Canned foods preserve homemade gift tradition

  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. “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. “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...