Click to watch how to can with Emerie Brine
By Diana Matthews, Mara Selanders and Jordanna Tennebaum
For those who practice canning fruits and vegetables, it’s about preserving a bygone era as much as it is about preserving food.
Emerie Brine, an executive chef with Bernardin, a Canadian home-canning company, drew from memories of his mother when he led a workshop at the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum in Ottawa on Sunday. Brine shared how to make spiced Christmas jelly and cranberry preserves.
Chef Brine making pepper jelly.
“I was raised in the age where in the case of food, nothing ever goes to waste,” Brine said as he stirred a mixture of peppers and sugar on the stovetop for the pepper jelly. “If we didn’t have it, we would grow it, and if we grew it, we would pick it.”
Brine held the workshop to give holiday gift ideas that would fill stomachs and excite taste buds. At the workshop, spiced cranberry preserves warmed the room with the scent of cloves and cinnamon.
“People will think, ‘Wow, you’ve gone through all that trouble just for me?’ ” Brine said.
When he first took the jars out of the hot water bath, all of the fruits were crowded at the top of the jar. As Brine demonstrated how to flip the golden jelly jars, light streamed through, showing off suspended red and green peppers. Soon the jars lined the counter.
For Brine, supporting local farmers is also a big draw to canning.
“If you have the opportunity to grow your own products and you have the opportunity to can them, it’s economics for me,” he said.
Terri O’Neill runs canning workshops through Just Food, a non-profit group in Ottawa that promotes sustainable food, and the community gardening network of Ottawa. In a phone interview, she highlighted the deep satisfaction she gets from canning locally sourced food.
Chef Brine makes chocolate chip cookie gift mixes.
“I can because I want to support my local economy, my local farmers,” O’Neill said. “Nothing, to me, is better than opening a jar that I’d canned in the summer in February and then that smell of just summer comes out of the jar. It tastes like you picked what’s inside.”
O’Neill said that she did not learn how to can from her mother and sought out the practice instead by attending workshops. She said that seeing others go through the steps is essential to learning how to do it.
“Eventually my repertoire just kept growing into stuff that I enjoyed to can. As I got more skilled at one thing I would add another item as an experiment and then I would add another one,” O’Neill said. “I really do just enjoy the process. I find that it’s meditative.”
For O’Neill, it’s also about supporting and eating local. Local food makes a big difference for the enjoyment of food in “miserable seasons,” she said.
O’Neill said her favourite thing to can is tomatillo sauce, which allows her to learn new things and teach others about a lesser-known product. Tomatillos are related to gooseberries but look like green tomatoes and have a papery husk around them. She harvests the tomatillos from her own garden.
“I love to can it because I love to eat it,” O’Neill said, but admitted she gives so many cans away to friends that she rarely ends up with any for herself.
O’Neill and Brine acknowledged that canning is a time-consuming process.
But both agreed, for those who love it, there is nothing better than knowing exactly what goes into the food we eat.
Chef Brine making cranberry preserves.
With files from Mara Selanders and Jordanna Tennebaum
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