Canning for dummies: Quick and easy pickles, preserves

On the South Georgia farm where I grew up, our summer table was often crowded with steaming bowls of field peas, okra and corn. My mother would let me handle one vegetable. I would slice cucumbers, sprinkle them with salt and douse them in vinegar. We didn’t call this zippy little dish pickles, but that’s what it was.

Pickles were part of the canning ritual, and I remember my Mama washing buckets full of dirty cucumbers (the bathtub may have been involved), sprinkling them with lime, soaking them and rinsing repeatedly. Mama took great pride in her pickles. I can remember her arranging fresh dill weed in her Mason jars. She was a messy cook, but those pickles had to be just so. By the time the sweet bread and butters and garlicky dills were packed into hot sterilized jars, then processed in a water bath, our kitchen would be a sauna of steam and aromatic pickle juice.

As much as I love these time-honored traditions and the beauty of a windowsill laden with fig preserves, peach jam and blackberry jelly, old-fashioned canning can be an intimidating and time-consuming affair. Well worth the trouble. Not to be discouraged. Just not for everyone.

So like a lot of modern cooks, I’ve instead learned to savor the pleasures of small-batch ice-box pickles and preserves. It’s a canning compromise somewhere between the simple cukes I used to slice for my mom, and putting up food for the long haul. Just about every Southern cookbook I’ve picked up this year included recipes for pickles, jams, relishes and chow-chows that can be kept in the refrigerator and consumed quickly.

“Preserving food takes no special equipment at all,” writes James Beard Award-winning chef Andrea Reusing in her lovely book, “Cooking in the Moment” (Clarkson Potter, $35). “Just the food itself and salt and/or sugar, some vinegar, and an hour or so. Most preserved foods, like pickles, jams, flavored oils, and salt-cured food, keep perfectly in the refrigerator for a long time — in many case for a very long time.”

Words to pickle by.

If you frequent posh restaurants, where local and seasonal are the rules of the day, you’ve probably noticed the little trend of serving food in jars. Athens chef Hugh Acheson has such a passion for Southern canning that he planned a “sommelier-like preserve service” when he opened his Atlanta restaurant, Empire State South, last year. “That kind of got lost in the shuffle,” he writes in his new book, “A New Turn in the South” (Clarkson Potter, $35), but the Canada native does include a whole chapter of pickle, jam, relish and chow-chow recipes — most of them meant to be stashed away in the refrigerator and enjoyed in the ripeness of the moment.

Indeed, you don’t need a sommelier, a pressure cooker, a jar lifter or a pickle poker to enjoy the flavor of homemade put-ups. You can make them up in your kitchen in minutes, and find something else to do with your spare time — like maybe befriending someone with a fig tree or a blackberry patch. Just use what's fresh. Eat it up quickly. And don’t get in a pickle.

Inside: Quick and easy recipes for Cucumber Sweets, Slow-Roasted Fig Preserves with Lemon and Pickled Okra

Tips box

• Jars are pretty. But any ice-box pickle or preserve will keep nicely in a plastic container with a tight-fitting lid. Since refrigerator canned goods are meant to be eaten up quickly and don't have to be sealed, you can use your old jelly and mayonnaise jars.

• Whatever your choice of storage container, make sure it's properly sterilized. Running jars and lids through the dishwasher will probably do it. But it's easy to fill a pot with boiling water and quickly rinse jars and lids in the hot bath before filling. If you don't have jar lifters, put some rubber bands around a pair of old tongs.

• Making pickles is a great way to use up spices that have been sitting in the back of your cabinet. By making small batches, you can experiment to create your favorite flavor profile. Fish sauce is a wonderful salt substitute. It adds an extra dimension of flavor to most any kind of sweet or savory pickle.

• You don't even have to boil vinegar to make a good icebox pickle. Just pour vinegar over your cucumbers, season to taste and refrigerate. Speaking of vinegar, I love rice vinegar for its mildness and cider vinegar for its mellowness. You can mix vinegars, too, or replace with lemon juice.

• When you finish off your pickles, no need to throw that vinegar away. You can strain it, boil it (if it makes you feel better) and use it again to make a quick batch of pickles. If you have leftover, store-bought pickle juice and you like the flavor, you can add fresh cucumber, onions, sugar or salt, shake it up, and make very quick pickles.

• If you want to explore water-bath canning, Athens author Liana Krissoff's "Canning for a New Generation" (Stewart, Tabori & Change, $24.95) is an excellent resource. She walks you through the processes step-by-step, and includes lovely recipes for using her Brandied Sweet Cherries with Red Wine, Mint Jelly, and so on. Maybe next summer.

Recipe intro:

These recipes are for pickles and preserves that can be kept in the refrigerator and eaten up quickly. They include a sweet cucumber pickle similar to classic bread and butter pickles; a spicy okra pickle that will perk up a Bloody Mary; and fig preserves that use a slow-roasting technique which won’t break up the fruit.

Cucumber Sweets

Hands on: 20 minutes

Total time: 3 hours, 20 minutes (includes 1 hour cooling time and 2 hours chill time)

Makes: 2 pints

My old standby. You can get a very tasty pickle without the mustard seeds, celery seeds and star anise. So don't feel that you have to go out and buy those spices. That said, I adore the subtle, vaguely mysterious notes of a touch of anise. I make these in all kinds of combinations, sometimes adding lemon juice and lemon zest in place of some of the vinegar. And fish sauce in place of the salt. Serve these with hamburgers and hot dogs, chop into potato salad and deviled eggs, or put out with cheese, crackers and pate.

1 pound cucumbers (preferable pickling cucumbers, but you may use any kind), thoroughly washed, scrubbed and sliced into 1/4 inch rounds

1 small onion, peeled and sliced thin

1½ cups rice vinegar (may also use cider or white vinegar, or any combination)

¾ cup sugar

1 teaspoon mustard seeds (optional)

1 teaspoon celery seeds (optional)

1 teaspoon black peppercorns

1 teaspoon kosher salt

3 star anise (optional)

3 bay leaves

1 small red chili pepper, split down the side (may substitute 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes)

Pack the sliced cucumbers and onions into two sterilized pint jars.

Place the vinegar, sugar, mustard seeds, celery seeds, black peppercorns, salt, star anise, bay leaves, and chili pepper in a small, stainless-steel or glass boiler. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat. As the mixture begins to boil, stir until the sugar and salt are dissolved, about 3 minutes.

Ladle the hot liquid into the jars with the cucumbers and onions. Gently screw on sterilized lids, and let jars cool for about 1 hour. Place in refrigerator and allow to chill for 2 hours before serving. Pickles will keep for a week or longer in the refrigerator.

Per serving (2 tablespoons): 25 calories (percent of calories from fat, 3), trace protein, 6 grams carbohydrates, trace fiber, trace fat (no saturated fat), no cholesterol, 60 milligrams sodium.

Slow-Roasted Fig Preserves with Lemon

This roasting method is brilliant. The acidic lemon juice plumps up the figs, and because you don’t stir them, they won’t break up — as they do with stove-top cooking. Serve over Greek yogurt, on a cheese plate or with toast and biscuits. Author Liana Krissoff suggests treating them as dessert — with fresh ricotta and a sprinkling of “savory salted and toasted pine nuts and rosemary.” These certainly don't need time to mellow in their storage jars. They taste good still warm from the oven.

Hands on: 25 minutes

Total time: 3 hours, 45 minutes (includes roasting time)

Makes: About 2 pints

1 small lemon, quartered and thinly sliced, seeds removed

3 pounds ripe figs, stemmed and rinsed, left whole if small, halved if larger

1½ cups sugar

1 cup water

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Scatter the lemon slices over the bottom of a large roasting pan; then spread the figs in the pan. Sprinkle with the sugar, and pour in 1 cup water.

Cover the pan with aluminum foil, and roast for 2 hours. Uncover the pan, increase the oven temperature to 400 degrees, and roast for about 1½ hours, or until the figs are dark, the lemon slices translucent and the syrup is dark and somewhat thick.

Ladle the preserves into sterilized, preheated jars. Gently screw on lids. Allow to cool on counter for about 1 hour. Then store in the refrigerator. The preserves will keep for at least one month in the refrigerator.

Adapted from “Canning for a New Generation: Bold, Fresh Flavors for the Modern Pantry” by Liana Krissoff (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $24.95)

Per serving (2 tablespoons): 74 calories (percent of calories from fat, 2), trace protein, 18 grams carbohydrates, 1 gram fiber, trace fat (no saturated fat), no cholesterol, 1 milligram sodium.

Pickled Okra

Hands on: 20 minutes

Total time: 1 hours, 20 minutes (but best if allowed to sit for a day or two in the refrigerator)

Makes: 1 quart

Smoked paprika gives this Southern classic a little zing. But the slight metallic taste may not suit everyone, so feel free to leave it out.

3/4 pound small unblemished okra

1 or 2 small red chili peppers, such as cayenne, red Serrano or Thai bird’s eye, split down the middle

1 garlic clove

3-4 sprigs fresh dill

1 teaspoon hot smoked paprika (optional)