Preserving Time in a Bottle (or a Jar)

FOR Eugenia Bone, opening the kitchen cupboard in her SoHo apartment is like dipping into a favorite TV show. “The jars are like characters, with story lines that I remember,” she said recently, scrabbling around in search of a jar of yellowfin tuna preserved in olive oil and salt. “Seeing them brings back the farm where I bought that case of artichokes, or the day we picked all those cherries.”

When the tuna came to light, the date on the label was discouraging: 2006. “The Feds wouldn’t like it,” she said, referring to Department of Agriculture recommendations that home-preserved food be eaten within a year. “But it’s still going to make a great lunch.”

Ms. Bone, who has just published a canning cookbook titled “Well-Preserved” (Clarkson Potter), is not the blue-ribbon farm wife usually brought to mind by the phrase “home preserving expert.” She spent her youth in a plastic miniskirt, smoking and running between punk music shows on the Lower East Side. Now 50, a typically jumpy New Yorker and the mother of two teenagers, she grows nothing, though she is a regular hunter-gatherer at farmers’ markets.

But with her finely developed palate — she is a daughter of the influential Italian-American cookbook author Edward Giobbi — Ms. Bone has joined a growing movement of home cooks who are interested in preserving flavor, not just food.

“When I was young, we were just trying to desperately hold on to things,” said Edon Waycott, whose “Preserving the Taste” (Hearst Books, 1996) is one of the group’s bibles. She makes preserves from the mulberries, guavas and boysenberries she grows at home in Malibu, Calif., and was raised on working farms in North Carolina and New Jersey. “Now everything is available all the time, but capturing the ripeness and deliciousness of a strawberry is harder than it was back then,” she said.

Preserving food cannot be considered new and trendy, no matter how vigorously it’s rubbed with organic rosemary sprigs. But the recent revival of attention to it fits neatly into the modern renaissance of handcrafted food, heirloom agriculture, and using food in its season. Like baking bread or making a slow-cooked tomato sauce, preserving offers primal satisfactions and practical results. And in today’s swirl of food issues (local, seasonal, organic, industrial), home preserving can also be viewed as a quasi-political act. “Preserving is an extension of the values that made you shop in the farmers’ market in the first place,” Ms. Bone said.

“There’s an incredible surge of interest recently,” according to June Taylor of Berkeley, Calif., a pioneer in using local, seasonal produce and as few added ingredients as possible in her expensive, delicious fruit preserves. “People want to take back their food and their skills from the industrial giants.”

People are also looking for thrifty, crafty ways to eat well. In a time of high food prices, job losses and food safety scares, home canning is booming, with sales of equipment already up almost 50 percent over last year, according to the Jarden company, which makes both Ball and Kerr canning supplies.

Stacks of locally grown, peak-ripe produce are about to appear at farmstands and markets — then disappear for another year. The time window is opening for pickling artichokes, simmering berries and suspending plums in time, and syrup.

On Sunday, about 80 people are expected at a community kitchen in San Francisco’s Mission District, to preserve 500 pounds of ripe apricots trucked in from local organic farms. “The morning team will macerate them in sugar, cardamom and vanilla and the afternoon team will process them,” said Anya Fernald, who conceived the project and publicized it on Facebook and on www.yeswecanfood.com.

Shares in the apricots (future canning parties will tackle cucumbers in July and tomatoes in September) have been sold online, with a discount for those who show up to work in the kitchen. “By joining C.S.A.s or shopping at farmers’ markets, people have made the commitment,” Ms. Fernald said, referring to community-supported agriculture programs, in which people buy a weekly share of a farm’s output. “Now they will learn to deal with the ingredients.”

Canning, especially the friendly sounding “small batch” model, reduces the seasonal bounty to a series of manageable afternoon projects. (By contrast, older recipes call for bushels, rather than quarts, of produce.) “It’s not a huge annual event, but all of a piece with the way I eat and cook every day,” said Georgianne Mora, who lives in South Londonderry, Vt., and blogs at www.acookinglife.typepad.com. “The most flavor, from the best ingredients, with the least interference from me.” Ms. Mora, a purist among purists, has experimented extensively with jams cooked almost entirely by the heat of the sun, and sells them at farmers’ markets.

Like most ideologically tinged movements, preserving has its warring factions, its fault lines and its taboos. Many American home-canning classics — the kinds that win prizes at county fairs, like peas and carrots, dilled green beans, fruit jellies stiffened with pectin — are considered too sweet, too plain or too artificial by these cooks.

“I have never made one jar of jam with pectin,” declared June Taylor, referring to the naturally derived thickener that is a staple of both industrial and home canning. (It is called for in many recipes on the Agriculture Department’s canning Web site, the National Center for Home Food Preservation, www.uga.edu/nchfp/, considered the most reliable resource.)

Pectin is present in most unripe fruits and many ripe ones, but Ms. Taylor, Ms. Mora and others consider the prepackaged stuff, available in liquid and powder form, unnatural. Some produce their own pectin as cooks did for centuries, by boiling down the juice of green apples. This is the method espoused by Christine Ferber, the French jam goddess whose tiny workshop at the eastern edge of Alsace is hallowed ground for lovers of fruit preserves. (Her jams are sold at Pierre Hermé’s pastry shops in Paris, and her book, “Mes Confitures,” begins with a recipe for green apple jelly.)

Even the pectin rebels generally follow the U.S.D.A.’s strict guidelines for canning procedures, which have become even stricter over the last two decades. “After the 1970s there was a real crackdown,” said Blake Slemmer, a lifelong canner and self-described “homesteader” in Atlanta who translates the detailed U.S.D.A. instructions into plainer language on his Web site, www.pickyourown.org.

“In the 1980’s there was a hard look at the science,” said Dr. Elizabeth Andress, director of the National Center for Home Food Preservation, who has worked with the U.S.D.A. for 25 years on developing the guidelines. “Canning is much safer and more reliable than when we began.” Current regulations forbid the simple open-kettle canning, in which hot food is spooned into hot jars, sealed, and left to cool. Now virtually all food must be processed after it goes into the jar, and cooks are firmly discouraged from canning vegetables other than tomatoes. (The high acidity of most ripe fruits helps discourage spoilers; most vegetables have no such natural protection.)

But experienced canners say that the warnings unnecessarily discourage novices. “You should be clean, but you shouldn’t be paranoid,” Ms. Mora said. “Imagine the conditions in which these techniques were developed.”

Although the science of preserving doesn’t change, tastes, economies and ideologies do.

Community canneries, where local farmers and cooks could once bring their produce to be canned, or do it themselves using large-scale equipment, have mostly disappeared. But in the Hudson Valley, a group in Schoharie County recently received a grant to help open a new one. Peter Pehrson, who is leading the project, said he was inspired and alarmed by the wasted produce on local farms that are geared for the commercial food market.

“The tradition here is for the community to come in and pick up the gleanings,” he said. “I couldn’t believe how much was left lying in the field.” Mr. Pehrson said he was raised on farms and knew that even basic preserving equipment could solve the problem and create a new resource: locally grown canned vegetables.

“Like most home cooks and gardeners, I overbuy, I overplant, and then the moment of reckoning comes,” he said.

Buying too much at the farmers’ market is the main reason Ms. Bone learned to can a decade ago. She loved good food, especially Italian food, and the preserving recipes that other canners used to win ribbons at county fairs just didn’t have the deep, complicated tastes she remembered from her father’s kitchen and visits to his family in Italy. Out of necessity, she began to develop her own safe recipes for canned foods she found useful, like pickled cauliflower and marinated artichokes.

“How much jam and dill pickles can a person get through?” Ms. Bone asked. Her book includes master recipes — for preserves like stewed onions with marjoram, lemony baby artichokes, and figs in brandy — and recipes for dishes that use them up. She is all about the churn of the kitchen, the movement of ingredients from the counter to the cupboard and freezer, back to the counter, to the table, and out. “It’s all part of the kitchen eco-system,” she said. “It all gets used in the end.”

She stepped away from a stovetop of boiling pots to arrange herself in a yoga pose. “In full peacock your elbows really dig into your stomach,” she said, balancing on her forearms. “Cooks like it because it keeps things moving through the intestinal tract.”

She doesn’t decorate her jars with calico, or stick charming labels on them, and is unconcerned about the color of her asparagus and the occasional overcooked batch of artichoke hearts.

“I’m not in it for the looks,” she said. “If it tastes good, I’ll eat it. If it doesn’t taste good, I’ll make it taste good.”