Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue.
Please log in, or sign up for a new account to continue reading.
Thank you for reading! We hope that you continue to enjoy our free content.
Welcome! We hope that you enjoy our free content.
Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribe purchase a subscription to continue reading.
Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribe purchase a subscription to continue reading.
Thank you for signing in! We hope that you continue to enjoy our free content.
Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue.
Your current subscription does not provide access to this content.
Purchase an Online Subscription to receive access to all website content of DAILY COURIER.
Sorry, no promotional deals were found matching that code.
Promotional Rates were found for your code.
The first dozen quarts of canned tomatoes from this year’s edition of the annual vegetable garden brought back memories of our former home on McGill Avenue and the kitchen pantry that served our family for most of my youth.
My parents bought their McGill Avenue home in 1936, two years before I was born. Like most of the homes on McGill, ours was probably a product of the explosive growth of the town in the prosperous early years.
Foundations usually ended at ground level with only an excavation for the coal furnace. First floor closets were rare and cabinet-filled kitchens unheard of.
McGill Avenue homes are large and roomy but most have had many alterations over their life.
I’m not sure when Dawson received public water but most of the homes on McGill have — or had — dug wells. In my lifetime, we always had city water and indoor plumbing.
My parents made many improvements to our home, but one modification completed before they bought it was to enclose the rear porch and make about half of the enclosure a kitchen pantry.
An open arch sometimes covered by a curtain connected the pantry to the kitchen. Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling and a lot of my mother’s dry goods filled some of the shelves.
Every other available space was filled with home-canned food.
We did not have a freezer — if they existed — but Mom canned everything, including meat.
Today, we buy a jar of jelly, but when Mom made jelly, it was usually a batch of 20 or 30 jars.
Quarts of green beans, various tomato products, fruit and applesauce, and even a few unidentifiable canned items filled the shelves. Emptied jars were carefully washed out and stored for next year’s use. Any kind of food produced in the garden usually ended up canned, bottled, dried or hung in the pantry.
Recently, puttering in my garage I found in a box of junk from the old house — a carton of new bottle caps. I remembered then that we had a bottle capper and made, bottled and capped our own ketchup. Take that, Heinz 57.
Over the years, my brothers and Dad dug out most of the basement as the vegetable gardens grew larger. A section of the basement was designated as the fruit cellar where a lot more canned goods could be stored. It did seem, in my memory, that the pantry was a necessary annex to the kitchen. Even now, in the luxury- oriented kitchens of today, a large floor to ceiling storage cabinet is deemed a pantry.
Even though I have happy memories of most of my youth, I remember very little about family meals.
My youngest sister was seven years my senior and both my brothers went to World War II before I was 5. My oldest sister went to Beaver Falls to work in the steel mill. Dad was on 24/7 call at the P&LE, so a lot of our meals were Mom, myself and Frances, my youngest sister.
Perhaps that’s why at some point around 1950, Dad decided to turn the kitchen pantry into a powder room as a first-floor convenience. Both brothers and two of my sisters got married during wartime or shortly after and did not return to the home place so our family unit at the dinner table decreased in number from eight to four.
The large kitchen pantry and its wall-to-floor shelves had become mostly unnecessary space.
Eventually, the pantry area morphed to powder room, laundry room and finally to a full bath. In the 1960s, Mom and Dad built a small brick ranch in our orchard and moved into it so they could have everything on one floor.
Even though it had a lot of closet space and modern kitchen cabinets, I heard Mom lament several times when trying to find storage space, “I sure wish I still had my pantry.”
Roy Hess is a Dawson resident.