I don’t know a thing about canning, and this renders me completely unsuitable for marriage of any kind. The older women in my neighborhood are horrified.

I’m sure you’ve had the conversation:

Older Friend: My wonderful son is getting out of prison after a lengthy sentence involving a misunderstanding about him cutting his horrible wife into seven pieces. He’s single, and all he needs is a good woman to turn his life around.

Me: Sounds great. You do realize I don’t know how to can?

Older Friend: Well, never mind then.

The thing about canning is that done right, you have a jar of asparagus. Done wrong… well, you have a jar of botulism. Canning is the one thing my mother was never willing to try just for fun with instructions out of a book. You have to have someone who knows what they are doing. I got to make jelly as a kid… but not very much, and we always stopped short of putting it in jars.

Someone recently pointed out that you can get anything canned in the United States. I think she meant store-bought and in tin cans, but the truth is… she’s right. And if it isn’t available canned commercially, you can bet there’s some woman down the street who’s doing it. There are a few exceptions. No broccoli. It won’t hold up to the heat, and you’d just wind up with a can of mush. (Or botulism.)

Other than that, yes… I think you can buy anything in cans. Meat (not jut Spam), fish, oysters, vegetables, snails (pause for any Frenchmen listening to recover), pumpkins, nacho cheese… pudding.

It’s a holdover from pioneer days when it took you six months to walk from  Missouri to Oregon and refrigerated rail cars were still a hundred years in the future. Root cellars and grow your own wheat grass days.

You used to can everything you could that you grew yourself, and then you’d buy more cans when you went into town.

Because you really did have to make it through the winter so you can start all over and get to battling locusts in the spring.