life in a red state 199compete with our southern humidity; a low- voltage dryer renders an iden-
tical product.) We make sauce in huge quantity, packed and processed in
canning jars. By season’s end our pantry shelves are lined with quarts of
whole tomatoes, tomato juice, spaghetti sauce, chutney, several kinds of
salsa, and our favorite sweet- sour sauce based on our tomatoes, onions,
and apples.
August brings on a surplus of nearly every vegetable we grow, along
with the soft summer fruits. Squash are vegetable rabbits in terms of re-
productive excess, but right behind them are the green beans, which in
high season must be picked every day. They’re best when young, slender,
and super- fresh, sautéed and served with a dash of balsamic vinegar, but
they don’t stay young and slender for long. We’ve found or invented a fair
number of disappearing- bean recipes; best is a pureed, bright green dip or
spread that’s a huge crowd pleaser until you announce that it’s green bean
paté. It keeps and freezes well, but needs a more cunning title. Our best
effort so far is “frijole guacamole,” Holy Mole for short.
We process and put up almost every kind of fruit and vegetable in late
summer, but somehow it’s the tomatoes, with their sunny flavor and short
shelf life, that demand the most attention. We wish for them at leisure,
and repent in haste. Rare is the August evening when I’m not slicing, can-
ning, roasting, and drying tomatoes—often all at the same time. Toma-
toes take over our life. When Lily was too young to help, she had to sit out
some of the season at the kitchen table with her crayons while she
watched me work. The summer she was fi ve, she wrote and illustrated a
small book entitled “Mama the Tomato Queen,” which fully exhausted
the red spectrum of her Crayola box.
Some moment of every summer fi nds me all out of canning jars. So I
go to town and stand in line at the hardware store carrying one or two
boxes of canning jars and lids, renewing my membership in a secret soci-
ety. Elderly women and some men, too, will smile their approval or ask
outright, “What are you canning?” These folks must see me as an anomaly
of my generation, an earnest holdout, while the younger clientele see me
as a primordial nerdhead, if they even notice. I suppose I’m both. If I even
notice.
But canning doesn’t deserve its reputation as an archaic enterprise