A Little Fruit Goes a Long Way

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

Peaches. For the past 10 days, our counters have been loaded with bags and bowls of peaches off the little tree in our backyard. Several years ago my niece gave that young peach tree to Daughter #1 as a birthday gift. Daughter #1 was thrilled. (Who knew she’d turn into a gardener at this stage of her life?) Now we have an apricot, a pear, two peach, and two apple trees in our side yard. Last year the peach tree gift was finally mature enough to be loaded with blossoms, but an unseasonal icy windstorm blew the flowers off the tree and sent them to somewhere into Utah County.

This year with the help of some indentured grandkids, we picked about four bushels of peaches from that little tree. Containers of fruit have been stacked up all over the kitchen since. We made jam and salsa and bottled fruit and frozen fruit, and several batches of peach shortcake. This morning Daughter #1 finished off the last of nature’s bounty by making six fresh peach pies. We’ll be enjoying a taste of summer when the snow is piled high outside this winter (in case you need to know where to come).

I am descended from a long line of women who believed that one of the qualifications for provident living is shelves lined with home-canned fruit and vegetables after the fall harvest. When I was a kid, fresh food from Mexico and South America was unheard of, so the stuff off my mom’s pantry shelves provided variety when there were no other choices. Drafted into food conservation when I was very young, I remember standing on a chair to wash and prep fruits and veggies while my mom sliced and diced. Every time my dad was transferred, the Air Force moving companies were amazingly uncomplaining about having to have to box up all those dozens of bottles–the result of my mom’s exhaustive labor.

Despite that early training, as a young mother I had an unexpected and fairly traumatic introduction to a side of food preservation which I had never encountered. When Son #2 was three days old and admitted to Primary Children’s Hospital for major surgery, I sat for several days of very long hours outside the intensive care unit next to a young mother whose six-month-old son had been poisoned by botulism toxin at a church dinner when he ate some home-canned tomatoes which were improperly processed. The adult bodies at the dinner had had strong enough immune systems to shrug off the danger from the tiny sample similar to which the baby had ingested–but for a body so small, the amount was potentially deadly. That young mother was lucky–her son survived. Medical personnel told she and I later that they had a few children every year admitted to the hospital for the same kind of peril. Some of those children had not been so fortunate.

Once my family began to grow, It was with some understandable trepidation that I embarked on fruit and vegetable preservation as a means decreasing the size of our rapidly expanding grocery bill. My neighbors at the time were all involved in an unconscious competition to out-brag one another about how many bottles of this or that they had canned, frozen, dried, or whatever. I sighed and tried to keep up with the Jones, Smiths, Youngs, and a passel of other single-syllable Mormon names. But it turned out, I was a dismal failure. Not that I didn’t have the skills (thanks to my mother and grandmothers), but my time at the hospital had unnerved me. It was several years of careful practice before I felt completely comfortable letting my children eat unsupervised from the bottled foods on the shelves in my kitchen.

Plus, to be frank, cutting stuff up bored me to the extent that over the next three or four years, I developed a subversive list of foods I could do without in the eternities because they were way too much work to get from the garden to the shelves of my pantry. At the top of my list: pumpkin. Do you know how much trouble it is to peel a pumpkin? They are heavy, awkward, and messy. Plus, it takes a ton of pulp cooked down to make a pie. Clearly, that’s why Libby’s brand was invented.

Also, I don’t bottle pears. A simple cost/benefit analysis proved that pears were way to much work to justify the effort/reward scale. (Sorry, my husband has a degree in economics!) But cherries! I love cherries. I even have a cute little cherry-pitter somewhere in the back of my cupboard. However, cherries are little, tiny things—it takes a lot of them to fill a quart bottle. At some point I figured out that if my kids wanted cherry pie, they could pull out a couple bottles of unpitted cherries and pit themselves enough for a delicious pastry treat. They did the work. I didn’t have to. Bonus!

Since that realization, I have had a sneaking suspicion that in the Next Life, we can tell if we’ve been assigned to Hell by the Great Judge of Heaven because we end up peeling/slicing fruits and vegetables for eternity. ARRRGGGHHH! Which brings me back to peaches. I am currently eating a piece of fresh peach pie piled high with whipped cream. Hard to beat that conclusion to a Sunday dinner—even if I did have to peel and slice them all by myself.