Yes Fat Tuesday is late this week. But given the opening of the NFL season in New Orleans today I thought it would be appropriate. Welcome back to Fat Tuesday, the Canned Edition. [No I didn’t get fired… yet].
Who we are, who we will become, is dependent upon the decisions we make in our life. But every part of who we are has its start at home. The Roots. It doesn’t define us, but rather gives us a frame of reference, a start. Where we proceed from that point is up to us.
As children we learn family heritage and family tradition. [Hopefully not drinking, smoking, and living out the songs we wrote]. As teens we spurn this identity and try to separate ourselves from it as we establish our individuality. This incidentally is often attempted by doing the opposite of our family. When we enter the real world we venture to form our own families with identity and heritage. And it is during this period we often times return to our family to reconnect with the traditions and beliefs so that we can find identity with our family, our clan.
What is it that hungers within us to be connected to an identity, a tradition, a clan emblazoned with our family crest? I have come to believe it is a need to be a part of something larger than ourselves. To identify with people who share the same experiences and the same memories. To cry together, laugh together, and share together with people that share our same quirks, shortcomings, struggles, and beliefs.
This July I returned home again to my family in Minnesota, bringing in tow my new family of wife and baby girl. With families converging, we shared together with laughter, stories, and games. Our children played together, competed, cooperated, and learned from one another. And of course we gathered in the kitchen to cook, which led to the dining room to eat, as a family.
But I arrived in Minnesota with an additional desire to reconnect with the traditions of my family, and find some connection to the generations that had gone before me. For this I would ask my mom to teach me the craft of canning. For our particular purposes it would be canning apple butter.
The rest of the family dispersed for the day’s activities. My mom bought the apples, and we gathered in the kitchen that she shared with her mother. The first order of business was settling on the music for the afternoon. It was quickly decided that the red-headed stranger would set the soundtrack, and Willie plucked his guitar as he had done years before for my grandparents.
What followed that afternoon were simply fundamentals. We cut the apples, cooked them down, strained, seasoned, and simmered until it had reached the proper consistency. My mom then instructed on the process of boiling the jars, filling, sealing, and boiling again. The craft was time consuming but simple, and if all you saw at the end of it was six jars of apple butter you would have missed the entire day.
The product was not the goal, but partaking in a craft practiced by my mother, and her mother, and I am sure generations preceding her. To share in activities, however simple, that were practiced and celebrated before I existed, and God-willing, will continue with my descendants after I have passed through this land. It’s a small thing, minor in view of all life, but it is a small piece of what makes up the identity of the clan from which I descend.
With luck and a little determination, in the years to follow I will continue to can and develop recipes for apple butter, strawberry jam, and whatever other recipes may follow. And years from now Willie will still be picking his guitar and humming a tune on the radio, and I will gather in the kitchen with my daughter and teach what has been taught to me. It still won’t be about the jars we produce, but something more. Because even though my daughter will never know her great grandma Bliss, the generations of our clan will all gather in the kitchen and share as we practice and pass on a simple craft that in a small way makes up part of who we are.
So this week I have no recipe for you, only encouragement to connect with the small things that make up the family that you are a part of.
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