When old is new again
Pharmacy Chick was grocery shopping today and found an item that screamed :BLOG!
For those of you old enough to remember, canning food used to be a pretty popular thing. Giant pots of boiling water turning cucumbers into pickles, Apples into pie filling, and peaches into future cobbler.
When I was a kid, my mother used to can food. I guess “jar” would be a more appropriate word for it since it was all in glass. We had a big back yard and grew all sorts of veggies. She’d can tomatoes and peaches, beets, cherries, jam and pickles. She also froze whatever couldn’t be canned. Because canning jars were expensive, they were treated quite well. AND we would also save and reuse mayonaise and Miracle Whip jars.
Oh, that wonderful stuff called Miracle Whip Salad Dressing. I wonder how they got the name. Where is the “miracle?” It seems that most households are either “mayo” or “Miracle Whip”. Ours was both because Dad liked MW and the rest of us liked Mayo. Anyway, these jars were perfect for canning because they had a wide mouth that was the same diameter as the canning jars sold in the store. Every jar was saved and reused for mom’s canning projects. Even our non-canning friends would save jars and bring them over. In mom’s opinion, if you threw away a jar suitable for canning, you were throwing away money.
I never got the hang of canning food, I don’t have a garden, and mom died with all of her secrets. But she left behind all these jars. Hundreds of them. She hoarded them BECAUSE Miracle whip changed their jars from wide mouth to a narrower mouth many years ago. Actually both Mayo and MW went with this narrower mouth at about the same time. To her they were useless for canning. Then they went plastic. I am sure mother would think this was apostasy.
My dad asked me once if I wanted her jars. I graciously declined. As mentioned before, I never learned the art of canning. I could just see me giving my friends Tomatoes Ala Botulina Toxina. Nope, I think I will stick to professionally canned food ,thanks.
So today, when I was shopping, I was amused to see Miracle Whip in its plastic bottle, emblazoned with the words “NEW, IMPROVED WIDE MOUTH JAR”
“New and improved?”….not so much..for those of us old enough to remember.
Tags: drivel, life in general, rambling | |