THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 14, 1996 TAG: 9608130045
SECTION: FLAVOR PAGE: F1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARY FLACHSENHAAR, SPECIAL TO FLAVOR
LENGTH: 226 lines
HAZEL SMITH'S October beans. Peggy Ulrey's pepper jelly. Patricia Sykes' sauerkraut. Kelli Lueth's peach preserves.
When these local cooks share a jar of their home-canned specialties with family and friends, they might as well be giving gold.
``People are so grateful because hardly anyone does home canning anymore,'' says Lueth.
Home canning was a way of life when more people lived on farms. Canning, pickling and preserving were the methods folks used to turn summer's harvest into winter's pantry.
Yet a survey by Heinz, a food manufacturer, and Alltrista, a home-canning-product manufacturer, shows that 25 percent of people canning and pickling today have been doing it less than four years.
These days, when fresh and canned foods are plentiful year-round, why would anyone take up the time-consuming pastime of canning?
Lots of reasons.
``My impression is that people aren't processing foods in a big way like they used to,'' says Carole Thorpe, extension agent with Virginia Cooperative Extension in Chesapeake. ``But they are curious about the process, so they might choose one or two recipes like pickles or salsa to make for their family or to give as gifts.''
The recent surge of interest parallels the rise in popularity of all types of scratch cooking, says Thorpe and other food-trend watchers. It also goes hand in hand with the growing numbers of vegetable gardens and pick-your-own farms.
Home canners often inherited their love of canning from a grandmother, who patiently passed along the do's and don't's of an art that maybe isn't dying after all.
These days, local extension services do what grandmother used to do, dispensing advice to consumers who wonder: What equipment will I need? How do I eliminate the risk of botulism? Where do I find reliable recipes?
Meet some home canners who are keeping the art alive and well in Hampton Roads. HAZEL SMITH
At the north end of Knotts Island, N.C., sit the community's only restaurant and store. At the southern tip is the dock where the ferry departs for the mainland. In between are the homes of the 600 families who live on the peaceful island, where life seems unhurried, even sleepy.
But many front doors open into homes like Hazel Smith's, where handmade decorative touches and shelvesful of home-canned foods suggest that somebody here is hard at work, every day, all day.
``We're always busy doing something down here,'' says Smith, a great-grandmother with the talents and the heart of Mayberry's Aunt Bee.
This summer, Smith estimates, she will put up about 75 jars of fruits, vegetables, juices, jams and jellies in the canning kitchen that sits just past the scuppernog grapevines and the fig and apple trees in her backyard. When she and her husband were raising their four children, a typical summer's yield was 300 jars or more.
``Now home canning is my pleasure,'' says Smith, who is a widow.
One recent summer day, in the tidy kitchen with crisp white curtains, several thickly frosted sheet cakes sat ready to be delivered to a homeless shelter an hour away in Virginia Beach. A countertop was heaped with handicrafts left over from the island's July peach festival. Smith helped fry 1,700 peach pies for the annual event that benefits the Ruritan Club.
``We are blessed in so many ways,'' she says. ``My greatest joy is in being able to share with others.''
From the time she got married at age 18 and learned how to can from her mother-in-law, Smith has been sharing what she makes with others.
``My husband and I had an open-door policy,'' she says. ``Friends were always dropping by and of course they were invited to stay for a meal. It was real nice to be able to prepare that meal from things I'd made myself.''
Company might get fresh-baked meatloaf and corn bread but the trimmings were Smith's canned goods - the October beans that are her specialty, collards, corn, green beans, sweet potatoes. And, for starters, a jar of homemade vegetable soup.
When her son lived in Alaska for seven years, Smith found a way for him to enjoy the greens and beans he was raised on. Twice yearly, she sent him a dozen quart jars of her canned goods. She cushioned each jar in several layers of newspaper, before packing it into an aluminum can.
This season apple butter is next on Smith's canning menu - the favorite of a granddaughter, ``who likes it so much she could eat six jars at a sitting.'' When it gets too hot in the canning kitchen, Smith will return to her cool living room. But she won't put her feet up. Instead she'll work on the quilt she's making for her church. PEGGY ULREY
Folks on Peggy Ulrey's Christmas list sure are lucky. Her gift baskets are stuffed with homemade cranberry bread, cookies and candy. They sparkle with the bright red, green and gold of the hot pepper jellies and fig preserves she put up in the summer.
These specialties are the labor of a woman who loves to cook and the legacy of a grandmother who taught her how. The Christmas baskets are what the rest of us talk about making but never have the time for.
Year-round, Ulrey takes time to can and cook as her grandmother, Verna Moore, did before her death a few years ago. Ulrey is just one of many cooks in an extended Pungo family that gathers often to share favorite family foods.
Their groaning board frequently includes grandmother's ``Saturday Night Special,'' a basic cake batter that can be transformed into a chocolate, fruit or pineapple-upside-down cake. And likely there will be bowls of sweet cherry cukes and pickled beets, recipes grandmother handed down to granddaughter.
The evening before her day off, Ulrey picks the fruits and vegetables she will preserve the next day. So far this season she has put up ``about six cases,'' including dill pickles, pickled squash and her signature pepper jellies. Tomatoes, peaches and apples are next in line to take the hot-water-bath plunge.
On a cold day, when lasagna is on the dinner menu for herself and husband Richard, Ulrey takes pleasure in reaching for a jar of spaghetti sauce she canned on a hot summer day.
``Everything you can yourself tastes so much fresher and you know what's in it,'' she says.
Blueberries and blackberries from summer's harvest often appear as a dessert cobbler.
``I make cobblers because I'm not too good at pie crust,'' she admits.
In a household filled with so many good things to eat, pie crust is hardly missed. JEFFERSON ``VICK'' AND PATRICIA SYKES
Vick and Patricia Sykes are retired, in a manner of speaking. He used to be an administrator in the Portsmouth school system. She was a teacher in Chesapeake.
But each of them still puts in a 40-hour-plus week, working hard at several hobbies.
Between early spring and fall, tending to their vegetable garden takes about 20 hours a week. In peak canning season, the Chesapeake couple spends another 20 hours a week putting up the cornucopia of vegetables the garden yields. Then there's the lush backyard garden, more than an acre of elegantly landscaped shrubs, roses and trees.
``We are very active people who enjoy working,'' says Patricia.
Her love of gardening and skill at canning originated in North Carolina during World War II when, as a preteen, she helped her grandfather tend his victory garden.
``Glass was hard to get so we even had equipment to do tin canning,'' she recalls.
Vick grew up on a North Carolina farm, where, he says, ``canning was a way of life.''
It didn't become a way of life for this high-energy couple until 20 years ago, when they rented four plots from a community garden sponsored by their church, Green Acres Presbyterian.
``We were a bit overzealous that first year,'' says Patricia. ``We produced 700 quarts of food.''
Now they rent just two 20-by-40-foot garden plots.
One early August day, about 300 jars, each marked '96, sparkled on the shelves of their neat kitchen pantry. The Sykeses make their own sauerkraut from fermented cabbage and process it in the 50-year-old pressure canner that belonged to Patricia's mother.
``We won't do much more this year,'' says Patricia. ``Maybe about a dozen more jars of tomato juice.''
Their prolific vegetable garden is nurtured by mulch and well water provided by the church, and also by a strong community spirit shared by the 25 gardeners who use the church plots.
``Everybody is very friendly and happy to share,'' says Patricia.
One of their greatest pleasures is letting 3-year-old grandson Tony help with the planting and picking.
``I think it's important for children to understand how things grow,'' says his proud grandfather.
No doubt Tony will inherit his grandparents' love of the land, and maybe that heirloom pressure canner, too. KELLI LUETH
Kelli Lueth is a baker at Virginia Beach's Cuisine & Company restaurant. She teaches cooking at the Adult Learning Center in Virginia Beach and Bouillabaise kitchen shop in Norfolk. She makes wedding cakes and is a professional caterer.
And in the kitchen of her Norfolk home, Lueth cooks scratch meals for her husband and their two children. She makes preserves from the apples, pears, peaches and cherries that grow in her back yard. Salsas and sauces from the tomatoes. Bread-and-butter pickles from the cucumbers.
And never seems to tire of being in a kitchen, though the one in her home isn't air-conditioned.
``Food is my life,'' says Lueth, a graduate of Norfolk's Johnson & Wales University. ``It is so fulfilling to go out in the field and pick one day and spend the next day preserving what you picked.''
Lueth didn't learn the art of canning when she was knee-high to a tomato plant, although her grandparents were farmers. She learned when she moved into her Ghent home six years ago. The four peach trees in the back yard were her motive.
``I called my grandmother in Michigan and asked, How do you do this?'' recalls Lueth. ``And she said, Kelli, you just do it.''
And Kelli did.
With her ``Better Homes and Gardens'' cookbook open to the pages on canning, she made peach preserves and bread-and butter pickles ``until they were coming out of our ears.''
That made her husband's grandparents happy.
``My grandmother-in-law says the bread-and-butters are the best she's ever tasted,'' says Lueth, with pride. ``She hides the jars I give her because when her husband finds one, he eats the whole thing.''
The real benefits of her hobby, says Lueth, come in the dark days of winter when the family enjoys the bounty of her garden.
``I don't trust a lot of store-bought canned food,'' says Lueth, ``but I know exactly what goes into mine.''
Soon the family will move to another house in Ghent, where there is no room for a backyard garden.
Lueth is not worried. ``I will find a way,'' she says. ``I will probably have to garden in clay pots.''
``My garden is my little piece of heaven,'' says Lueth. ``It is the one place I can go where I know no one will follow.''
But when she returns from the basement pantry with a jar of black cassis jam, everybody follows. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
RICHARD L. DUNSTON/The Virginian-Pilot
Before being canned, tomatoes are first washed and then scalded.
Such high-acid foods should be processed in a boiling-water canner.
``My greatest joy is being able to share with others,'' says Hazel
Smith of Knotts Island. She's holding a jar of string beans she
canned.
CANDICE C. CUSIC/The Virginian-Pilot
Vick and Patricia Sykes, here in the kitchen of their Chesapeake
home, have canned fruits and vegetables for 20 years.
Photos
RICHARD L. DUNSTON/The Virginian-Pilot
LEFT: Peggy Ulrey of Virginia Beach uses canned items for gifts as
well as at home. ABOVE: Home canned foods include Roma string beans,
left, and pickled watermelon rinds.
Kelli Lueth checks apples in her Norfolk back yard. She also makes
preserves from pears, peaches and cherries, as well as salsas and
sauces from tomatoes. by CNB