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for Apricots  |
It's June of 1945 and time to start canning apricots
By JOYCE KIEFER
of TheColumnists.com
I don’t know how he does it, but Dad always picks the hottest night of the year for his favorite event–canning the apricots we grow in our backyard. This year–1945--I ask him why he picked such an awful night when the kitchen feels like a steam bath--that’s how Mom describes it. After all, I’m seven, old enough to ask my parents why we have to do certain things.
“You have to wait for a heat wave like this in late June,” he explains. "Up to then the fruit might be pale gold but there will still be some green on top. When the fruit is almost ripe, hot sun makes it juicy and ready to eat.” He takes me out in the back yard and picks an apricot the size of a Santa Rosa plum and pulls it open. “Smell that. Like perfume. Now touch it.”
It feels like velvet inside.
“This fruit is ready to can. Apricots don’t wait, so we have to pick them now and get going.
I know what happens to the ‘cots if we don’t pick them soon enough. They get so soft they fall off the tree and splat on the ground. Flies stick to them and lay eggs.
“OK”, I tell him. “I’ll help you even if it’s hot.”
Dad tells me to picture the rows of quart jars filled with golden apricot halves that will line our basement shelves. “They’re our golden treasure.” When we visit special friends in San Francisco, he wraps a jar or two of apricots in tissue like a gift. He is proud of our peaches, trims the berry vines with care, and admires the russet jewel tones of the jelly from the Japanese plums. But he loves those apricots the way I love my seashells. I like pulling open the flat drawers of an old wardrobe to admire the shells I find near Carmel or that a family friend shares with me from Mexico or France. When you have something special, you feel so proud of it that you forget the cold wind off the ocean or the heat of a summer night.
When June begins, Dad goes out in the back yard every night after work and sizes up the way the fruit is developing. He examines the clusters of orange-gold globes and peers at the tone. Is the orange starting to deepen? Are the cheeks faintly blushed? With his thumb and forefinger he gently presses the fruit with the right color. Do those downy globes yield ever so softly to his touch? He eats one–no, two or three– and savors the moist, lightly scented orange meat. I heard somewhere that Adam and Eve didn’t really eat an apple, because apples don’t grow in the Middle East. They probably ate an apricot. I’m sure Dad believes this.
Just like the Garden of Eden, an enemy lurks near our tree. Its first strike also determines the exact time when we pick the crop.
About a week before the fruit hits the peak of ripeness, a band of scrub jays lines up on the telephone wire next to our yard. Jays are a contrary breed, cousins to crows. They caw together as they peer down at the tree, waiting for the right time to strike. Since they hang around all day while Dad is at work, they have the advantage for first attack. Hawk-like vision and a dog-like sense of smell tells them when to pounce. We try to ward them off by hanging can lids on the branches so the sun beams flashing off the tin will scare them away. Mom pokes a hole in the top of a can with a beer opener and then removes it with a can opener. After she empties the contents, she does the same with the bottom of the can. I tie strings through the holes and we hang them on the tree like Christmas ornaments. The jays don’t stop to admire how beautifully the tree sparkles, they’ll just fly off because they are scared by anything strange. But the smarter jays will return in the stillness of early morning, before the sun peers through the fog, to dive for the forbidden fruit.
When Dad discovers they have started pecking the apricots, he knows there is only one thing to do: snatch up the fruit before they finish the crop. He would never admit it, but he knows the birds are his helpers. They start eating the fruit when it’s ready to can.
I love climbing the black, flaky trunk of the tree to fetch the ‘cots near the middle. I’m not allowed to climb the tree just for fun, so this is my big chance to get in there. Dad climbs the ladder to pick the fruit off the outer branches. As we each press apart the smooth, heart-shaped leaves, more apricots reveal themselves. “Did you get those up there?” he asks and I climb higher. I look down and for a minute pretend I’m a blue jay. I could fly away to where it’s cool. Together Dad and I strip most of the fruit. Meanwhile Mom stands at the bottom of the tree and takes the ‘cots we hand down and put them in the flats. She doesn’t say much except “be careful.” I think she figures if she encourages Dad and I, the more fruit we’ll find and the longer the canning will take.
Growing up in the hills of San Francisco around Washington Street, Mom didn’t learn the joy of growing your own food. Her family lived in flats without back yards suitable for a garden. It was too cold to get anything to ripen. She excuses herself: “My mother was too busy raising five kids by herself with my father off at sea, cooking for the Pacific Steamship Company. When I was seven years old like you, I was too busy helping with housework to fool around with canning, even if we did have fruit trees. Besides, the Italian vegetable man came around the neighborhood year round with a cart full of produce. Or the Chinaman came with baskets of vegetables. We didn’t need to stockpile anything.”
Dad says the warm apricot weather reminds
him of growing up in Acapulco and the scent of the mangos ripening
in his family’s courtyard on a tropical night. He kept that
memory all the years he’s lived here in the San Francisco
fog. As soon as he and Mom built their house down the Peninsula,
he planted a Blenheim apricot tree in their big, empty back yard.
He chose the kind that grows in the warm orchards of Santa Clara
County. By the time the tree was big enough for a good crop,
World War II began.
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KERR HOME CANNING BOOK, treasured for generations. |
One day Dad brought home the Kerr Home Canning Book. He and Mom had never canned before. We all looked at it together. This became my parents’ Bible. He pointed out the color drawings to me and the text that went with them: “You can help in this vast Victory Program,” he read. “Plant, can and eat. This is your part.”
“All three of us can do that,” he said.
The book gave a recipe for canning mint juleps. My friend Jane told me that her father made them for the Kentucky Derby parties he gave because he was from Kentucky. His mint juleps had whiskey, she said, but the Kerr recipe didn’t call for any. The book also told how to can rabbits and wild birds. “Bleed well,” the instructions began. I could never do that. Even worse was the paragraph on the proper way to can tongue. “Boil until partially done. Cool and remove outside skin. Slice or leave whole.” This would be a great way to scare kids on Halloween: Take them down the basement and show them a bunch of jars with tongues inside. Then to make them really sick, I’d show them jars of fried liver, because the book told how to can that, too.
Mom agreed we should stick to fruit.
The book opened with encouraging words from President Roosevelt himself. Dad read them out loud.
FOOD is no less a weapon than tanks, guns and planes. As the power of our enemies decreases, the importance of food resources increases. With this thought in mind, we must further mobilize our resources for the production of food.
“Wow, “I said, “The boys at school use food as a weapon at lunchtime.”
“Now, that’s wasteful!” Mom exclaimed. Then she smiled and says that her brothers did the same thing.
Mom said that Dad is more patriotic than most people because he had to go through the trouble of becoming an American citizen. But more than thrift and patriotism fire my Dad’s love of apricots. They were the first fruits of his outdoor labor--planting, pruning, fertilizing and watering, then the lavish payback year after year of succulent crops that ripen all at once. He could never let the fruit simply fall on the ground and rot. Both he and Mom lived by the Depression-inspired motto, “Waste not, want not,” But I can eat only four or five apricots at one time without getting the runs. I like them much better fresh than canned. Once they’re cooked in the jars, they seem to get squishy and effervescent, as if someone mixed them with soda water. Mom and Dad say this is just my imagination, but I believe what I taste.
I like the excitement of canning but not the way the boiling kettle for the jars heats up the kitchen. Our operation turns our kitchen from a place where Mom cooks dinner into a cannery like Libby’s in Sunnyvale, which has a water tower painted like a can of fruit cocktail.
This year we eat a small meal of leftovers so as not to spend much time cooking and washing dishes. The sink is needed for more important work. After cleaning up from dinner, Mom puts me in one of Dad’s old shirts so I won’t get messy. Dad gets out the Kerr Book. On the cover a smiling lady wears a white pinafore apron with a blue inset bordered with red trim with white stars. She forces a model’s smile as she holds up a jar of canned fruit in one hand and a box of Kerr Mason caps in the other.
Mom mutters, “That woman doesn’t know what real canning is like. There’s not a spot on that apron. She’s not sweating and she’s standing next to a picture of a fruit tree, not next to a messy sink.”
“Maybe,” I say, “She looks nice so we’ll want to be patriotic like her and can food whether we like to or not.”
Dad looks back at Mom and reads the dedication in the front of the book: ‘To the women who serve without banners, the homemakers of America.’”
“That’s right,” she says, “I don’t see any banners for housewives across Third Avenue downtown.” But she grins as she straightens her flowered apron trimmed with rick rack.
Dad has already counted off the quart jars we used last year and bought additional ones to add up to two dozen. He has brought out our large enamel canning pot with its rack for jars, which Mom keeps in the basement. We line up all the equipment, wash it in sudsy water, rinse it, and put it on the kitchen table.
“Now for the apricots!” Dad announces and orders me to help him carry the flats from the back porch. Mom rolls her eyes at me, but smooths down her apron and gets out the paring knives. She prepares a dishpan of lightly salted water. I wash the outside of each apricot with the small brush the Fuller Brush man gave her the last time he came to the door. Mom cuts each ‘cot in half, removing any spots on the skin, and plops it in the water so it won’t turn brown. The squishy ones–there are always some–go directly into a bowl for puree that will also be canned. Dad sets up the metal meat grinder and puts in a couple of disks with the right size slots to make the puree smooth. He clamps it to the pull-out chopping board. Then I put in a couple of handfuls of squishy fruit pieces, push them in with a wood mallet, and turn the crank. The puree flows into the bowl like a waterfall. We can that, too.
This mess is beautiful because it will turn into the best ice cream in the world. Dad will fold the pulp into a bowl of whipped cream and sugar with a dash of almond flavoring. I help him by heaping the mixture into the metal trays we’re supposed to use for ice cubes in the refrigerator, then licking the spoon and what’s left in the bowl. He sets the trays in the little metal section meant for ice cubes in the refrigerator and takes it out as soon as it’s slushy. He beats it again by hand (we don’t have an electric mixer or an ice cream maker) and pours it back. He and Mom serve it at dinner parties and when it’s my birthday. Sometimes he makes apricot ice cream just because it’s so good. The kids in the neighborhood love it. Carol, who lived kitty-corner from us, never forgot the slightly tropical flavor, even when she moved to Hawaii.
Mom boils the sugar syrup on the stove to pour over the fruit halves while the jars rattle in the huge pot of boiling water that is sterilizing them. As she brushes back strands of hair, I think of the lady with the neat permanent on the cover of the canning book, every tight brown curl in place. Mom. who can often read my mind, tells me, “When I lived and worked in San Francisco I used to get my hair “Marcelled”. The hair dresser would use a hot curling iron to make deep waves in my hair along the sides of my head. When we’re done, go look for that picture of Auntie Carmen and I dressed up for the opera. I think my Marcel waves look pretty good.”
“Do you wish you still lived in the city and got dressed up?” I ask and think of the beaded purse in the back of her dresser drawer that she used for the opera.
“That was before I was married.” She steps back from the stove and looks through the window over the sink into in the back yard. She likes to tell their friends how she and Dad planted the garden from scratch. Dad has turned on the fountain in the middle of the fishpond. The peach tree near the side of the pond has filled out with long, pointy leaves hiding the green, fuzzy fruit just waiting to grow and ripen. Mom slowly smiles and takes a deep breath of the balmy air that’s so different from the windy, cold evenings we usually have.
Dad returns to the kitchen. Mom has everything ready to go–the jars and lids are sterilized, the syrup has thickened and the fruit is cut. He puts what looks like a glass cup with the bottom cut out over each jar and I drop the apricot halves through so they will land cut side down. Then he and Mom screw on the tops and put the jars in the canner to boil.
I go to bed. Early the next morning I hear him tapping the tops to hear if the seal is tight, as if he were making music. They are tunes of glory for all three of us.
©2010 by Joyce Kiefer. The photos are the property of the author. All rights reserved. This column first posted July 5, 2010.
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