Smithsonian.com

The final product, a hopefully delicious one at that. Photo by Lisa Bramen

Sometime around hour six of my first attempt at pickling—a project I had naively thought would take half as long—I heard my mother’s voice in my head. This was no flashback to lessons learned at her apron strings. The only things my mother ever canned were troublesome file clerks at the law office she used to manage. Instead, the sound I heard was her laughter at learning that I planned to try pickling. It was the same surprised, gently mocking chuckle she had given at each step of my transformation from a city girl who rarely ventured into the kitchen to a rural landowner, enthusiastic home cook and novice vegetable gardener.

Pickling and canning was the natural next step in the progression. Even tiny gardens often produce more fresh veggies than can be eaten—or even given away—before they go bad. My first garden, which has gone surprisingly well, is no exception. To avoid waste you have to preserve the bounty somehow. My boss, who grew up helping her mother, a farmer’s wife, “put by” dozens of jars of pickles, preserves and canned fruits and vegetables each year, made it sound easy and fun. For extra encouragement, she gave me a copy of the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving as a gift.

So, as my refrigerator filled with surplus green beans and cucumbers, I carved out a weekend afternoon for the project. Fun? Debatable. Easy? Definitely not.

Things might have gone better if: a) My legs and feet hadn’t already been aching from the seven-mile hike I had done the previous day; b) I had attempted only one recipe on my first go at pickling, rather than three; and c) I hadn’t had the insanely ambitious plan to also make dinner and bake a pie with the wild blueberries we had picked on the hike.

It’s not that there was anything overly complicated about the recipes I was attempting: dilly beans, pickled green tomatoes and dill cucumber slices, three of the classics. It was just a lot more time-consuming than I had anticipated. There is a reason, I discovered, that households of yore required at least one full-time homemaker to keep things running smoothly.

The biggest problem, believe it or not, was getting the water hot enough for the boiling-water bath that the jars must sit in for a time after they’re filled with vegetables and pickling liquid. The hot bath kills harmful microorganisms, seals the jars and makes them airtight. It takes a whole lot of water to cover a half-dozen standing pint jars in a giant graniteware pot, and my 1962 electric range with the wonky front burner just wasn’t up to the task. I swear I had it cranked to the max for an hour, with nary a bubble to show for it. I tried to move the pot to the other, more dependable large burner in the back, but it wouldn’t fit underneath the second oven with the lid on. Desperate, I improvised by covering the pot with a large wooden cutting board instead. It probably wasn’t very good for the cutting board, but it worked.

After six or so hours of standing around on my aching feet waiting for water to boil, I eventually came out with a grand total of seven jars of pickles. They’d better be delicious.

If I haven’t dissuaded you from trying pickling yourself—and I hope I haven’t—here are some more tips and resources that I plan to use when I try again:

First of all, learn from my mistake and set aside plenty of time for the project. Also, make sure your stove works before you’ve washed and cut up mounds of vegetables.

Pack the jars tightly enough with vegetables that they won’t float when the pickling liquid is poured into the jars. You want the vegetables to be completely covered with liquid, while leaving a small amount of space at the top of the jar.

Remove visible bubbles from the jar with a plastic knife, chopstick or other nonmetallic instrument. There may also be bubbles hiding below the surface; stick the instrument all the way down into the jar several times to release them.

The water bath around the jars of pickles will boil more quickly if you use several small pots or kettles and then consolidate them in the big pot. I wish I had known this time-saving trick before my pickling misadventure.

The jar lids will become concave if you’ve processed them correctly, but this doesn’t happen until they’ve cooled. Wait 24 hours to test by pressing the center of the lid down; if you can move it, it’s not airtight and you should either reprocess or refrigerate.

For recipes and instructions, see freshpreserving.com, the website for the mason jar brand Ball.

A few recent cookbooks bring a fresh approach to the canning scene with recipes that go beyond the basics:

Canning for a New Generation: Bold, Fresh Flavors for the Modern Pantry by Liana Krissoff and Rinne Allen has a couple dozen internationally inspired pickle recipes, including Indian Hot “Lime” Pickle and Persian Tarragon Pickles.

Put ‘em Up!: A Comprehensive Home Preserving Guide for the Creative Cook by Sherri Brooks Vinton explains how to pickle everything from ramps to watermelon rind.

Tart and Sweet: 101 Canning and Pickling Recipes by Kelly Geary and Jessie Knadler offers such delicious-sounding recipes as Southeast Asian Carrot Daikon Pickles and Orange Chili Pickled Baby Fennel.

Waiting. Image courtesy of Flickr user morberg.

In the criminal justice system, those who live outside the law sometimes meet their downfall through their relationship with food. These special cases keep cropping up, and some themes even begin to emerge, be it Jell-O-centric criminal behavior or the nefarious activities of ice cream peddlers. Take your fill of a few more stories from the underbelly. (Here is the apropos sound effect if you’d like to play it as you read each entry.)

Port St. Lucie, Florida. July, 2011. A minor beef.

It was a drug deal that spun out of control. Timethy Morrison shelled out $100 for marijuana, and the dealer drove up and handed Morrison a white bag through his car window and began to drive off. Inspection of the bag’s contents, however, revealed nothing but ground beef, and Morrison promptly turned around and fired several shots at the dealer’s Volvo and fled the scene. He was later apprehended and charged with attempted murder, burglary, escape, possession of marijuana and providing a false name to a law enforcement officer.

Kittery, Maine. March 2010. “Redemption is a dirty business.”

Many states add a 5-cent deposit to the price of bottled and canned drinks—and you can get that deposit back if you return your empties a redemption facility. But in addition to the consumer getting back a bit of change, the facility is paid a handling fee on the order of a few cents for every can processed. It is illegal for facilities to process out-of-state containers, since a state’s beverage industry is paying back those deposits. But a at a few cents a pop, who would put the effort into working the system? Attention turned to Green Bee Redemption in Kittery Maine, when Dennis Reed of New Hampshire rolled up with some 11,000 empty bottles and cans. Reed, along with the facility’s owners, Thomas and Megan Woodard, were all charged with fraud. During the Woodards’ trial, it was revealed that they arranged for Reed, along with Green Bee employee Thomas Prybot of Massachusetts, to collect large quantities of cans which would then be dropped off at the Maine facility after hours. Thomas was found guilty of stealing more than $10,000 by way of processing the illegal empties while his wife was acquitted. Reed is slated to stand trial in October while Prybot was not prosecuted for his role in the crime in exchange for his testimony. It is estimated that some $8 million worth of bottle fraud takes place in Maine every year.

Holyoke, Massachusetts. August, 2010. A load of baloney.

Postal inspectors in Puerto Rico had been working with authorities to try to crack down on illegal drugs being sent via mail to the United States—and their attentions turned to Juan Rodriguez of Holyoke, Massachusetts, after several parcels were sent to his home in May and June of 2010. When the post office alerted Holyoke police about another shipment being sent to Rodriguez, narcotics dogs detected the presence of drugs and an undercover agent delivered the package. After the package was signed for, police raided the residence—and it turned out that Rodriguez had a way with b-o-l-o-g-n-a. About 2.2 pounds of cocaine, worth about $100,000 on the street, had been hidden inside a hollowed-out loaf of luncheon meat. Rodriguez was arrested and charged with cocaine trafficking.

Webster, Massachusetts. July, 2008. Get ‘em while they’re hot.

On July 27, 2008, a tractor trailer traveling on Interstate 395 was involved in an accident and overturned, spilling its contents—a shipment of live lobster—and tow-truck operator Robert Moscoffian was called to the scene. Prosecutors allege that Moscoffian also called Arnold A. Villatico, owner of Periwinkles & Giorgio’s restaurant to the scene, who drove to the site with his refrigerated truck, and the pair took crates of lobster from the scene, with an estimated value of some $200,000, and sold them to local restaurants. Some of the upscale crustaceans were returned to the authorities, and the contraband lobsters discovered at Periwinkles & Giorgio’s were released into Boston Harbor. Indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit larceny, larceny over $250 and selling raw fish without a license, Moscoffian and Villatico are currently slated to stand trial in 2012.

The daunting school cafeteria. Courtesy of Flickr user ericnvntr

For this month’s Inviting Writing series, we asked you for personal stories about cafeteria culture: the sights, smells, rituals and survival tactics of shared mealtime. Our first essay comes from Katherine Krein of Sterling, Virginia, who works in a middle school in the special education department, helping students in math and science classes. She charts the skills one learns to master over time as the cafeteria poses new and more elaborate challenges.

Learning Cafeteria Culture, Grade by Grade

By Katherine Krein

School cafeterias from my youth are first remembered by their artifacts. I can visualize several things: the hard and heavy rectangular trays, the substantial metal silverware, the breakable plates filled with food, the little milk cartons, and the thin plastic straws. Lunch was paid for with change in our pockets or purses. Learning how to carry the heavy tray in order to balance the plate of food, silverware, and milk was a proud accomplishment for me as a young girl.

Social navigation was the next thing that had to be learned. You had to make friends and form a pact that you would sit together day after day. This could be hard at first if you were the new kid in town. My family moved about every two years throughout my elementary schooling, so I had to be brave and friendly. Trying to fit in would sometimes put me in a morally uncomfortable position. I have a recollection of making friends with a group of girls whose leader was a little mean. I remember one day she put potato chips in the seat of an overweight girl. When the girl sat down and flattened the chips everyone, including me, giggled. This memory still haunts me and fills me with shame.

By junior high school everything became smoother. I had grown, and carrying the full heavy tray became easy. My father’s job no longer required us to move, and we settled into our social surroundings. Knowing where to sit in the cafeteria became routine, and it no longer filled me with uncertainty. But social faux pas were still rather common. I remember sitting across the table from my friend Lisa when somehow milk came shooting out from my straw and ended up in Lisa’s face and hair. I’m not sure how this all transpired, but I am sure that I must have been doing something unladylike. Lisa did not speak to me for the rest of the day, and later in the week she got revenge by flinging peas in my hair and face. We remained friends through it all.

In high school, manners and appearances became more important as I began to view boys in a new way, and I began to notice them noticing me in a different way. Keith was a boy my age who I thought was very cute, and we were sitting across the table from one another. He was playing with his ketchup packet as we talked and flirted, and in an instant the packet burst. Ketchup squirted in my hair and on my face. Shock and surprise turned into laughter. What else could I do? We did end up dating for a while until my interest moved on.

I can barely remember specific foods from my K-12 cafeteria days. In California I loved the cafeteria burritos. Fish was frequently served on Fridays. Pizza is remembered from high school because my sister, two years older than me, could count on me to give her half of mine. Last but not least are memories of the mouth-watering, gooey, sugary and aromatic cinnamon buns. Eating them was such a sensory and sensuous experience.

I have a theory about why I don’t remember more about the food. As a student my brain was bombarded with numerous new and nervous social situations, and I was busy trying to analyze and remember new and complex ideas. Eating was a response to being in the cafeteria, and my primary consciousness was busy with socialization and academic learning. Eating did not require much of my thought.

Dried chili pepper wreath, courtesy of Flickr user min_photos

In a society that could conceive of deep-fried sticks of butter and donut burgers, it’s sometimes hard to remember that food’s main purpose is to keep us alive. In other societies, such as among the Yanesha people of the Peruvian Andes, food’s centrality to life is celebrated in myths that describe the origins of their most important food plants.

Ethnobiologist Fernando Santos-Granero, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, recently published a fascinating study of the Yanesha myths, titled “The Virtuous Manioc and the Horny Barbasco: Sublime and Grotesque Modes of Transformation in the Origin of Yanesha Plant Life.”

He explains in The Journal of Ethnobiology that the Yanesha, like other Amazonian peoples, conceive of a primordial time when all plants and animals took human form. Around the time that the present-day sun rose to the heavens, the Yanesha believe, the beings went through one of two kinds of transformation, classified as either “sublime” or “grotesque,” into their current states. The sublime transformations were associated with the upper half of the body and expressions of love and self-sacrifice, while the grotesque were “related to the baser activities of the lower body,” Santos-Granero writes. “Because of their immoral way of life—expressed in extreme forms of genital, oral, and anal incontinence—these primordial humans were separated from humanity and transformed into the plants they are nowadays.”

Santos-Granero concluded, by process of elimination (no pun intended), that the determining factor in which type of transformation a plant went through was the antiquity of its domestication. The oldest domesticated plants, and therefore those most central to the Yanesha diet—including manioc, maize, beans and peanuts—were ascribed to sublime transformations, while more recently domesticated plants—chili peppers and yams, for instance—fell into the grotesque category.

The maize narrative is an example of the sublime transformation (and has some interesting parallels to a more familiar religious story): During a time of famine, the creator god felt pity for humans, so he impregnated a virgin girl. The girl’s father demanded to know who the father was, but the girl refused to tell him—this is an example of the creator god testing the humans to see if they are worthy of his sympathy. The father accepted this child of unknown parentage, proving his worthiness, and the fair-haired grandson grew up to be Maize-Person. Maize-Person sowed pieces of himself in the grandfather’s garden and taught the people how to harvest and prepare the ensuing crop. When there was nothing more of his maize, he ascended to the sky and became a bright star.

Origin myths in the grotesque category, by contrast, center around selfish or immoral beings. For instance, chili peppers are said to be created from the farts of Hua’t~ena’, a gigantic forest ogre with an enormous, toothed penis who raped women and then ate them. And if being a “horny, cannibalistic rapist” wasn’t bad enough, his semen was poisonous to fish. He was somewhat redeemed, however, because when his selfish destruction of fish was discovered, he was ashamed—he cut off his penis and planted it, thus creating the barbasco (a plant used by the Yanesha to temporarily stun and catch fish) and, through his farts, the chili pepper.

Wild stories, indeed, but are they really any more outlandish than deep-fried sticks of butter?

Bedroom + kitchen + bathroom. Image courtesy of Flickr user ryanscottdavis.

Some college students are fortunate enough to have access to a communal kitchen space in their dorm. Granted, you are contending with everyone else on the floor, having to wait until the space is free, but having access to to a bona fide sink and stove makes up for a few inconveniences. But what do you do if all you have is whatever you’re able to stuff in your dorm and the cafeteria is closed? While most colleges have restrictions on what one can and can’t have in a dorm, this doesn’t necessarily put the kibosh on your first adventures in cooking as an independent young adult. And you don’t have be stuck subsisting on three squares of ramen noodles a day.

So, you’re in a dorm. Not a lot of personal space at your disposal. Although you have plenty of nothing, nothing may be plenty for you—especially if you’re allowed to have a coffee pot in your dorm room. Just think about it: This device contains a heating element and a pot in a space-saving package that can do worlds more than brew a cup of joe. Yes you can do the basics like oatmeal and ramen. But you can also really up the ante and crank out some formidable meals, from rice and bean dishes and soups to pasta dinners as this blogger deftly illustrates. (However, what I think is more awesome is that he is using the coffee pot to get the kids to play in the kitchen. Kinda blows the Easy Bake Oven out of the water, doesn’t it?) Depending on what you want to make, this appliance doesn’t lend itself to speedy cooking—especially if you’re trying to work with meats—and your college may limit you to buying a machine with an automatic shutoff switch, so you’d have to work with the quicker-cooking recipes. But while we’re on the subject of multifunctional electrics, let’s not forget the lowly iron, which can also double as a makeshift griddle/grilling surface for cooking eggs and bacon, enchiladas, and yes, a grilled cheese sandwich. (This site geared to travelers aiming to cook in hotel rooms has recipes for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and if you start searching the internet, you’ll find even more ideas.) The man who whipped up a tortellini with spinach and crème fraiche with a side of homemade biscuits in a hotel room has me in flat-out awe.

For colleges that are a little more open to letting you have heat-generating appliances in your room, you may be fortunate enough to incorporate tools like a hotplate, a single burner or even a George Forman grill into your closet kitchen. This opens up your opportunities considerably, and your cooking time will be cut down compared to using a coffee maker. Here, the biggest restriction is going to be your budget. If you can shell out the dough to cook a steak dinner for yourself, more power to you. For most college students, eating for ten bucks or less per meal is a little more realistic. And it can totally be done, as Dorm Room Kitchen illustrates. With a limit of $8, students challenged to whip up meals are able to make bruschetta appetizers, cheesesteak sandwiches and beer-battered fish.

And then there’s the microwave, the gold standard of collegiate cooking appliances. Like the aforementioned tools, this really opens your cooking options. (One intrepid blogger has already shown that one can craft a Thanksgiving meal in a dorm-sized microwave, another offers a microwavable take on cashew chicken.) There are lots of books out there on microwave cookery, so you should be able to find something that fits in with your budgetary and spatial limits. You might want to give The Healthy College Cookbook a flip through as it contains recipes for a variety of appliances, so there are recipes in here that should work with what few precious pieces you have to work with. And the recipes are also geared to helping new students avoid the dreaded “freshman 15.”

But the dorm room chef should also remember: like any other living space, your dorm is subject to pests, so be mindful about food prep and cleanup. You’re in a living space that is serving as a home away from home for a lot of people. You don’t want to be remembered by everybody on your floor as the person who brought about plagues of cockroaches, mice and ants on account of sloppy coffee pot cooking. And, whenever you are working with anything that produces heat, make sure you have your appliances situated in your room so that they do not create a fire hazard.

And also remember: have fun. And if there’s a significant someone-or-other that you’re aiming to woo, it’s hard to beat dining in. But please bear in mind, since open flames are probably a no-go in almost all dormitory spaces, you’ll have to forego the romantic glow of a candle-lit dinner. That is unless you go the LED route.