GEORGIAN PEACH KOMPOT, A FIRST TRY

The peaches have been just great this year in Ontario and the northern US too.I wanted to get a head-start on recipes, and with fruit such a hugely important part of the Georgian larder, and in so many delicious ways, I wanted to start with two Georgian fruit preserves.

I made sour cherry moraba, delicious, but not quite as thick-syruped as those I had in Georgia. I am still working out why that is.

And I made peach kompot. It was entirely successful, thanks to my friend Tamar Babuadze in Tbilisi, who consulted several friends and their mothers too and passed on their instructions and advice. The peach kompot I had tasted in Georgia, made in Kutaisi by Elena’s ninety-one year old grandmother from peaches from her garden, was my standard. That came in a large wide-mouthed jar, and consisted of whole peaches floating in a pale pink very light and unbelievably delicious syrup. But the jars I had, one-litre jars, had mouths that were too small to take the large ripe organic Niagara peaches I had bought at the farmers’ market.

No problem said Tamar, of course you can cut them.

And so I did. She also told me that peeling them was optional. I peeled some, and left some unpeeled (just well washed); I prefer the look of the unpeeled ones, I’ve decided.

I posted on FB and was asked to supply the recipe. So here are the instructions in a slightly rough and ready format.

Be sure to get all your equipment ready first, and to follow the canning instructions, or substitute instructions from a reliable canning cookbook or handbook. The acidity of peaches is nice and high, so they don’t need a very long boil in the canner, unlike lower-acidity foods.

Get ready the following: 

- 1 quart/1 litre glass canning jars or substitute 650 ml (20 ounce) jars; for each 6 quart basket of peaches allow 3 large jars. Or you can use smaller 2-cup jars.

- Two-part lids for each jar, new ones, with no rust or nicks out of them

- A canner, or substitute a very large tall* pot with a lid, and also a rack in the bottom that the jars can stand on. (*How tall? You need to be able to boil the jars in the pot, with an inch or more of water covering them.) Check to see how many of your jars fit at one time on the rack in the canner.

- Tongs for lifting the jars out of the boiling water

- A large heavy tray or baking sheet and a rack that fits on it (to place the jars on to cool once they have been processed)

Ripe peaches, preferably organic, at least one 6-quart basket 

Sugar: 1 cup of sugar per litre/quart jar; 2/3 cup sugar per 20 ounce/650 ml jar; ½ cup sugar for every 2 cup/500 ml jar.

Kettle of boiling water

Wash the jars and lids in very hot soapy water, and rinse well, or wash them in a dishwasher, then fill them partway with hot water and place them on a tray by your stovetop.

Place a rack in the canner or tall pot, fill the canner or pot with hot water, and place on the stove.

Wash the peaches well in hot water. Cut out any bruised patches and trim off any stems. If you wish, peel them (I think it’s prettier to leave the peel on). If the peaches are too large to fit through the mouths of the jars, cut off chunks leaving pieces as large as possible; I leave in the pits too.

Working with one jar at a time, empty out the hot water, then fill the jar with peaches, not forcing or bruising the fruit. When the jar is half full, add half the sugar needed for that size of jar (see above). Then add more peaches to fill the jar, and then other half of the sugar.

Pour in boiling water from the kettle, pausing to allow bubbles to rise to the surface, until the water is up to the jar neck. Place on a flat lid and screw on the other piece of lid, until just tight, not extremely so. Repeat with the other jars until you have filled as many as will fit in the canner.

Place jars in the canner, being sure that they are upright and not on a tilt. The water should be covering the jars by a generous 1 inch or more. Add water if needed. Put on the canner/pot lid and bring the water in the canner to a rolling boil. Once it is boiling, you can lower the heat a little, just so long as a boil is maintained. Boil for ten minutes.

Place a rack on your counter or on a baking sheet, then lift the jars out carefully, keeping them vertical, and place on the rack to cool.

(If you have a second batch to do, repeat the jar-filling and boiling process.)

After ten minutes or so you should hear each jar lid go “pop” or “click” as it seals. Once that happens, take off the rims and wipe off the glass, then put them back on and tighten a little. Let the jars cool completely, then label them and store in a cool dark place.

The liquid will gradually get infused with peach flavour. This nectar is a real treat in the wintertime. So are the peaches.

PRESERVING MOMENTS AND FLAVOUR AND MORE

We're been returned to summer by the weather gods these last few days. I've been out in the evenings on my bicycle under huge radiant sunset skies and luminous dusks lit by the fat moon. This is mid-autumn festival time on the lunar calendar, but really so far there's no autumn feel to it at all. The axe will fall this week I think, with rain and chillier weather. So it's a very live-in-the-moment few days.

Of course this date also reminds us of the fragility of things and that living in the moment and appreciating it fully is one of our main tasks as thinking imaginative beings. Today, brilliant with morning sunshine, clear blue sky, and still-green leaves is very like in feel and weather that day ten years ago.

A wonderfully obsessive and energetic friend spent yesterday canning tomatoes, which of course involves cooking them down and then being very careful about sterilising the jars etc. She had worked her way through one whole bushel of tomatoes by the time I got there at the end of the afternoon. Bowls and pots of them in various stages were all around, brilliant gleaming redness. We had supper, then I stayed for a little while to help with the first batch of 6 one-quart jars. They got lowered into a large pot of boiling water, then had to stay there for 45 minutes. There was a lot more to do, and from a note she sent very late last night I gather she stayed up for ages putting the rest into jars.

We labour at these things, putting food by for winter, preserving in our small way the warmth and immediacy of summer by sealing tomatoes and peaches, pickled cucumber and more, and jams too, in glass jars. They're like jewels on the shelf, as richly beautiful. They are the promise of a hit of summer sunshine and optimism when we need it most, in the dark days of winter. It takes imagination to visualise that moment of need vividly enough that it prods us to engage in the long laborious work of canning and preserving. And that's why most people no longer do it. There are tin cans of crushed tomatoes we can buy...but once you taste the homemade version, and see it in a glass jar, the tins no longer seem a good substitute for home-made.

It's a question of flavour, yes, but also something about identity and meaning and connection. Food is more than a "product" or "input". If we production-line produce food, as we might a car or a computer, the end result is not comparable to food made by hand by you or someone you know well. This point is made with far more elegance and developed over several pages, in the article that opens this issue of Lapham's Quarterly, the one on Food. I often find the collections too much of a pastiche, but the food issue has some real treasures in it, such as the description by a sufragette of her experience of being force-fed. Horrific, yes, and a process that continues to this day. For example there's the woman in India, whose story appeared recently, who has been suffering force-feeding because she has been on a politically motivated hunger strike for years. Yes, years.

On this day that marks a very public violence, it's important I think to remember that there are ongoing instances, many of them state-sanctioned, many of them occurring behind closed doors, of humankinds's cruelty to fellow human beings. ("Man's inhumanity to man" is an elegant expression, but somehow feels so incomplete; so many victims are women, and also a good number of perpetrators, let's admit.)

The Toronto International Film Festival, most often referred to as TIFF, opened this week. The downtown and uptown are abuzz not just with students returning to university, but with the news of which film is wonderful and which star or director was last spotted coming into or out of this or that bar or restaurant. I've been to one film so far, with a friend who gets pass tickets. I Have another three to look forward to. I saw the second showing (a morning screening) of the Vietnamese film Lost in Paradise. It's a love story, set in contemporary Saigon, in the milieu that is toughest: the street. The central relationship is between two young guys, one of whom is a prostitute. There are many kindnesses in the film, but also many cruelties. Beautifully shot, not as tightly edited as it needs to be, and with strong acting, it's one to look out for.

No, I have no pretensions to be a movie reviewer, I promise! But the unfreedom of the lives of many of the characters, the virtual slavery of the prostitute whose woman pimp comes round to berate her and beat her if she's not on the job, for example, was a reminder that slavery exists in many forms. It's not an institution from before, but an ongoing possibility and reality for many people, in varying degrees.

Freedom and transparency are both fragile plants. They can't just be preserved in glass jars and put on a shelf; they have to be actively defended and fought for.

Meantime, on the home front, it's time for my annual small preserving routine, time to start putting up basil in olive oil. That intensity is so welcome once the cold weather comes and the garden is fallow.