Canning Season

 

                When I was 14, we lived in an old house with a crab-apple tree in the back yard. I gathered the apples in the fall and attempted to make applesauce. It was awful. The apples were tart and wormy; I was dismayed. “Wrong apples,” my father muttered when he saw the results. “Crab apples are for cider.” Who knew?

The next weekend, we made our first trip to the apple orchards, where I picked half a bushel of beautiful MacIntosh apples under a bright blue New England sky. I even climbed up in the tree to reach the highest, ripest fruit. My father pretended not to notice. When I came home, I had apples. After consulting Betty Crocker c. 1958, I made real applesauce for the first time, peeling the apples and tossing the unbroken skins over my shoulder. I had read that the skins would fall into the initials of the person you would marry; it was worth a shot.  The puree bubbled in the new harvest gold crockpot, sending the sweet scent of cinnamon throughout the house. Once the sauce was frozen, I moved onto pie, making a crust for the first time. Then I tried turnovers. And we ate apples for days. Next year, I vowed, a full bushel.

Picking apples and making sauce became an autumn ritual. When I was in college, my room mate woke up at six on Saturday morning and peeled all of the fruit before I even rolled out of bed. We ate applesauce for a late breakfast that morning and on pancakes for weeks.

These days, I make far more than applesauce in late August and early September, as school starts up again. Every day, something is processed. Salsa. Tomato sauce. Dried pears. Pickles of all sorts. Whatever overflows from local gardens and old trees finds its way into our house, waits its turn in the dining room, and becomes something we will eat this winter. Tonight, it was dried pears and salsa verde. Tomorrow will be another batch of tomato sauce, cooking down in the crockpot that looks exactly like my first one, that I made my first batch of sauce in, back in high school.