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Canning isn't a lost art for this Walworth County couple

Bill Austin gets a little help from his wife, Helen, as he puts up some jars of mixed vegetables, a new combination he’s trying this year. Bill will be entering his preserves and canning in the Walworth County Fair. He’s already garnered a drawer full of ribbons from past entries. Terry Mayer/staff.

By Lisa M. Schmelz

Contributor

It’s a home art and science that started fading as soon as the first supermarkets began cropping up on the horizon. Yet somehow it’s managed to remain as much a fixture of the county fair as the Ferris wheel.

We’re talking canning, of course, or food preservation as its known in home-economics circles.

The finest examples can be seen at the Walworth County Fair, of course, when judging begins at 9 a.m. Thursday in the Home Economics Building.

If you’re like me, you don’t know the first thing about canning other than it’s a way to put this summer’s produce on the table in the dead of winter.

I have vivid memories of my mother and her mother canning, but couldn’t take the heat and avoided the kitchen at all costs on canning days.

Now that my mother and grandmother are gone, I deeply regret never pitching in when they were “putting up” fill-in-the blank.

I regret never canning alongside the women I come from as much as I regret never gardening with my late father the very produce they were preserving. There is something noble and holy in growing and preserving your own food. What a wonderful feeling it must be to look at a hundred jars of produce and know you can feed your family if the economy completely tanks.

On canning days, my mother’s pressure cooker would take center stage.

Then my grandma would pull up in her Plymouth Acclaim, with an “I’m saved are you?” bumper sticker on the back. My grandmother was a God-fearing Pentecostal, who regularly sent money to fallen television preachers. She also was one of the most resourceful women I have ever met.

Her trunk would be jammed with cases of Mason jars. Sometimes, I’d help her in with them and wonder why she and my mother went to all this trouble. When I actually did eat a vegetable as a child, I could never tell if it was from the garden or the Green Giant.

Over the years, my taste buds have evolved, and now, when friends and relatives share their canning with me, I’m beyond thrilled.

Among those who will have entries in the canning category when the fair begins this week is Bill Austin, 71, of Walworth, who clearly understands my happiness.

An avid gardener and canner, he’s been exhibiting his canned produce at the fair for nearly a decade. Ribbons in every color of the rainbow are stuffed into a drawer in his kitchen.

For years, his wife, Helen, was the lead canner of the family. With five children, canning food they grew themselves helped the family’s bottom line. These days, she’s more than happy to turn the canning process over to her husband.

“It just kind of grew as a hobby for me,” Austin says. “The thing of it is, you experiment with stuff, and you alter your procedures and recipes. It’s fun. I end up giving three-quarters of it away.”

Jeanine Jung is a retired high school home economics teacher and home economist with the University of Wisconsin Extension. For 40 years, she’s judged Mason jars and their contents with exacting standards.

“The most important thing you’re looking for is safety,” says Jung. “Is it sealed and has it been processed safely?”

That’s it?

“You look for the fill of the jar. Is it over-filled? Does it have a certain amount of head space? Then you’re looking for uniformity in the size of the produce.”

And then you taste it?

“I have enough criteria that taste should not be a part of it,” she concludes.

Indeed, the bible of canning and preserving food, Jung says, is the “Ball Blue Book: The guide to home canning and freezing.” Step by laborious step, it takes you through the process of what my mother and grandmother did so effortlessly, including what preserving agents — and how much — to add to various produce.

Both Jung and Austin say their claim to canning fame is their tomatoes.

“My spaghetti is absolutely the best,” says Jung. “It tastes that good because I’m using home-canned tomatoes.”

“My big specialty is tomatoes,” says Austin. “Tomato sauce, salsa, stewed tomatoes, tomato juice and spaghetti sauce. They’re really good.”

All this tomato talk makes me miss my mother and grandmother something fierce. They were canning tomatoes the day my husband came over for our first date. After my mom died, I never was able to locate her pressure cooker.

But starting right now, I’m not going to wonder what happened to that beloved kitchen appliance anymore. I’m going to buy my own. And then, I’m going to put up some tomatoes.