Putting Food By in Yesteryears

Contributed by Patricia Wells, Chatham Township Historical Society

If you had been born in Chatham in the 1860s, your family like generations before them, would have had a large kitchen garden and some fruit trees that produced a large part of the family’s food. With no refrigeration, your mother would have spent a great deal of labor “putting food by”.

In the decades after the civil war the housewife’s work was made a little easier with a number of inventions.

Your mother would have been thrilled with the new canning jar invented by James L. Mason of New York. His innovative threaded lid with its embedded rubber seal screwed onto the jar, eliminating the need for the sealing wax your mother had struggled with.

In 1903 Alexander Kerr developed the version of the canning jar most commonly used today. This jar had a threaded neck and a flat metal lid with its attached gasket. The lid was held on by a reusable metal ring.

Since fruits and vegetables were often ready for harvest all at once, your mother would have embraced timesaving kitchen devices. Sargent’s Gem Food Chopper, patented in 1892, was a favorite. The hand cranked chopper screwed onto the edge of the kitchen table and had several different blades, producing different cuts. It could chop vegetables, puree fruit, and turn meat into sausage. The design was so simple and useful, it was widely used until similar electric devices replaced it in the late 1940s.

Devices such as apple peelers, cherry stoners, food mills, food presses and breadmakers were invented and patented. The cherry stone shown here allowed the cook to load cherries into the hopper, turn the wheel, and separate the cherry stones from the fruit. This significantly sped up an otherwise tedious task.

A perusal of historic cookbooks shows housewives wasted little. Vegetables were made into pickles, fruits into juices, jams and jellies. Corn cobs could produce a sweet jelly and watermelon rind, cantaloupe slices and pumpkin cubes could be turned into delicious sweet pickles. At the end of the season green tomatoes were made into pickles or marmalade.

Stop by the Red Brick Schoolhouse Museum at 24 Southern Boulevard to see vintage kitchen goods and old cookbooks. The museum is open the first Sunday of every month from 2-4 pm or by appointment. Chathamtownshiphistoricalsociety.org.