I've spent the last month pickling and jamming and that's led me to recognising how time and labour consuming it was for women to have to deal with forward provisioning post harvests, indeed post 'the season' for fruits and vegetables, in the absence of fridges and freezers.What I mean is...
I have fruit trees, herbs and grow some vegetables in my backyard and forage from neighbouring properties when there is produce going unregarded. I also shop at a growers' market and often engage in 'rescuing' produce that's put on the discount shelf at the greengrocer for being too old or bruised or a tad over-ripe or whatever.
This leads to me facing gluts of produce well beyond anything I can eat within the period the produce is at its best or least worst. This is the situation that faced or faces anyone growing fruit and vegetables still dependent on the seasonal cycles. Its the joy and curse of seasonality.
So, I like others have to do something to not waste the abundance when it comes. I don't have the imperative of having to provide for a winter of no produce, however. One of the solutions we humans came up with was to preserve the produce via pickling or jamming and it has usually been women to whom that responsibility has fallen. And it is bloody hard and time consuming work!
You spend an hour juicing thirty limes; then finely slicing their skins; then mix them with their juice and sugar; then stand for another hour over a pot as the mix boils away threatening to spume up and drench your fire and stove and you at the least inattention from you; testing testing testing for the setting point; meanwhile sterilising jars; then filling and sealing them; and finally labeling them.
Or you slice chokos under running water so your hands don't react with the sticky juice that can form a black film on a careless hand; then grind spices and in the days before electric spice grinders this would have been immensely tiring of the arms and back as you bend over and pound away; stand over a boiling pot stirring and stirring so nothing sticks and burns all the while being careful not to mash the fruit in the process and that the flour heavy sauce doesn't cake; and again you do the jar sterilising, filling, sealing, labeling.
If you are making a guava jelly there is the tedium of straining the steaming pulp out of its cooking liquid so it becomes clear and free of the merest hint of a speck of flesh. Then if you are determined to not waste the pulp and go on to make guava cheese you get to stand over - yes, you guessed it - a steaming pot, as the pulp and sugar you have added condense down into a larval paste that erupts scaldingly till it is set and lifts away from the sides of the pot.
Then of course you have to clean the pots and pans, the utensils, the stove, the benches...
I get satisfaction for all of this from the oohs and aahs of friends to whom I give the finished product, the cache of home made. I suspect I would look on it differently if I wasn't doing it by choice but out of necessity, as routine, as something expected of me in my position within a household.
I have fruit trees, herbs and grow some vegetables in my backyard and forage from neighbouring properties when there is produce going unregarded. I also shop at a growers' market and often engage in 'rescuing' produce that's put on the discount shelf at the greengrocer for being too old or bruised or a tad over-ripe or whatever.
This leads to me facing gluts of produce well beyond anything I can eat within the period the produce is at its best or least worst. This is the situation that faced or faces anyone growing fruit and vegetables still dependent on the seasonal cycles. Its the joy and curse of seasonality.
So, I like others have to do something to not waste the abundance when it comes. I don't have the imperative of having to provide for a winter of no produce, however. One of the solutions we humans came up with was to preserve the produce via pickling or jamming and it has usually been women to whom that responsibility has fallen. And it is bloody hard and time consuming work!
You spend an hour juicing thirty limes; then finely slicing their skins; then mix them with their juice and sugar; then stand for another hour over a pot as the mix boils away threatening to spume up and drench your fire and stove and you at the least inattention from you; testing testing testing for the setting point; meanwhile sterilising jars; then filling and sealing them; and finally labeling them.
Or you slice chokos under running water so your hands don't react with the sticky juice that can form a black film on a careless hand; then grind spices and in the days before electric spice grinders this would have been immensely tiring of the arms and back as you bend over and pound away; stand over a boiling pot stirring and stirring so nothing sticks and burns all the while being careful not to mash the fruit in the process and that the flour heavy sauce doesn't cake; and again you do the jar sterilising, filling, sealing, labeling.
If you are making a guava jelly there is the tedium of straining the steaming pulp out of its cooking liquid so it becomes clear and free of the merest hint of a speck of flesh. Then if you are determined to not waste the pulp and go on to make guava cheese you get to stand over - yes, you guessed it - a steaming pot, as the pulp and sugar you have added condense down into a larval paste that erupts scaldingly till it is set and lifts away from the sides of the pot.
Then of course you have to clean the pots and pans, the utensils, the stove, the benches...
I get satisfaction for all of this from the oohs and aahs of friends to whom I give the finished product, the cache of home made. I suspect I would look on it differently if I wasn't doing it by choice but out of necessity, as routine, as something expected of me in my position within a household.
It is indeed a lot of work. I guess it worked best in the old days when women could do it together - very isolating to be slaving over the stove on your own. Especially in times before gas or electric stoves. My mum did all her baking in a fuel stove when I was small, but I came along around the same time as the electricity arrived at our farm, so I before then all meals, baking, jams, & preserved fruit would have been on the slow combustion stove. I believe she drew the line at bread though.
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