The making of wine was hardly my mothers first foray into growing,harvesting and bottling our own fruit.She had a garden in the back yard,and it's very early on that I can recall her gathering up all the old bottles,sterilizing them in a big pot of boiling water,then cutting up,and grinding up thins to put into them.
In early summer,before the first of July,canning season would start with strawberries.we usually picked our own berries at a self picking farm,as there was not near enough room in the backyard for a strawberry patch.We'd bring them home,and out would come every bottle in the house,to be boiled inside and out.We usually didn't use Mason Jars,purchased for bottling,but instead,old instant coffee,or Cheez Whiz bottles,or any jar laying around the house.My mother would cut up the berries,and boil them down with whatever secret ingredients she used,until the whole house was filled with the smell of strawberries,and it drifted out into the yard.She'd work late into the night sometimes,after were were in bed,and when we woke up the next day,there would be dozens of bottles of strawberry jam, still warm and sitting on the kitchen counter.My mother would serve us jam with our toast at breakfast. Later on,she would usually make bread,and we would have jam with fresh buns for dinner.To this day,the smell,and the taste of fresh strawberry jam,and warm baked bread,are the taste and smell of home to me.
Out in the garden,my mother grew a lot of cucumbers,and beans,both green and yellow.These she used to bottle up later in the summer.Sometimes she would just slice up the cucumbers,then pickle them in vinegar and a lot of salt,so,when it was time to eat them,they just came out of the bottle like sliced cucumbers,only smaller.They tasted good too.Not at all like cucumbers,which is a thing I've never really acquired a taste for.Pickles were completely different-all tangy and salty,and I very much enjoyed them.Sometimes she would take out this metal grinder she had,and grind up the cucumbers along with other ingredients.This usually included onions and green and red peppers,as well as some various spices.This is the way in which I first encountered peppers,and I distinctly remember that experience.Peppers were not something we grew in our garden,nor were they ordinarily something that was kept in the house at the time.My mother,being a United Empire Loyalist,was not especially into the kinds of food you would use peppers in.In fact,I think that her idea of ethnic food was limited to Irish Stew and French Fries.But,when she was making the kind of pickles you grind up,then use as hot dog relish,she used both green and red peppers.Her recipe might well have called for other kinds of peppers as well,but she was hardly that adventurous,and I don't recall that the hotter varieties of peppers were even available in any store in Moncton. It's not like there were many ethnic food stores around at the time.
So I was standing in the kitchen,watching my mother grind up cucumbers.Nothing new about that.But then she had these kind of misshapen round things that kind of looked like apples,except that they were waxy looking and had a tough,fibrous stem growing from the top of them.As my mother ground up the cucumbers,she allowed me to smell them.They were a rather subtle smelling thing,not overpowering at all.If she ground up onion,I could smell them too,from almost anyplace in the house.I rather liked them smell of onions too.But when it came to the peppers,my mother encouraged me not to sniff at them."You won't like them" she said,and I wondered how she could be so certain. The green ones seemed be okay,though they made my eyes water a bit.Not like being right over top of a ground onion though.When she ground up the red ones,she shooed me away,telling me they were really hot,that they would burn up my nose and make me cry,worse than onions ever could.So I watched her grind them up from the other side of the kitchen,and I still wanted to see what they smelled like.So I waited for her to go into some other room,then went up and sniffed the bowl full of ground red peppers.I'd had a certain expectation of how they might smell,based on my mother saying that they were hot,and on the fact that they were red.But they didn't smell anything like I thought they might.They didn't make my eyes water either,so I stuck my finger into the bowl and tasted some of the peppers.It had an unusual sort of tang to it,but it wasn't at all what I'd call unpleasant.A tiny bit hot,but,more than anything,quite sweet.But,once the pickles were all made,I couldn't really find that taste in them at all.It was as if it just disappeared into the taste of pickles,which was alright by me. I'm also quite certain that it was my mothers first encounter with peppers too.I'm certain she would have never told me they were hot and nasty,if she'd known that they were not.Where she grew up,I'd never known anyone to grow peppers,and I'd never even seen one in a grocery store. So what possessed her to use them in the first place is something I can only guess at.She always used to tell us years later that it was important to follow recipes precisely ,to the letter,so,perhaps she found a pickle recipe and did exactly that,though it was likely an adventure for her to have done so.Most likely she had her own expectations of how such exotic plants would smell and taste.And most likely those expectations were wrong.She likely knew,too,about pickles never tasting exactly like the things you put in them,so this likely permitted her to be obedient to the recipe without being too bold.
Later in the year,we would go get apples from a roadside stand,and my mother would make bottles of apple jelly,some apple pie,and,my favorite,apple cobbler made with apples and brown sugar. Sometimes we would find apples in other places too.There were wild apples growing both around the cottage,and at my grandparents place in western New Brunswick.That's where we would go to pick apples.But,as it turned out,not all apples are created equal.Some of them were apples you could eat,some you could turn into a pie or apple jelly,and some were just better left alone. I could never really go near an apple tree without tasting the fruit,which I guess is how I've been able to tell I'm fully human.In my grandparents yard,there used to be an apple tree.there were others up in the woods too.But when I asked my mother if they were good to eat,she said no,and she called them pig apples.The only thing they ever used those apples for was to feed pigs.But sure enough I got into the pig apples.And I remember both my mother and father saying"Well,they ought to keep him close to home for a while at least.".This was something that I couldn't really figure out,since in The Bible,eating apples was the thing that seemed to get Adam and Eve run out of their home.But I wasn't long learning that pig apples really did keep me close to home,no farther away than the front yard,until they ran their course.
In early summer,before the first of July,canning season would start with strawberries.we usually picked our own berries at a self picking farm,as there was not near enough room in the backyard for a strawberry patch.We'd bring them home,and out would come every bottle in the house,to be boiled inside and out.We usually didn't use Mason Jars,purchased for bottling,but instead,old instant coffee,or Cheez Whiz bottles,or any jar laying around the house.My mother would cut up the berries,and boil them down with whatever secret ingredients she used,until the whole house was filled with the smell of strawberries,and it drifted out into the yard.She'd work late into the night sometimes,after were were in bed,and when we woke up the next day,there would be dozens of bottles of strawberry jam, still warm and sitting on the kitchen counter.My mother would serve us jam with our toast at breakfast. Later on,she would usually make bread,and we would have jam with fresh buns for dinner.To this day,the smell,and the taste of fresh strawberry jam,and warm baked bread,are the taste and smell of home to me.
Out in the garden,my mother grew a lot of cucumbers,and beans,both green and yellow.These she used to bottle up later in the summer.Sometimes she would just slice up the cucumbers,then pickle them in vinegar and a lot of salt,so,when it was time to eat them,they just came out of the bottle like sliced cucumbers,only smaller.They tasted good too.Not at all like cucumbers,which is a thing I've never really acquired a taste for.Pickles were completely different-all tangy and salty,and I very much enjoyed them.Sometimes she would take out this metal grinder she had,and grind up the cucumbers along with other ingredients.This usually included onions and green and red peppers,as well as some various spices.This is the way in which I first encountered peppers,and I distinctly remember that experience.Peppers were not something we grew in our garden,nor were they ordinarily something that was kept in the house at the time.My mother,being a United Empire Loyalist,was not especially into the kinds of food you would use peppers in.In fact,I think that her idea of ethnic food was limited to Irish Stew and French Fries.But,when she was making the kind of pickles you grind up,then use as hot dog relish,she used both green and red peppers.Her recipe might well have called for other kinds of peppers as well,but she was hardly that adventurous,and I don't recall that the hotter varieties of peppers were even available in any store in Moncton. It's not like there were many ethnic food stores around at the time.
So I was standing in the kitchen,watching my mother grind up cucumbers.Nothing new about that.But then she had these kind of misshapen round things that kind of looked like apples,except that they were waxy looking and had a tough,fibrous stem growing from the top of them.As my mother ground up the cucumbers,she allowed me to smell them.They were a rather subtle smelling thing,not overpowering at all.If she ground up onion,I could smell them too,from almost anyplace in the house.I rather liked them smell of onions too.But when it came to the peppers,my mother encouraged me not to sniff at them."You won't like them" she said,and I wondered how she could be so certain. The green ones seemed be okay,though they made my eyes water a bit.Not like being right over top of a ground onion though.When she ground up the red ones,she shooed me away,telling me they were really hot,that they would burn up my nose and make me cry,worse than onions ever could.So I watched her grind them up from the other side of the kitchen,and I still wanted to see what they smelled like.So I waited for her to go into some other room,then went up and sniffed the bowl full of ground red peppers.I'd had a certain expectation of how they might smell,based on my mother saying that they were hot,and on the fact that they were red.But they didn't smell anything like I thought they might.They didn't make my eyes water either,so I stuck my finger into the bowl and tasted some of the peppers.It had an unusual sort of tang to it,but it wasn't at all what I'd call unpleasant.A tiny bit hot,but,more than anything,quite sweet.But,once the pickles were all made,I couldn't really find that taste in them at all.It was as if it just disappeared into the taste of pickles,which was alright by me. I'm also quite certain that it was my mothers first encounter with peppers too.I'm certain she would have never told me they were hot and nasty,if she'd known that they were not.Where she grew up,I'd never known anyone to grow peppers,and I'd never even seen one in a grocery store. So what possessed her to use them in the first place is something I can only guess at.She always used to tell us years later that it was important to follow recipes precisely ,to the letter,so,perhaps she found a pickle recipe and did exactly that,though it was likely an adventure for her to have done so.Most likely she had her own expectations of how such exotic plants would smell and taste.And most likely those expectations were wrong.She likely knew,too,about pickles never tasting exactly like the things you put in them,so this likely permitted her to be obedient to the recipe without being too bold.
Later in the year,we would go get apples from a roadside stand,and my mother would make bottles of apple jelly,some apple pie,and,my favorite,apple cobbler made with apples and brown sugar. Sometimes we would find apples in other places too.There were wild apples growing both around the cottage,and at my grandparents place in western New Brunswick.That's where we would go to pick apples.But,as it turned out,not all apples are created equal.Some of them were apples you could eat,some you could turn into a pie or apple jelly,and some were just better left alone. I could never really go near an apple tree without tasting the fruit,which I guess is how I've been able to tell I'm fully human.In my grandparents yard,there used to be an apple tree.there were others up in the woods too.But when I asked my mother if they were good to eat,she said no,and she called them pig apples.The only thing they ever used those apples for was to feed pigs.But sure enough I got into the pig apples.And I remember both my mother and father saying"Well,they ought to keep him close to home for a while at least.".This was something that I couldn't really figure out,since in The Bible,eating apples was the thing that seemed to get Adam and Eve run out of their home.But I wasn't long learning that pig apples really did keep me close to home,no farther away than the front yard,until they ran their course.
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