Open-Fire Canning

Some things bring back memories and I couldn’t help but to think about that cool damp hole beneath the pumphouse while I sat outside under the fly peeling pears.

My brothers dug that hole. Hand dug. A couple of boys with shovels in their hands.

I never measured the dimensions of that hand dug cellar. Looking back, thinking back and guesstimating, it was around 10’ by 12’ and deep enough that a 6’ person could stand without bumping their head on the rough-cut pine floor joists overhead. The cellar stayed close to the same cool temperature year ‘round and made an ideal place to store all those shelves of jars filled with canned vegetables, jams, and jellies. Potatoes kept fairly well but someone had to regularly pick through them to get rid of the rots. That someone was me once I was grown enough to carry a bucket up and down the cellar steps.

We were, unbeknown to our family those 60 plus years ago on my personal life-calendar, what modern folks now call preppers. 

It was a way of life for us … prepping for the coming years, living daily out of our stores, and annually rotating and replenishing our stock. Our family was good at it too. My mom and dad knew what we needed to go another year. We always put up at least what we needed and there was always some reserve left over when the new stuff made its way to the shelves.

I don’t know who came up with the idea or when the practice first started. I suppose I could Google the history of canning and find out. I do know that, by the time I came along, my folks knew all about it and depended upon it as a way of life.  It was our means of storing food for personal use out of season when it doesn’t grow. Canning vegetables and fruit outdoors over an open fire was knowledge and skills that my mom learned from her parents and my dad learned from his.

I am, where my lineage is concerned, at least a 3^rd Generation practitioner of these skills.

One significant difference between water-bath canning and pressure canning is the length of time that it takes to do the cooking part of the process. All the other parts of the process are the same. The reason pressure canning time is so much less is that the amount of heat inside the container is increased by pressure. Water boils at 212 degrees. Add 10 pounds of pressure and that same 212 degrees becomes somewhere between 240 and 260 degrees … more than enough heat to cook the food and destroy anything that might make you sick (or worse).

There’s a big difference between a 35-minute cook time in a pressure canner and a 3.5-hour cook time in a water-bath container. Where a pressure canner uses the increased temperature caused by pressure to safely process (can) vegetables and fruit, the water-bath canner uses what seems to be an extreme amount of time at boiling temperature to safely accomplish the same task.

We kept the canner at a rolling boil for 3.5 hours regardless of what we were canning … not 3.5 hours from the time we started the fire under the canner. (Let me mention that we DID NOT can meat or fish.)

Another significant difference is that a water-bath canner can be made out of any suitable sized container that will hold canning jars. Our family wore out several 55-gallon oil drums. We always kept one in reserve knowing that the one in use would eventually rust out. We used only oil drums. We’d cut the top out of a drum. Then we’d build a good hot fire in it to burn out the oil. Once the oil was burned out, we’d give the drum several good washings with Tide detergent before giving it a good final rinse.

DO NOT use drums or containers that held chemicals or toxic substances.

Yet another significant difference that I can think of is that you simply do not set a pressure canner on a grate over an open fire. Pressure canners are sensitive pressurized bombs. You must be able to carefully regulate the temperature beneath them to keep the pressure where it is supposed to be. You must constantly keep an eye on the pressure gauge. The worst that can happen to a water-bath canner over an open fire is a boil-over caused by too big a fire. That same too big a fire might cause a sensitive pressure canner to blow its gasket and cause some serious bodily injury.

Some folks set their canning drums on concrete blocks. We didn’t. We set ours on disc spacers that had been salvaged from an old disc harrow. A couple of firings and concrete blocks tend to crack and fall apart. That could be disastrous with a drum full of filled quart jars cooking away. The cast spacers refused to give up the ghost when the going got hot.

This business of open-fire canning is something that prepper-folks should give some serious consideration. It has a definite off-grid application. It has a definite grid-down application. There are numerous skills involved in the process … skills that need to be honed long before a real catastrophe hits. The necessary tools to accomplish the task aren’t difficult to come by.

We are coming up on our Ten-Month Anniversary as full time small cabin dwellers. We’ve settled into the small cabin in the woods lifestyle and can’t imagine ever returning to living in the midst of all the hustle, bustle, mayhem, and mania associated with life down there at the other end of the county. These woods suit us just fine. 

Running the road back and forth four days a week finishing up at the other end of the county is behind us now.

It’s a done deal. Shirli and I are now both officially retired.