Cherry Eyeballs and Frozen Peaches

1950  Grandma Isabella

                                                                                                               Grandad Robert and Dad Davy

In the house on Fairfield , there was a root cellar in the basement. When I was growing up I used to believe I heard noises coming from it. I  would walk by and feel the air move through the darkness.

My Grandmother  loved that root cellar, when she and Grand dad lived with my parents in the '50s. She saw it as a  lovely place to keep her preserves. Hundreds of processed jars, full of floating fruit.

My father, Davy, used to drive everyone in the old Dodge, to the Okanagon in the summer. They'd buy big flats of fruit, and then drive  back home. Then they would can cherries and peaches in heavy glass mason jars, and stack them up on the shelves in the root cellar.  

It was earthy, wormy, musty, in there. Spiders dangled in profusion from webs strung  from the jars.No light except the one from the  basement light bulb. And it didn't reach that far.  After Grandmother died, those jars and jars of peaches and cherries seemed to settle in , like  mummies.... 

No one ever opened them after she died.  No one touched them. Till one day, years later (some 20 years later), I was sent down to get a jar of cherries and a jar of peaches. My mother wanted to see if they were still any good.....I had to put on  gumboots in order to walk into the root cellar. 

I stood on the threshold, the light swinging back and forth. There was something in there. I was sure of it. Something crunched underfoot.  The cherries loomed. They looked like eyeballs. Gooey, gelatinous things. The peaches resembled  fuzzy fingers drowning in amber liquid. Softly sluffing white dandruff from their edges. 

Something scuttled  into the corner.  I couldn't tell if it was the resident garter snake , or the bony hand of a long dead Egyptian mummy come to life.......Grabbing a jar of cherries and a jar of peaches, I escaped to the light above, where it was safe. Where it didn't smell old.  

Unfortunately, I don't believe my grandmother's cherries and peaches  survived the test of time. They smelled ...bad...real bad.... I kind of wondered why my mother did not just get rid of the lot.  

1955 Grandmother Isabelle  and mum Nessie

I watched her as she poured the  old fruit into a bowl, and she talked about her mother and the farm, and the old days. She talked a lot about those days.  I think she missed them.

Many years later when  I sold the the house , those same jars of peaches and cherries were still in the root cellar. I just left them there, cause that's where they belonged. It was their home. I couldn't get rid of them either. 

And truth be told , I was just a little leery about  those cherry eyeballs and peach fingers floating about in their glass tombs. Watching me.  (And I always wondered about that garter snake...........I  was sure it was still alive down there. Slithering in the dirt. ............)

FREEZER PEACH PRESERVES

Chop up 6 cups of peaches. I don't peel them. Gives more texture.

Add 6 1/2 cups of sugar to the chopped peaches.

Stir till combined ..................

let sit for at least 15 minutes.

Squish till your heart's content.

Add a squeeze of lemon juice

Add 2 pouches of liquid Certo. You can do it without if you wish. Just doesn't set as well. 

Ladle into plastic containers. I use Ziploc ones. easy to stack

Photographs 2020

 

Keeps for six months in freezer or one month in fridge......A dark  root cellar is not necessary.

BLACKBERRIES.....

 "I ate mythology and dreamt of blackberries..." -― Yusef Komunyakaa

 Growing up  we picked blackberries every summer. Especially in  late August, before school got back in.My mother would don her  railroad engineer overalls with the blue pinstripes, tie her hair up in a kerchief, shove the old wooden ladder in the Dodge, pails and buckets and we'd trundle out to the far end of Victoria ( the far end THEN was near Hillside Road.)

  There was an old church there, the last of its kind, with an empty lot, covered with  brambles. My mother would  stick that old ladder on  mountains of thorns,  climb up with a pail, and she and I would pick blackberries. (She would pick. I would eat.)  My mother would undo her long kerchief, tie it  around the full pail  and lower it down to me. Then she would  tie up her hair again and continue picking. Then repeat the process.

For hours we picked. Filling pails and buckets. our hands stained , our cheeks stained with blackberry juice.  For years we did this. Till one year, before I headed to Grad school, we toodled out to our  bramble patch and it was gone. A parking lot stood in its stead. The blackberries paved under. That year she had one bag of frozen berries from the year before. Blackberry cream pie. Open baked pastry, custard on the bottom, fresh blackberries on the top, whip cream piled on top of that..........oh yum.

 This year, there were beautiful local bramble berries from a farm. A lot of  blackberry patches I've picked in the area have been taken down.Still some by the road, but  the cars zoom by and it's noisy and dirty. So have taken to getting farm berries. They're beautiful. 

 BLACKBERRY COMPOTE ( this is good as freezer jam, or on ice cream, or on a cream pie, or tarts, or just to scoop up and eat AS IS) I double this by the way....

  4 cups blackberries ( give or take....I don't worry if it's a bit more)
5 cups sugar ( that's 2 cups less than the original recipe. You can use stevia or whatever. But I detest stevia)
2 pouches Freezer jam pectin ( liquid or powdered)
4 tsps lemon juice.

 Blackberries were discovered  in the HARALDSKAER  WOMAN ( Jutland ,Denmark bog) from 490 B.C. She had consumed blackberries before she died.

 Greeks used to brew the leaves for a tea, or chew the leaves to prevent gingivitis. Roots to helped intestinal problems,and the fruit was used to prevent scurvy.

 Squish up the all the ingredients in a big, big bowl. You might want to use a pastry cutter. I used a large fork as well, and if you use frozen berries you might want to  thaw in microwave  for a big, or on counter. 

 Leave quite a few larger berries.....I wouldn't over mix. 

 It should end up like this. Great to freeze in small containers. I have one container in the fridge right now that I can use up for a couple of days.......

 In 1696 it was documented   blackberry cordials were used as medicinal drinks. In 1771 stomach ulcers were treated with blackberry cordial, or fresh fruits, or bramble wine.The juice used to dye fabric and flexible canes to make rope.

 “Blackberries seize the land, gobbling acres, blanketing banks, consuming abandoned farmhouses and their Studebakers and anything left alone in the rain for five minutes or longer.” 
― Robert Michael Pyle, Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place

 Another  story says the brambles from the Blackberry were used to make the crown of Thorns........

My mother would serve this on scones for tea, crustless toast, pound cake, on cream pies, angel food cake.....but my favourite is to ladle it over vanilla ice cream.  That was the prime treat when we got back from picking. All those years ago in that wild blackberry  patch, my mother in her pinstrip overalls, hands stained , and  pails of blackberries  at our feet.....

 Photographs 2019