A few more memories and more on my Pantry Part One

Something a little different this evening, a post which will cover a couple of days worth of posts - not sure how many at the moment.  For those of you who are interested in creating your own Pantry and what to use, I thought I would give a bit of background information to my formative years, the influences I came under and the way my family worked.

From what I can gather quite a few of you aspire to having a Pantry space all of your own but have been a bit nonplussed when it comes to what you store your food items in.  Obviously you have to be practical about this as different foods require different types of storage.  Liquids for instance need to be in suitable jars or bottles.  Some of their contents are shelf-stable and others have to be made shelf-stable.  That does not mean though that you have to use new; sometimes you can upcycle old items as well.

I have always had a fascination with Pantries; probably because my Nan would not let me enter for fear of breaking some of her hard worked food storage items, many of which were in Kilner jars.  So little people and fingers were kept at a distance much to my chagrin.  I was a very curious child!  One thing you did not ever do though was argue with the Duchess which was the pet-name my Nan was christened with by my Dad.  She could fix you with a stare and not get nasty with it but you did not argue.

My family has been one that provided for themselves wherever they could by preserving a lot of bottled fruits, cheeses, curds, conserves, pickles, chutneys, jams, jellies, wines, bacon and other meats (well certainly my Nan and Pop preserved the meat - but we used to eat it when we went there). At that time there was also honey from the hives, and apples plenty of apples both cooking and eating and Codling apples as well as Conference pears in storage.  Plums etc were always bottled.  These were preserved or stored to see you through the winter months until the following spring. There were no shops in the village they lived in and the Post Office was situated in a World War II Nissen Hut.  When I was 11 years of age years of age the Local Authority upgraded a lot of the properties on their books and the unusual Nissen Hut Post office was replaced with new shop premises. 

There were also vegetables throughout the year as well. Plenty of eggs from the chickens during the kinder months although they used to go off the lay during winter.  The natural rhythm for chickens.  There was also a home grown Goose which we used to have for Christmas dinner. We were protected from the not very nice things until I was about 11 when I was deemed old enough to be involved in a cull of the older chickens.  It was then that I found out that the Goose that wandered the orchards each year were Christmas dinner.  Innocent times. Each item that was grown, preserved, picked from the orchards or from the wild and what it was turned into was always treasured as it provided variety to the diet and made sure that the family ate well during the harsh winter months. Often the villages because of snow used to be cut off for a few days, so keeping a well stocked Pantry for Country folk was a necessity and inbuilt into the way they stocked their Pantries.

Because of her experience in the War years when times were really harsh, in peace time anything that came my Nan's way used to be squirrelled away for use another day. One never knew what was going to happen and there was always something in reserve.  

My Nan was "green" before green became a thing.  She had a small drop leaf table in the kitchen with two stools and two sliding drawers in.  Things like pieces of string, paper bags, the outer wrapping of bread which was like a waxed paper were recycled and re-used. String for gardening jobs and sometimes wrapping presents or flowers, paper bags for everything, the waxed paper was used for wrapping sarnies up for pack-ups. You could still do this today if you wanted to.  Butter papers were always kept and used to line a cake pan, and the top of the cream from a bottle of milk used to be taken off each bottle as it was used and popped into a little pot which was stored in the fridge.  Come Sunday night tea the cream used to be whipped up and used on the top of a jelly or a pie.  Just one of my Nan's little tricks to have a Sunday teatime treat.

As I have mentioned Nan bottled a lot of fruit in her original Kilner jars with glass lids.  They used to be stored in the garage (which was not used for the car) and often when we went over my Pop used to drag some of the preserving jars out, get a ball and my brother, Pop and I, we would play skittles on the back lawn. Later on as an adult I did ask for the jars, but by then Nan had passed them on to someone else so I dipped out.  At least I have my memories and they were happy ones.

These are the type of jars she used.  They had a glass middle part to the lid, and I believe that there was a rubber seal that went underneath as well.

With the advent of the freezer quite a lot of stuff went into the chest freezer in the garage.   The garage by then was used for storing apples, drying onions, storing demijohns and winemaking equipment, and anything else that needed a home. I therefore grew up in a culture of make do and mend. Anything that could be utilised would be.  That continues to this present day as old habits die hard.  I am turning into my Nan!

When I first was married pennies were tight as was buying our own home.  Could not afford new items for the home so started buying second hand both for laying a nice table for entertaining and storage items for my Pantry and this collection has really come together over the last forty years or so.  I like vintage items, that still have plenty of life left in them or items that have been used but which I can give a second life to.

I have bought new jars for preserving and jars for specific purposes over the years.  As time has gone on the selection available has become more wide-spread.  However, I continue to recycle the jars from the produce bought in the supermarket things like sauce jars that kind of thing.  If I can re-use something then I will.  That is just me being practical and true to my nature.  I still save nice paper bags when I come across them too.  I also remember when polythene bags first came out for freezer storage they were so expensive, that both my Nan and my Mum used to wash them out, hang them on the line and then re-use them.   No, I am not joking it actually happened on a regular basis. How times have changed.

I think my preserving hobby has perhaps grown like Topsy and taken over really the governing of how my household rolls.  Keeping the Pantry like I do, has got us out of all sorts of trouble over the years. Growing up we always followed the seasons, at this time of year more often than not we would be at my Nan and Pop's bringing in the apple harvest.  We would go for the weekend and stay, and often other family members would come and give a hand too.  A proper family get together.  We were always up the trees as kids. There were the old wooden wonky ladders and my Pop's Apple hook, which was a long length of metal bar, which had a hook bent into it and which was used for lowering the taller branches and getting the apples off the bough.  On this particular harvesting weekend here would be a big Sunday dinner for all the family as well.  Happy days.  I still miss that seasonal work and the various harvests that we used to obtain whether that be from the orchards, the gardens or the wild.  The natural rhythm of the seasons sings its own particular song.  Then there were the mushrooms too.

The next post will deal with what I use for storing the Pantry items and some options and ideas for putting some of the older items into use again.

More on that tomorrow though.

Pattypan

x