52 Ancestors - Week 19 - Preserve

 52 Ancestors – WEEK 19 – Preserves

By Cynthia Keefer Patton

The summer's are hot and long in southern Mississippi and the growing seasons are also. So there is a LOT of produce when you put in a garden, but that means there is also a lot to preserve. My mother-in-law and her extended family taught me to can and freeze the harvests.

I remember sitting on barstools in her kitchen and snapping bushels of green beans and putting them in the boiling water. The counters were lined with dozens of mason jars we had cleaned and staged to be filled. We would laugh and visit and work long hours.

Sometimes we would drive up to "the country" which was a little community called Necaise Crossing about 20 miles farther down the highway from our farm. Aunt Ethel and cousin Collie and their families had acres of gardens. The corn, the crowder peas, and the cucumbers were so plentiful. Again, the family gathering going there to pick and eat a lunch of seafood gumbo and sweet iced tea are some of my fondest memories of my Mississippi days.

When the shrimp were plentiful my husband would go to the docks in Biloxi or Gulfport and buy 100 pounds and bring them home in a cooler. It would actually cut my fingers to clean the tails off so many shrimp. We would freeze them in Ziplock bags with water.

I especially enjoyed learning to make jellies and jams. We made scuppernong jelly with the native grapes that grew on the farm and fig jam from the fig bush outside my mother-in-law Florence's well house.

I loved seeing the shelves full of lines and lines of colorful jars filled with the fruits of our labors at the season's end. There is nothing more satisfying than opening a jar of homemade tomato sauce and preparing a pasta dish in the winter and every bite tastes like summer.