The Canning Watch

I live in Washington, D.C. But my home town is Chula Vista, California, today a paved-over nightmare the size of Cincinnati, but a sleepy little coastal town surrounded by tomato fields and lemon groves when my grandfather moved his family there in 1929.

My mother grew up in Chula Vista, as did her sisters and brother. All of them, including my mother, are dead now. I grew up there too.

When I was a small child my grandmother still lived in the house at 235 Madrona Street in Chula Vista which my grandfather had bought in 1941, eight years before he died. When my grandmother died in 1967 my family moved into that house, and it remained the "family homestead" until we sold the place after my father died in 2005.

The house had a fairly large backyard until 1970, when my father built a granny flat out there for me to live in, which I did, all through high school and college and for some time afterward. But in my early childhood days when my grandmother still lived there, at least half the backyard was given over to her garden. We kids played there, and there was a porch swing in the middle of the backyard where we liked to rock in the sun.

Grandma Winrow grew all manner of stuff out there: squash, tomatoes, guavas, radishes. It goes without saying that she did a great deal of canning. To my dying day I will remember her guava jelly, put up in Mason jars and sealed with wax. When we stayed overnight at Grandma's house, as often as not for breakfast we would be served her delicious, creamy oatmeal with a generous dollop of guava jelly sitting right in the middle of it like a big, glistening ruby.

Despite the fact that the granny flat with which he filled half the backyard the year I started high school severely restricted his space, after my father retired he decided to continue the tradition of backyard farming that had begun with Grandma Winrow. Dad's annual tomato crop became as much a summer tradition as following the usually-sorry fate of the San Diego Padres each year. He would plant in May. It doesn't rain very much in southern California, so once a week he would give the tomatoes a generous soaking with the hose, using a little system of irrigation canals that he dug. By late July the tomatoes would be coming in, often thick and fast as they used to say. During my years overseas, when my sister's children were growing up, my mother would often write to me in her letters that Dad had such a bumper crop of tomatoes this year they were giving them away to the neighbors, or that my nephew Ricky was selling them on the street.

Dad taught me how to cultivate tomatoes just before he died. I laid in the last two crops at Madrona Street. When I moved to Washington, D.C. last year I decided that come spring I would pick up the tradition, and so I did. Last May I went to Home Depot with my neighbor Donald L. Williams and bought four Better Boy plants. (Better Boys were my father's favorite breed of tomato.) I planted in May, as had my father before me. No weekly hosing was needed, however: here on the east coast, during the summer anyway, it rains almost every damn day. In D.C. I swear you can set your watch in July by the three p.m. thunderstorm, which sometimes knocks out the power as well.

By mid-July, sure enough, I had tomatoes coming in every which way. I was proud. Dad would have been, too. And just as in old times, there were far more tomatoes than my wife and I could eat, so I began making the rounds of the neighborhood, handing out bags of them. My next-door neighbor Myrtle was delighted. I think my friend Holly's son Mason, down in Springfield, VA, is still scratching his head and wondering who that character was who knocked on the door and woke him up on a Saturday morning when he was the only one home, handed him a bag of tomatoes and drove away.

The tomato crop usually begins to peter out late in September, but mine was still going strong. However by the second week of October when I was preparing to leave for a family reunion in Reno, NV which would coincide with my 53rd birthday, I decided it was time to pull up those tomato vines, which by then had crawled halfway to Pennsylvania, and prepare for the next year's crop. I paid my neighbor Donald $50 to yank them out for me, but told him, "If you find any more tomatoes, set them aside, don't throw them out."

I might have regretted that. Because when Donald was finished pulling up those tomato vines and hauling them away, I was looking at roughly 30 pounds of leftover tomatoes, most of them still green.

What do you do with 30 pounds of green tomatoes?

What you do in the 21st century is, you jump on the Internet and type into your browser, "Recipes for green tomatoes."

And so it was that I made an enormous batch of green tomato chutney.

Then I had to decide what to do with an enormous batch of green tomato chutney.

Obvious answer: follow in the footsteps of my wizard-grandmother and can, can, can.

I had never canned anything in my life, although I had watched my mother do it, as she had been taught by her mother. Not one to be daunted by the mere fact that I had no idea what I was doing, I ordered up some Mason jars and rolled up my sleeves.

Well, the first thing the canning instructions that I pulled off the Internet tell you to do with Mason jars is wash them thoroughly with hot water and soap. No problem; I ran them through the dishwasher. The lids too.

Then, conventional wisdom says you sterilize the Mason jars by putting them upside down in a pan of boiling water, on some sort of rack so that the steam can get up inside them. This was where I had to get creative: I had a wide pan, but no "sort of rack." I went down into the basement and rummaged around, finally coming up with the roasting rack that I use for Thanksgiving turkey. It's slanted, but would do the trick if I carefully positioned the jars so they wouldn't fall over.

Next you're supposed to go ahead and shovel whatever it is you're trying to preserve into the jars. But the rim of the jar has to be absolutely clean; there can't be any food stuck to it, so they tell you to wipe the rim with a clean, wet cloth after you've poured in your preserves. No problem. But after that is when you actually put the lids on the jars, and I don't know about you, but cross-threading is my bete noir. Many swear words are still hanging in a blue cloud over my kitchen because of cross-threading.

Now came the real challenge. Once you've put the preserves in the jars and screwed down the lids, the next step is to submerge the sealed jars in boiling water for about 10 minutes. But, as when you're sterilizing the jars, they cannot be permitted to touch the bottom of your boiling pot. Something has to sit between the bottom of the jars and the bottom of the pot.

My turkey rack was too big to fit in the pot. Couldn't use that. Time to get creative again. I went hunting. Trivets? We didn't have any. What I finally ended up doing was, I found some Christmas cookie cutters in the back of a drawer. Each one was about an inch deep. I had half a dozen, shaped like stars, doggies, Santa, what have you. What the heck?

I dropped these Christmas cookie-cutters into the pot of boiling water. They landed on the bottom and together made sort of "rack" for my jars. Gingerly, one by one, I dropped the jars into the boiling water, hoping they would land upright and by the way remembering vividly the time when I was living in west Africa and, while boiling some drinking water, spilled it all over myself and burned my right foot so badly that for a week I was hobbling around on crutches with my foot wrapped in a bandage.

I think the purpose of this exercise is to make the jars and their contents expand under the heat, so that when you take them out and they cool, the jars and their contents will contract, completing the sealing process. You know it's worked if the seals on the jars are tight. They're not supposed to pop up. After I had fished the jars out and let them cool for a few hours, I tapped each lid to make sure the seal was tight.

Proud as Aunt Bee at the county fair, I then made some labels: "Green Tomato Chutney, October, 2008."

Now comes the fun part: annoying people with green tomato chutney. You know, handing out jars of it to people who probably don't really want it but are afraid of hurting your feelings.

But not so fast. I want to make sure I did this right. I mean, giving somebody botulism might be embarrassing. In fact I'm sure it would be.

And so I am now in the period of the Canning Watch. Several jars of green tomato chutney have been sitting on my kitchen counter since before Halloween. If they don't start smelling awful by Thanksgiving, I'm going to assume they're safe to give away. So far so good.

Still, go ahead and call me paranoid if you want to, but I think most of my friends are hiding.