Preserved Fruit – Photo Credit: Don Lee Aldrich.
I remember my mother and grandmother sitting at the kitchen table talking loudly over the radio as they peeled peaches for canning. No doubt my grandmother did the same with her mother before that. I think about them as I peel apples for applesauce. Without preserving fruit back then, you had a pretty fruitless winter.
30 ripe peaches? That’s a lot of peeling! Recipe from favfamilyrecipes.com
The farmhouses in this area mostly had root cellars or Michigan Basements where they stored their canned fruit, potatoes, apples, and other things. They had simple dirt floors and fieldstone walls which held the frost at bay and was cool enough to keep things from spoiling.
Today we can freeze it or buy it, but it does not taste as good. But what a job back then! First, they had to get the wood stove fired up and get water boiling to sterilize the jars. Stoke the wood stove with more wood and prepare the sugar syrup. Peel and cut up the peaches. Get all this in the jars and then, still not done, the jars had to be put back in the pot, covered with water, and boiled for 25 minutes (after adding more wood to the wood stove). When I looked up the recipe, it was under the heading “American Cuisine,” back then it was just plain food for the winter. They were probably grateful for these cool fall days.
An antique wood stove like our great-grandmothers used. Electricity did not come to Omena until 1906 so they did not have a choice. You can still buy these on eBay, a little rusty, but I am sure still workable.
Photo credit: The Organized Home
Photo credit: Pinterest.