Mom had a very large garden. We kids did a lot of the work. The produce from it could be on the table at mealtime or maybe preserved in some form for later use. Different things would be canned or frozen.
Green beans were “canned.” To this day I do not know why the process is called “canned,” when the beans were actually in glass jars. Shouldn’t we have said they were jarred?
After the beans were picked from the garden, which us kids would have done, they were “snapped” which meant breaking the long beans into smaller pieces. We would have done that as well. Lots of childhood labor was involved in the garden.
The beans were then washed and placed in Mason jars with some water and the two-piece metal lids were tightly sealed and then placed in the big metal pot of the pressure cooker.
As a kid I was certain we all were going to die right there in the kitchen “canning,” beans with that big pressure cooker sitting on the burners on the stove top.
The bottom part of the pressure cooker was a large and very heavy metal pot. That’s where the jars of snapped beans were placed. The big pot was almost large enough to cover two burners on the stove top.
Water was added to the pot around the jars of beans. The heat was then turned on. To this point, everything seemed safe.
The pressure cooker lid was also very heavy. It had several black Bakelite knobs on clamps around the edge. The knobs on the clamps would be turned to tighten the top to the pot so no steam could escape.
On the pressure cooker’s top were a round gauge and a small vent. The gauge allowed the pressure inside the pot to be monitored. As the gas burner of the stove heated the water, the pressure increased, and you could see the pointed dial slowly climbing on the gauge.
I had watched some submarine movies and you didn’t worry too much about any of the gauges unless something was going wrong. To me this whole process did not look right!
After the heat was turned up, you knew even without looking at the needle that something was going on because you could hear the sound of the boiling hot water. It was a bit concerning as I already knew from the war movies and books I had read, what happened on Navy ships when the steam lines broke; people died or were horribly injured.
Eventually steam would escape from the vent on top in an increasingly shrill whistle, growing louder as the pressure increased. All the while the needle on the gauge slowly climbed around the dial.
I just knew that at some point the whole thing was going to blow up. My skin would be scalded with high pressure, boiling hot water, and then begin to peel off. And, there were the shards of hot metal that would penetrate our bodies, breaking our bones and ripping into our muscles.
We were going to die a horrible death! It was one thing to be hit by scalding hot, high-pressure steam when you are in a battle at sea; it’s another whole deal to be scalded while you are standing, under your Mom’s command, in the kitchen!
Fortunately, none of that ever happened.
I still have a mental picture of that pressure cooker silently sitting on the counter. With its weight, its black knobs, gauge, and vent, it reminded me of something that silent uniformed men might be using behind curtained windows at the prison in McAlester as they prepared the room in death row for the next execution.
I’m sure most of this was just my overactive imagination at work. It would have been very inhumane for a death row inmate to die in that fashion.
But when you’re a kid you don’t think about all of that.
Some Called It Coincidence/Don Ukens Chapter 2