by Lauren Kessler
I was living in a fourth-floor walk-up in a decidedly ungentrified neighborhood in near north Chicago, rooming with a boyfriend I would stay with much longer than I should have, working a soulless job to make money to move west. I had just graduated college. My dream was open spaces. My dream lacked particulars except for one thing – the color—and that color was green.
From the apartment I had to walk ten blocks to find green, a city park, where I dug dirt from a flower bed and brought a baggie-full back to my place. On the fire escape of the apartment, my only outdoor space, was a jar with a tooth-picked potato suspended above water. It had sprouted roots and was putting up green shoots. I thought I’d plant it in a clay pot of city park dirt and grow my first vegetable right there on the fire escape.
I hailed from potato country, but I didn’t know a thing about growing them. They just appeared every year—unasked for and generally unwanted – in my mother’s backyard vegetable plot. And, although my mother was a semi-serious gardener, and although I loved (most of) what she grew, I took no real interest in gardening. Because, well, I WAS A TEENAGER. Now, living in a world of sidewalks and streets, concrete and brick, I wanted—I needed—to grow something.
I would not grow a potato from that fire escape potato, but I would grow a big, bushy plant that almost but not quite survived my trip west a few months later. With me on that journey was the boyfriend I should have left behind, but more importantly, in one of many boxes in the back of the second-hand truck that miraculously made the journey without breaking down, was a used paperback I had bought just before my departure. The book was Putting Food By, which was and is the bible of food preservation. I didn’t know its reputation at the time. I bought it because I loved the title when I saw it, spine-out, on the bookstore shelf. It was so Little House on the Prairie. I wanted that. A girl from the raw suburbs who lived in a city, I aspired to be a pioneer woman (with indoor plumbing and antibiotics, that is). I wanted wide open spaces. I wanted to grow my food. And I wanted to “put it by.”
Fast forward a few eventful decades, and here I am in my country kitchen busily preserving and stockpiling food from a garden that is big enough to be called a mini-farm and productive enough to warrant quite a bit of “putting by.” My initial attempts, many years ago, when I had less produce and fewer resources, was employing the oh-so-simple boiling water bath, a method we owe to a French confectioner who discovered that putting food in glass jars, sealing them tightly, and boiling them for a long time could prevent spoilage. This was back in the day. As in 1809. Monsieur Appert, the candy maker, was working on ways to preserve food for Napoleon’s army. You may remember that Napoleon famously said, “An army marches on its stomach.” (Alas, that army, presumably well fed, marched itself to Waterloo.)
Here in the U.S., a century later, with the rise of home economics movements and the spread of agricultural extension services, the boiling water bath method gained formal recognition as a safe and effective way to preserve high-acid foods at home. It was easy. And it almost always worked. My jars sealed nicely and looked pretty, but my results were less than spectacular. My pickles were not as good as my favorite store-bought brand. So said my family, and I had to agree. My green beans looked nice lined up on the pantry shelf, but no one (including me) wanted to eat canned beans when you could buy fresh green beans in the store, even in the dead of winter. I made tomato sauce, which, given the blanching, peeling, coring, chopping, simmering, and reducing took about as much time as a trip to Italy. My preservation travails continued when my dear friend Barb came out to Oregon one summer, and the two of us canned peaches together. Again, blanching, skinning, cutting, pitting and then, because we were determined not to have these delicious, hand-picked peaches swim in sweet syrup, we spent triple the amount of time creating unadulterated peach juice for our canning liquid. We used more peaches to make the juice than we put in slices in the jars. The whole process took days. It was August. It was hot. ‘Nuf said.
One more report from these early efforts. I had a friend who managed a fish store in town, all the fish caught and then delivered by her fisherman father. Vickie invited me to her apartment one autumn day long ago to can fresh tuna, beginning with the cleaning, gutting, boning, and filleting of the whole fish. This woman knew what she was doing. She had knives, so many knives, and rubber gloves and jars and tongs and an industrial-sized pressure canner. We decapitated, scaled, and eviscerated the fish, played loud music, and had a great time. Yet, although I truly respected her expertise, when I looked at the little jars of tuna a month later, I was scared to eat them. And didn’t serve them to my family. And never told Vickie.
Now, the good news: A while ago my father-in-law bought us a freezer, and my life as a preserver changed for the better. Do you have any idea how much easier it is to freeze applesauce, tomato sauce, beans, peas, peaches, jam—to name a few—than it is to process them in a boiling water bath? Answer: A lot. Do you know how much fresher and sprightlier they taste? A lot. I don’t get to gaze at pretty jars lined up in the pantry and think pioneer woman thoughts. Instead, I trudge out to the garage and rummage through the freezer. But, given the results, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
But I actually do have it one other way: dehydrating. I am now deeply in love with the modern take on the oldest method of food preservation, when ancient civilizations used the sun, wind, and air to remove the moisture from food, to allow what they grew or gathered or hunted or fished to last them through the winter. The indigenous people of Peru, where the potato fueled entire civilizations, set out small spuds on the ground to freeze overnight and then dried them in the sun the next day. The indigenous people of north America made pemmican out of dried meat and dried berries (and rendered fat). Coastal tribes dried fish over fires or by salting. Drying not only preserved food, it also made it portable, perfect for the nomadic.
Before a dehydrator came into my life this summer, courtesy of one my sons, I had tried my hand at drying by bundling up herbs and hanging them around the house from lines strung between windows, creating a kind of festive clothesline that became far too enticing to the feline members of the family. I had also set herbs and apple rounds out in the sun between window screens, which I had to remove from the house and then spend hours scrubbing. Neither method, for reasons stated, encouraged repetition.
Enter the two-foot by two-foot by two-foot stainless-steel box with controllable temperature and circulating fan and fifteen mesh shelves. Although it wasn’t love at first sight—it is, after all, a big steel box—it was most definitely love at first use. Prep is simple, ranging from none at all (the herbs) to a single cut (the cherry tomatoes) to slicing (the fruit, with skins on) to a quick big-dice (the zucchini). Then, press a button and come back 24 hours later to trays of impressively dehydrated, home-grown garden products that will see us through the winter. Except the peaches, which we’ve already devoured. And the Little Houser on the Prairie bonus: The Mason jar display in the pantry is lovely.
photo credit: Lauren Kessler
Lauren Kessler is an award-winning narrative nonfiction writer and (semi) fearless immersion reporter who specializes in exploring invisible subcultures in our midst. The author of fifteen books, she has written about the gritty world of a maximum security prison, grueling world of ballet, and the surprisingly vibrant world of those with Alzheimer’s. Her upcoming book, Everything Changes Everything, explores love and loss, wounds and healing, and the way grief and beauty can coexist in a single step. Her weekly essays can be found on her Substack, Life After All (laurenjkess.substack).
A proud Oregonian, she is a long-distance hiker, tent-camper, kayaker, cat-lover, and chicken-wrangler who tends an outsized (mini-farm) vegetable plot and a sometimes absurdly productive fruit orchard.