Old Stories - Canned goods - July 24, 2021

 Today, I am going to take my brother some of the tomato relish/chili sauce that I made from the tomatoes our sister picked from his garden while he was on vacation.  As I was thinking about what other canned goodies I might take him, a memory from my childhood popped into my mind.

Great-uncle Garner was born in 1904 and farmed for his living.  By the time I was 10 years old, he'd sold most of his property and had retired from farming.  He and his wife, Aunt Lee, never had any children, and he was fond of my mother and her siblings, his nieces and nephews.  When I was a child, he visited my mother on a daily basis, sometimes more than once a day.  And he was always good for a story or two.

Uncle Garner's mother died of a miscarriage in 1914, when he was six years old.  His father remarried to a kind, sweet woman two years later, but she died not long after the marriage.  In 1919, his father married again, and this woman, Mary, was not so kind and sweet.

Not long after their marriage, Uncle Garner's father noticed that the family's supply of canned peaches and other canned goods had diminished.  When he mentioned this to Mary, she blamed the disappearance on Uncle Garner, said he'd probably sneaked them out of the house and eaten them.  Uncle Garner, innocent of the crime, pled "not guilty," but his father still suspected him.

One day, as the family was preparing to visit one of Mary's grown and married daughters, Uncle Garner's father sent him to put something under the wagon seat.  As Uncle Garner did what he was told, he noticed that there was already a box, hidden under a quilt, under the wagon seat.  He peeked under the quilt and found that the box was full of canned goods.  He summoned his father to the wagon and showed him what was under the seat.

"And we didn't have any more food disappear after that," Uncle Garner said with a satisfied chuckle.

* * * * * * * * 

I cooked and canned the cucumber relish that I chopped and prepared yesterday.  The recipe usually yields 5 pints of relish, with a "sample" left over.  I've gotten pretty good at "eye-balling" a pot of vegetables to predict how many jars I'll need, but I always sterilize one extra jar, just in case.  Yesterday, I needed TWO extra jars - 7 pints total.

This canning makes somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 jars of relish.  THAT'S ENOUGH.  No more relish.  I swear it.