How many of us really know beans about beans? The first photo is beans being left to mature and dry. There a thousands of varieties of beans. Green beans and dried beans come from different varieties of the same plant, the same pod, green beans are picked while green and cooked, dried beans are allowed to mature and naturally dry before harvesting. A dried bean is the seed for a new bean plant. For dried beans (what baked beans and bean soup are made from) you harvest the pods when the plant is has lived out its life cycle and is turning brown (usually by pulling the entire plant out of the ground) remove the pods, and then shell the beans. In farming this is done by a machine, in a home garden and before mechanization, it is done by hand. A very time consuming task. The beans are then allowed to complete drying. Dried beans being seeds, store well for a year or more if kept dry.
I was amazing by this pyramid of canned fruits and vegetables.
My grandmother canned green beans, corn, carrots, beets, apple sauce, and tomatoes almost every year. My grandparents lived around the corner on the same farm that I grew up on. My grandparents always had a large garden, through the depression and World War II, they seldom went without, because they grew most of what they wanted (coffee, sugar and butter were hard to get during the War.)
As a teenager, I became my grandmother's canning assistant. It can take hours to prepare the veggies. Apples are peeled, cored, cut up and cooked down with sugar and spices. There were three apple trees in the their garden, the one behind the honey processing plant had the best apples. Green beans had to be trimmed, and cut or broken into pieces. My great grandmother couldn't see well enough to trim the ends with a knife, she would set there with a dishpan full of trimmed beans and snap them into precise one inch segments for canning. A couple of years my grandmother made chilli-sauce, a complex process that involved chopping and grinding a bushel of tomatoes, onions, and peppers, cooking and canning. I spent a couple of hours feeding and cranking an old fashioned hand grinder. She used a steam pressure cooker for most of her canning. Only strawberry jam, and pears (we had bees in a pear orchard and boxes of pears would come home some years) were done in a boiling water bath (open kettle method.)
There is something comforting about growing and preserving food. It is nesting, I occasionally get the urge to nest.
I also find value in knowing where food comes from, and what is involved in getting it to the kitchen.
*It was a honey farm, we had over 2,000 colonies of honeybees. Honey farm, funny farm. We lived on 80 acres and didn't really farm the farm.
Did I miss where that photo of the beautiful canning pyramid was taken? I didn’t know anyone who canned when I was young. My college girlfriend was from outside Rochester, NY, and she was the first person. I loved canning with SG who grew up with it. We only did fruit, and pickles. I miss that.
ReplyDeleteThe Renwick Gallery, is doing a show on State Fairs. There is even a butter cow.
DeleteAll I know about beans is that beans are a magical fruit, the more you eat the more you toot!
ReplyDeleteOh my,
DeleteMy mother sometimes canned fruits and veggies but she was near the end of that era and soon stopped.
ReplyDeleteMy grandmother's generation was really the last of the great preserving age.
DeleteThis brought back some memories. I can picture my mom and my grandmother canning tomatoes and green beans. I also remember that hand grinder. It would get attached to a table or bench and then she would hand crank whatever she was ginding up through it.
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