The Art of Preserving and Storing
Courtesy of the Florida Memory Project
The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a program developed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) to help Americans to overcome the Great Depression of 1928. A WPA administrator interested in food decided to publish a collection called America Eats.
Housewives historically practiced the art of preserving and storing produce in a family’s cellar to be used when needed, especially during the winter months. Pickling and making jellies had been a common way of storing foods before the popularity of household refrigerators. These two techniques had been a source of pride for many housewives. Women carefully curated the walls along their cellars with barrels of apples, cabbages, turnips, and more. They also stacked homemade canned potatoes, squash, and yellow sugar pumpkins on cellar shelves. When showing her work, the housewife typically overlooked the vegetables because they were generally harvested by the men but they took great pride in the handpicked assortment of strawberry, raspberry, red currants, gooseberries, and plum jellies. The producer of these delicious sweets knew a myriad of facts about each of the bushes and trees from which they picked the fruit by hand. When she concluded the cellar tour of all of her canned goods, a proud canner sent a sample container of her best product as a parting gift so long as they showed an appreciation for the hard work put into its preparation.