s nonna. His firefighter father learned canning from the Italian guys at the firehall who often ate together, family-style. When MacCharles moved out, he realized his supply of homemade tomato sauce would dwindle unless he took up canning himself.
In 2008, he and partner Dana Harrison found themselves with 300 jars of jam and soon after started the blog WellPreserved.ca.
It’s tempting to believe the resurgence of canning among youngish, urban people is just another food fad, but MacCharles stopped saying it was a trend years ago.
“Part of (the revival) is canning and people becoming more interested and it becoming more accessible, but different styles of preserving are becoming more popular,” he said, pointing to the growth in foods such as kimchi and kombucha, and local restaurants featuring house-made preserves.
“It definitely follows from that awareness of where our food is coming from, and what it actually means to preserve it, from the ground to the table.” JAMES PARTANEN OF WEST END FOOD CO-OP
He and Harrison, both 42, have day jobs and run the blog as a passion project from their Toronto apartment. Their first book, Batch: Over 200 Recipes, Tips & Techniques for a Well Preserved Kitchen, was released in May and features seven types of preserving and storing food, from salting and smoking to water bath canning.
Harrison says preserving may have skipped a generation. Her grandmother did it; her mother was too busy working.
“We’re so far away from it, we’re starting to go back,” says Harrison, 43.
That may be why, at West End Food Co-op, workshop participants split into two distinct age groups: roughly, millennials and their parents, says facilitator James Partanen. Immigrants are also interested in learning the predominantly western method, he says.
Younger participants say they want to trust the food they feed their families. “It definitely follows from that awareness of where our food is coming from, and what it actually means to preserve it, from the ground to the table,” Partanen says.
What hasn’t changed over the generations is a fear of botulism. Manning, MacCharles and home economics teacher Jan Main, who has been in the food business 40 years, all told the Star they hear the same fear: “I’m going to kill someone.”
Following instructions and sticking to high-acid foods, at least at first, works for newbies and nonnas alike. Besides, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada, botulism cases are rare.
In 2005, one case was reported. A short-lived spike saw 14, 13, and 11 cases reported in 2006, 2007 and 2008 respectively but numbers have declined ever since. Five were reported in 2013 and zero in 2014, the most recent year for which data is available.