Canny

Once a year, around Labor Day, my liberal-arts-educated family gets together for an almost scientific, Mr. Wizard sort of holiday:

"Boil them for twenty minutes to sterilize them."
"Measure exactly or the pH won't be right."
"Has the chemical reaction started? Is it thickening? Did the color turn?"
"What's the salinity of the mixture?"
"Watch the siphoning!"
"Do you need me to neutralize the ascetic acid?"

Once a year, we converge on my parents' house with bushels of tomatoes, over-sized stock pots, piles of onions, peppers, chiles, berries and cucumbers, and cases and cases of mason jars, for a weekend of binge canning that would make Laura Ingles Wilder proud. It's an anti-urban, anti-modern holiday that somehow has still resulted in our accumulation of science fair wisdom about acidity, bacterial growth, pectin, brines, and antioxidants. It also results in nearly a year's supply of condiments, mostly of the tomato-based variety. [After Labor Day, if you like tomatoes, it'd be possible to live for a full month in my parents' basement with nothing more than a can opener and a spoon.]

Other than Christmas, Labor Day is the only holiday of the year when my family reliably comes together; unlike Christmas, our canning holiday requires quite a bit of labor. Christmas of course is its own kind of work: if the one holiday is occasioned by the day that celebrates labor rights , the other celebrates capitalism of the most grueling kind—the kind that involves refunds and exchanges. What the two holidays share is excess: because of the scale of the canning, even small miscalculations have significant consequence, and at the end of this weekend, because of my misjudgment, we had an extra 40 jalapeño peppers, five pounds of basil, and a heap of minced garlic—the ingredients for what could be a military scale pesto from Hell.

This weekend's canning was the smoothest ever: the combined wisdom of our several-year-old tradition seemed finally to be paying off. Quality, and quantity, and efficiency. As my sister and I carried the Mason-jar-sealed fruits of our labor to the basement by the caseload, we struggled to find space for it all: "How about there?" one of us pointed—behind the still-full cases we'd canned the year before, and the year before that...

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