Mold and Fruit Flies: A Canning Romance
They’re staring at me. Precarious piles of overripe red fruits oozing rivulets of juice across the counter, pooling at the edge until they reach a critical mass and the river becomes a waterfall, plummeting over the edge onto the kitchen floor.
It’s hot. Damn hot. And instead of lounging in the shade of a tree, I’m still in this damn kitchen, sweating over the steam bath of large canning pots. Oh why does it take five friggin’ hours to reduce tomatoes to a consistency that allows you to avoid just canning quarts of tomato-infused water? I schlep a flat of too-far-gone Brandywines out to the chickens amid a veritable house party of fruit flies and slop it over the fence, where it splatters flesh over my shins. Those rock-hard supermarket tomatoes are sounding pretty good right now.
Or better yet, no tomatoes at all. It’s the ultimate irony of gardening— you slave away for months planting, transplanting, watering, pruning, trellising, and weeding. Then when the summer nights grow cooler and the plants realize their death is imminent and they must, at all costs, disperse their seeds by ripening their fruits, all of a sudden you the gardener are left with an overwhelming burden. Now that you’re completely exhausted from growing all this food, you have all this food to deal with!
Every hour of the day you scramble to salvage the ephemeral fragility before it’s gone: piles of beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, basil, eggplants, peppers threatening to rot before your very eyes. Snap the dilly beans, reduce the tomatoes, roast and freeze the eggplant, can, can, can, wash, wash…and finally, the kitchen is clean again. Then you walk out into the garden and see what those thoughtless plants have done now— they’ve gone and grown you another weekend of work!
It’s at this point that I start pining for the frost to come and kill them off. The poetic spring waxing—“All this from one single seed! Farming is so amazing! Tra-la-la!”—is now fully buried under a big, fatpile of sloppy tomatoes, and I’m afraid I’m going down with it. I call in a lifeline: all those friends who admire my shelves of homecanned food who insist I teach them to can next summer. “Gosh, Casey, I’d LOVE to come over this weekend to learn to can, but I’ll be out of town!”
“I WANT TO GO OUT OF TOWN IN THE SUMMER!” I scream to the flats of tomatoes covering my washing machine. They mock me by peeing all over it.
Out of spite, I take the entire flat and dump it, cores and all, into the blender and turn it on, relishing the sight of them whirring into oblivion.
“Take that, Suckas!” I pronounce gleefully, opening another beer. If I can’t be sipping margaritas on the beach, at least I can get tipsy while annihilating my kitchen.
It’s this time of year (bent over a vat of some garden concoction) where I imagine being a housewife in the ’50s as canned food became more ubiquitous—no wonder my parents’ generation dropped gardening and canning like a bad habit! I’d have jumped for joy!
And there’s the rub. A mere generation later, we’re coming back to it. I guess I know why. When I come into kitchen the morning after a late-night canning session and all those flats of vegetables have given way to clean, sealed jars of home-grown goodness, it does make me feel pretty good. I just have to avoid walking out into the garden again for a few hours to savor it.
