Can the Can Can Cukes

Knee deep in a few hundred square feet of cucumbers and sweltering in New England’s August heat, I had one thought. Pickles. And one question for my friend and fellow gardener.

“Annie, can you can?”

“I can!” She flounced her gardening dress skirt from side to side and started singing,

Oh can you do the Can Can?

If you can then I can

I can Can Can if you Can Can

Can you Can Can

Oh we can do the Can Can

Yes we can we Can Can

We can Can Can

Yes we can Can Can!

Somewhere between kicking our legs up into the air between rows of sprawling vegetables and doubling over with laughter, we decided to can, put up, or otherwise pickle our bumper crop of cukes. And if one jar of pickles is a good idea, then a hundred must be Christmas.

“We can give them away for gifts!” I exclaimed, hands grasped beneath my chin. “Tie red ribbons around them.”

“We can store them in a root cellar,” Annie suggested. She was always more practical than I. “But first we’ll have to build a root cellar.”

That was beyond our capabilities. So while we ended up doing both, the crop was stored in her pantry, not a root cellar.

We excitedly shared our idea with friends. Annie’s husband threw cold water on it before we boiled the first pot of water. “You two making pickles? That’s a recipe for botulism. You’ll kill us all.”

That sobered us into investigating the process and then we commenced by amassing a gross of mason jars, several gallons of vinegar, a few pounds of spices, and a couple of water bath canners with metal racks. We picked, washed, and sorted bushels of cucumbers, all the time asking if Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, how many pickled peppers did Peter Piper pick? Or better still, how many pickled cucumbers would we make?

A shitload.

Bright and early one Friday morning, Annie brewed a pot of coffee and we turned her farmhouse kitchen into a factory. Thus began my only canning adventure.

The instructions were easy enough. Sanitize the jars in a pot of boiling water. Remove the jars carefully so that they don’t break and you don’t burn your fingers. We did both. Make the brines—dill, sour, sweet-and-sour, spicy—with vinegar, pickling salt, and sugar, garlic, mustard seeds, black peppercorns, cayenne, dill sprigs. You name it, we made it, and labeled it. After filling the jars with all the ingredients and checking for air bubbles, we sealed, arranged, and boiled them again. And again. And again.

No problem. Except that each batch took about an hour, and we had enough green gourds for dozens of batches, two canners going at a time. We found plenty of time in between to flounce our aprons side to side and over our derrières as we sang:

Oh we can do the Can Can

Yes we can we Can Can

We can Can Can

Yes we can Can Can!

We opened the windows and cranked up the fans. By noon, we could have canned our pickles using sweat as brine. By 3 o’clock, my boyfriend and Annie’s husband arrived with beer and wine to cut through the briny steam bath. By evening, we couldn’t see, smell, taste, feel, or hear anything but vinegar. And by midnight, well, we were wasted, having pickled more pecks than Peter ever picked.

Man oh man, what a plan! We had canned the Can Can. For good. With water pans, Annie’s fans, dancing fannies, chantings silly, and sour dillies—I never wanted to brine a pickle again.

But those Can Can Cukes? Well, hot damn. They were jammin’ good!