Amy’s mother made wonderful preserves from the prairie fruits of North Dakota. I remember her chokecherry syrup as more delightful on the tongue than any Vermont maple syrup. Her buffalo berry jam was tart without being vicious. And her bottled wild plums turned many a harsh winter day into a delicious revel, especially when served in a bowl with lashings of pure thick cream from the nearby Hartsock dairy farm. Amy’s mother brought the milk, with several inches of cream on top, back from Hartsock’s in plastic gallon mayonnaise jars. Unpasteurized and unhomogenized.
When I was courting Amy she invited me out one autumn afternoon, into the scrubby roadsides where gnats trembled in the decayed sunlight and the chokecherries flourished like weeds. (In fact, Williams Country treated them like weeds -- mowing them down so they wouldn’t plug up the culverts and ditches.) A spoony swain, I dutifully followed Amy about, picking berries off the bushes she pointed to and depositing them in a rusty tin bucket. Being a city boy, I perspired freely after the first few minutes of trudging through the brush, wishing I had brought a machete with me. When we paused to rest at last the bucket was nearly full.
“Good work, Timmy” she told me, her mouth screwed up in that peculiar little smile that I loved to see. “Try a handful, why don’t you? They’re sweet as can be.”
So I did -- and immediately spat them out, my mouth puckering up like a carp’s. Talk about sour! Amy let out a wild, throaty laugh; it was an intoxicating sound that I would never grow tired of hearing -- she put all the innocent pleasure of the world into her laughter. I wish now I could have made her laugh more often.
When we married we decided that part of a provident LDS lifestyle should include preserving as much of our own fruits and vegetables as we could. We bought cases of Mason jars, a large aluminum canning kettle and crates of deep red tomatoes from the local market gardens. They lasted us all through that winter. We also attempted cucumber dill pickles, with less success. Although we followed the directions from an old speckled Kerr canning pamphlet to the letter, the result was both pale and squishy -- a bland cucumber mush.
I was a student at BYU that first year of our marriage, and one day while walking down a long flight of stairs to the bus stop I noticed wild plums growing in profusion along the steep banks by the stairs. When I got back to our high ceilinged one bedroom apartment I immediately told Amy. That night we went back and stealthily gathered a sackful of wild plums -- their fermenting aroma arousing us to giddiness during our clandestine harvest. We stayed up all night canning those wild plums. The next day as I was going up those same stairs to class I noticed a groundskeeper busily spraying the banks of flowers and wild plums. When I asked him about it he cheerfully replied that everything was sprayed twice a week, with insecticide and fungicide. Since when, I asked. Oh, we start doing it in the early spring; the poison works right into the stems and fruits to discourage the aphids. It’s probably not safe to eat the plums, then? Oh no; I wouldn’t dare eat a single one! Probably get stomach cramps, or something much worse . . .
So Amy and I tossed ‘em all out. A week later Amy went to the doctor to confirm she was pregnant. And her desire to can and preserve pretty much evaporated from that point on for the next nine months. By the time Madelaine came we were living in Bottineau, North Dakota, surrounded by fields of sunflowers and winter squash. A large Japanese consortium had rented thousands of acres and hired their owners to plant banana, hubbard, butternut, turban, Lakota, acorn, and kabocha squash -- to be exported to Japan. There was so much squash around, at such a cheap price, that we filled our blue Ford station wagon with it for just a few dollars. I lugged ‘em all down into the root cellar of our house, where they fed us magnificently that winter. Amy baked them with butter and brown sugar. We also got a dozen sacks of red potatoes from the Hegland farm, where Amy’s grandfather usually grew nothing but wheat until the oil and gas leases he signed made him wealthy enough to go to Hawaii with his wife every winter and buy a new Cadillac every spring. That’s when he started to plant a few acres of potatoes to give to his kids and his grandkids each year -- in lieu of any cold hard cash.
The next few years after Bottineau were pretty topsy turvy for Amy and I, and our growing brood. So it wasn’t until we settled in Wichita, Kansas, several years later, that we attempted to start canning again. I worked as the regional Ronald McDonald, and my working hours were few and far between, though I made a decent salary -- so we got ambitious. We bottled tomatoes; we bottled carrots; we bottled string beans; and we even bottled big fat luscious peaches from the Amish orchards down around Yoder. And those peaches were nearly our undoing.
Our apartment had a garbage disposal and dishwasher -- the very first ones we’d ever had. It seemed like a luxury only the Rockefellers could afford, and now it was ours! I loved getting dishes dirty and then just rinsing them and slipping them into the dishwasher. And I loved even more scrapping leftovers into the sink and watching the disposal churn and gargle them away. After we had pitted our freestones I gathered all the pits into a pyramid in the kitchen sink, turned on the tap, and turned on the garbage disposal to watch the fun.
Now, in case you don’t know, I’m going to tell you that peach pits are pretty hard, and garbage disposals are unable to pulverize them. Instead, if you push peach pits down into a running garbage disposal, what happens is that they shoot out at a deadly velocity -- cracking wall tiles, breaking glass cabinet windows, and leaving enormous stains on the kitchen ceiling. We never did get our damage deposit back from the landlord when we moved out of that apartment.
As the years continued to whiz by and the babies kept coming, it became harder and harder to find time to do any home canning. Amy and I decided it would be just as well to stock up on canned goods when there was a local case lot sale at the supermarket. And so our basement shelves groaned with Green Giant brand cans of corn, sweet peas, green beans, beets, and spinach. And we bought a chest freezer for hamburger and chicken (and Totino’s frozen pizzas.)
Our last hurrah, when it came to provident food storage for a rainy day, occured at Christmastime when I worked at Fingerhut Telemarketing on East Hennepin in Minneapolis. For some reason the manager liked me enough to take me off the phones and put me in charge of monitoring the other telemarketer’s sales pitches to make sure they were not ordering things for senile old ladies or trying to hook up with sexy sounding women. In other words, I was a company spy. But it was considered a management position, so I got a pay raise. I could live with that. As part of management that memorable Christmas, the manager put me in charge of ordering and distributing the annual Fingerhut Christmas bonus for all employees -- a Butterball frozen turkey. I ordered enough to cover every employee, plus twenty extra at the manager’s suggestion (why he wanted them I never found out.) Turned out that about a third of the employees already had several frozen turkeys lurking in their freezers and did not want another one, thank you very much. So I wound up with fifty spare frozen turkeys. When I asked Jeff, the manager, what to do with them, he shrugged his shoulders and said: “Whatever you want -- just get them off our loading dock by tomorrow!”
A man with six children and a mortgage does not look a gift turkey in the mouth. I called Amy and told her to drive over pronto for a frozen bonanza. We loaded all fifty frozen turkeys into the van and put them out in the garage -- this was Minnesota, remember, and that winter the thermometer didn’t get above thirty degrees until the middle of January.
Boy, lemme tell ya, we ate turkey and turkey leftovers every day that winter. We fed the four missionaries assigned to our ward (from Salt Lake, Idaho, and, in one instance, from Tonga) roast turkey at least twice a week. And still there were frozen turkeys to spare by the time the thermometer threatened to rise above freezing. So, thinking fast, I called everybody I knew and asked if I could leave one or two or three frozen turkeys with them. Sure, why not, they all said.
But in my haste I forgot to make a list of who was harboring our turkeys, and when I left that early spring to go back to the circus I couldn’t rightly remember who still had some of our frozen birds. There still might be a few of them lurking in the freezers of old Minneapolis friends like Jim McCabe, Larry Gray, Lee Bourgerie, or Rick Cohen.
So, guys, if you happen to read this post, check the back of your freezer, and if there’s an ancient Butterball lurking there, go ahead and eat it yourself. Bon appetit!
