[Sca-cooks] Re: pantry foods was Cooking Spam

[johnna holloway]

I didn't mean that they didn't can prior to the
Depression only that the depression and home ec
re-enforced the canning aspect of the life on the
farm or life with the big 5 acre garden that would feed
25 easily. That people still continued to can after the
second world war has something to do with the human psyche.
Why spend more on sugar to can something at home than what
it would cost to buy fresh in the winter? Why continue to can
this year's harvest when there are already 5 years already
put up??? I was always amused by the observation that
people shouldn't eat foods out of cans/tins when a century ago
people wanted foods in cans because that helped ease the
monotony of what they did have to eat through the winter
months.... Think about canned milk and even Condensed
milk... when the cow went dry, the housewife with young
children wanted canned milk. Just wait and see someone
will ask what a root cellar is next??? Try also to explain
the importance of getting the deer or elk in the fall so that
they'd be meat through the winter too. My father ate canned
chickens as a boy for several months because a hailstorm killed
the chickens. His mother did the only thing she could... she canned
them all. This would have been the early 1930's.
 Johnna Holloway  Johnnae llyn Lewis

> For a lot of areas in the Western United States it was also the only way to
> ensure you had fruit or vegetables for the winter.
  My grandmother, right up until the end of her life, regularly
> canned peaches, pears, apricots, beans, peas, corn, pickles (sweet and dill),
> jam, jelly (chokecherry jelly was my favorite) tomatos and tomato juice.  My
> great-grandmother's root cellar was lined with shelves full of food, and like
> a good Wyoming pioneer's daughter every year she canned even more.  Out here
> many familys have been canning food since long before the Depression or Home
> Ec classes.> Noemi
> who only cans dill pickles