Harvest Season: The Annual Tribute to My Grandmothers
“I think grandma would say that it should be a bit creamier,” my mom said on our biannual sweet corn freezing day. So, we adjusted the cook time shorter and made sure our corn would be just the right cream and just the right kernel.
I am thirty-three years old and I can remember back to the days when I would stand on a stool in my grandmother’s kitchen and help move the corn cobs from the cold water to the very cold water as we chilled the freshly blanched corn. Some days, I would help fill pint jars with whole round juicy cherries or watch as my mother and grandmother peeled and canned baskets of peaches. Canned fruit from the store leaves me wishing for “real” canned fruit…the kind that comes with ripe fruit, sugar, and a hint of old-fashioned cooking.
I’ve never thought much about how unique my childhood was growing up on the farm with my conservative Mennonite grandparents. Oh, they drove a car, a large sedan that had a bench seat in the front that I could sit in between them. My grandma wore a covering and wore dresses everyday with an apron to keep the kitchen dirt off of her. My family didn’t…we dressed like everybody else and my grandparents didn’t seem to mind. But living with them and having that type of community as my background, I learned beautiful, community building skills that started and ended in the kitchen with food.
On canning or freezing days, our kitchen would be piled full of baskets or boxes of the fruit or vegetable we were preparing to store for winter. It was a family affair with everyone doing a job, even little me in my bare feet, getting under foot. We’d talk and laugh and eat and work…for hours. Freezing corn or canning peaches for a large family is a day’s work. My grandma would have peppermint water…water made with a little peppermint extract and sugar to keep us going or Meadow tea from the side of the house. It was hard work, but with many hands, the time would fly by.
So in August each year, as the harvested tomatoes, sweet corn, and cucumbers fill my house, I do an annual tribute to my grandmothers that came before me. I freeze corn, can tomato soup, braid onions, and store fresh potatoes from my garden. I can pickled beets, make salsa, and start freezing vegetables as my jars start filling up. It is hard work…often filling my day, but there is something relaxing, calming in the chopping of vegetables, filling of jars, boiling of water. Perhaps it is that I enjoy cooking or maybe, its a small bit of the women who came before me…my grandmothers, my great-grandmothers, my great-aunts, and on and on and on back through the history of my family, working alongside to make this task light.
Cooking, preserving, and homemade meals are a legacy and tradition in my family…
What sorts of traditions do you have that were passed down through yours?
