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Gudrun Enger channels her 'inner grandma' when it comes to home canning

by Jane Knoerle

We think of home canning as a grandma thing. Picture granny hunched over a pot of splattering jam, shooing kids and flies out of the steamy kitchen on a hot August afternoon.

Years ago, canning wasn't a choice for homemakers, it was a necessity. Trees on the land were heavy with fruit. The garden was ripe with produce that couldn't wait. If the family was going to eat well in the coming winter, the harvest had to be preserved.

The fruits of that labor were stored in the basement or fruit cellar. It was a point of pride to display gleaming jars of red tomatoes, green pickles, jewel-colored jams and jellies.

Nostalgia for earlier times led Gudrun Enger of Menlo Park to make her first foray into home canning. "My two grandmas and my mom were all into freezing and canning," she says. As a child, she went with her mother to U-pick farms near Watsonville to pick olallieberries for jam.

When her own son was a baby, she continued the tradition. "I put him in a backpack, and headed to a U-pick farm. I made olallieberry jam and gave away most of it to my friends."

That was the beginning. When a colleague at work at Stanford University brought in plums, she made plum jam. A couple of years later, she turned green tomatoes from her garden into green tomato mincemeat.

"We use it for pies at Thanksgiving," she says. She found the mincemeat recipe in the 1963 "Freezing and Canning Cookbook."

Preserving tomatoes and bread and butter pickles are now part of her repertoire. "Last year I did 40 pounds of tomatoes in quart and pint jars." She orders roma tomatoes from the local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), a service that also delivers a weekly box of produce to her home.

"Canned tomatoes are so high in sodium, I like to put up my own," she says. The home-canned tomatoes are often used as a base for marinara sauce.

Peaches for jam and pickling cucumbers are purchased at Webb Ranch in Portola Valley. In high season, Webb also sells canning tomatoes at a lower price.

Ms. Enger was making peach jam with ginger on the day we visited. She also added black pepper. "I like to experiment in my cooking," she says. She also makes nectarine jam flavored with vanilla bean.

She uses no pectin in the jam, so it takes longer to cook. "I like the flavor and color when using a long-cooking method. The peaches seem to carmelize."

Her basic jam recipe uses 5-1/2 to 6 cups of fruit to 4 to 5 cups of sugar and 2 tablespoons of lemon juice. It yields 6 to 7 pints of jam.

The hot jam is poured into sterilized glass jars. Metal lids, which have been simmered in hot water, are fastened on with bands. The jars are turned upside down for five minutes and then flipped back, she says.

Ms. Enger buys canning jars at Orchard Supply and other canning tools, such as a canning kettle and jar lifter, at Palo Alto Hardware.

"Oh, that sounds so hard" is the reaction she often gets when telling friends about home canning. "So far, I haven't managed to convert anyone," she says with a laugh.

They do, however, appreciate gifts from her kitchen. One year she made so much plum jam "I had to force it on friends," she says.

There are many Web sites with home canning information. Ms. Enger likes the National Center for Home Food Preservation, part of the University of Georgia. "They've got everything," she says.

The Web site www.freshpreserving.com also has step-by-step information for home canners. The site is operated by Ball Corp., manufacturers of glass canning jars. Ball also publishes the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving and the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.

As people plant more gardens or buy local produce, there's a resurgence in home canning. Gardeners want to preserve the fruits and vegetables they worked to raise. Good cooks like the creativity that making jam or canning pickles affords them.

Ms. Enger is part of the new wave of home canners who find that making something with their own hands is satisfying and tastes better than anything they can buy. Home canning, once thought to be old-fashioned, now is considered cool.

Gudrun Enger has her own food blog: www.kitchengadgetgirl.com.