The Fruit Cellar

When I was a girl living in the 1940's, there weren't any processed foods. The TV dinner hadn't been invented yet. The grocery stores didn't carry the produce that they do today. A fresh pineapple was unheard of. We ate things that were in season....and that's why an orange in the Christmas stocking was started. We didn't have oranges very often in the winter. The freezers were small little compartments that hung down in the middle of a small refrigerator. No ice makers in those days. We seldom had ice water, tea, or even Kool Aid back then.

My mother was a canner. She "put up" quite a few of the fruits and vegetables that we ate during the winter. Late summer found her in our un air conditioned kitchen... peering over a kettle of tomatoes to put in jars, seal and put into the canner. She had two canners going at a  time. I remember a hot kitchen in the summer....not from the weather but from the stove with canners boiling. The familiar "ping" to say that the jars had sealed was a sound that she asked me to keep track of.

We were recipients of bushels of apples....the person giving them to us would say...."This were under the tree....you can just cut away the brown spots." Mom was thrilled with anything she could get. Those apples meant that we would have applesauce throughout the winter. Mom would ration out the applesauce so that it lasted for a couple months. I never had jarred applesauce until I was a teenager.

I remember getting bushels of peaches and pears. I loved having a peach with cottage cheese salad for lunch. Mom and Grandma used to make blushing pears. They would be cooked with a few cinnamon red hot candies. I love these to this day. The last thing that she canned each year would be chili sauce. I can still smell it in my memory. We would have that with beef and pork roasts.

Then there were the tins with Mom's fruitcakes inside. She made these for everyone... for gifts at Christmas. They were her treasures.

Where did we keep all of these canned things? We had a house with a basement that wasn't heated. Part of it had a dirt floor. There was a monster furnace. It looked like a big octopus in the middle of the room. There was a coal bin on one side......and across from that was an old stairway coming down from the outside. Much like the one in the photo. Remember the old song....Playmate come out and play with me...and bring your dollies three....climb up my apple tree. Look down my rain barrel...slide down my cellar door and we'll be jolly friends forever more.

Well, we had that cellar door and the stairs led down to our basement. There was a little room, partitioned off from the rest of the basement, that Mom called her fruit cellar. I've heard it called a root cellar, but ours was a fruit cellar. She decorated the shelves with fresh shelf paper each fall and put her jars on those shelves. All lined up like jars of jewels. The window to this little room was always cleaned...so that the sun could come in and shine on her jars. She would have a gunny sack of potatoes, carrots in sand, and onions hanging. I loved going into the fruit cellar. It was my job to bring up the jars as she needed them.

We were healthy in those days...I think because of the fact that we got good nutrition (no processed foods yet) plenty of sleep, (no tv) and we played outside in all kinds of weather. 

Those were the days of my youth....I'll never forget.

Balisha