"Some farmers hold that there’s nothing they’d rather sit down on a blowy, autumn day when they come home cold and hungry to dinner, than a deep brown pot roast or stew with a big bowl of dill pickles nearby."
I feel the same way (minus the pot roast and the profession). This little Zen gem appeared in the revised edition of Farm Journal’s Country Cookbook, edited by Neil B. Nichols and published first in 1959, then 1972.
Flash forward two generations, to a cold and rainy Friday afternoon in January, 2010. I post the following to my Facebook profile: "Wendy Joan Biddlecombe had to order mason jars : ( Will have to place the canning dreams on hold until next week."
Full disclosure: my Facebook page doesn’t seem to get that much traffic. A comment here, a thumbs-up there; a few event invitations roll in from time to time. But after that status update, friends came out of the woodwork to post countless comments on this thread, from offers to send tips from their expert southern grandmothers, to where to buy mason jars, to genuine interest in joining my pickling efforts. I was not, as I previously thought, the only person in the area enthusiastic about canning my own pickles.
This article appears in Jan 20-26, 2010.