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Show High Time Cheap: No Bargain If It Goes To Waste shelves full of fruit. Mothers ot yesteryear sang praises and w rote poems about sunshine through the window lighting up the fruit, calling it a stained glass window . THE OTHER half of the need is the row s of empty hot ties accusing me every time I go into the basement. I think I'll just do this one more bushel of peaches, maybe a few pints of frozen fruit cocktail, then perhaps a little jam. THEN I am going to put the empty bottles in boxes and give them to my children for Christmas presents. Let them explain to those bottles why they are not full of fruit. j, j, j, a, 4, a. -It -tf By FLORENCE BITTNER Fruit orchards are disappearing dis-appearing from our Wasatch Front valleys. Each fall I have to drive farther and look harder har-der to find peaches to fill my bottles. Since my sons have grown, 1 wonder how many years I will continue the fall canning ritual, but there is security in looking at the rows of fruit-filled bottles on my shelves. IT GOES way back to my earliest childhood memories. Mother knew how many quarts and pints of each item she preserved to get her brood through a winter, and from the first produce in the garden, she had a daily quota. Four quarts of vegetables every day, four pints of condiments like corn relish, catsup or pickled beets. And every fall at least IS bushels of fruit. When the shelves and bottles bot-tles were filled, the meat from the slaughtered pig had been cured, made into sausage and packed in lard, or canned, when the honey man had come and Dad had traded flour for five gallon cans of honey, when the potatoes and carrots were in their bins in the root cellar, then we knew we were secure for another winter. MY EARLIEST memories of my mother are of her working work-ing at the stove with the pressure press-ure cooker she used to process food. She was careful and we never had spoilage. They had learned the hard way to beware be-ware of poorly preserved food. Grandmother still had some of the narrow neck bottles which required the fruit to be cut into small slices, used corks sealed with wax. As the wide mouth bottles became available, she gladly abandoned aban-doned the narrow necks. THEY ALSO dried food. Slicing the beef for jerkey required re-quired the efforts of the men to get the thin strips cut. The women rolled the strips in salt, threaded them on lines and hung them up to dry, covered with cheesecloth to keep off flies. We used jerkey for candy. If my children inherited the need for shelves full of preserved pre-served food as a security against the winter, they have not shown it. My daughter says, are you sure you want to do another bushel of peaches? You still have fruit left from last year. Who's going to eat it? Ol'R TASTES have become more sophisticated. We like things fresh frozen or fresh, we don't like canned meat in any form, we don't like canned vegetables with the exception of corn, we prefer commercially commercial-ly prepared condiments like pickles and catsup. There is no denying it is cheaper to dd your own, but only if your family will eat it. I found out some, time ago that cheap is no bargain if it goes to waste. It hurts to throw food away at any time, but home preserved food is especially painful to discard uneaten. WE DO eat the fruit, but not in the quantities I feel compelled compel-led to preserve. My growing boys would eat a couple of quarts of fruit, half a loaf of bread and as much milk as 1 had in the house for a snack. No more. Their appetites have leveled off, praises be, but I still have this need to see |