Dilly Beans / Come on [Ir]ene

On my birthday last year, a small cardboard box arrived in the mail from our friend Andrew, and it was full of small red chilis that he'd grown. No note, no card. Isn't that the best? I strung them up and dried them, and now they're showing off in many jars of things.

When the power went out last night with a sucking sound and then black silence, the kids darted in from their bedrooms, cheering. The hurricane had not gathered itself up with much oomph around here, thank goodness--a nisht geferlach, if you’re of the Yiddish persuasion. Some rain, a tree limb or two on the ground, us checking news updates somewhat obsessively, checking this and that online hurricane tracker, checking out the window, checking in with my parents in New York. We wanted our roof to stay on, sure, our basement to stay dry—but we understood that, in the scheme of things, we were likely to be fine no matter what, and, therefore, deeply lucky. “It might be a nuisance,” I reassured Birdy. “It might be a mess or a pain or even kind of expensive to deal with. But it’s not going to be catastrophic for us. The only thing worth worrying about is people who can’t stay safe where they are.” Who am I? I hardly recognize the person I’ve become—the person with perspective. But there it is. All of us together? And safe? Let the basement flood. (Of course, when the basement did flood in March, I did some no small amount of lamenting, don’t get me wrong. Every morning I stood at the top of the basement stairs with my coffee mug, looked down into the underwater gloom, and, to the children’s daily delight, sighed, “Motherfucker.”)

Disaster preparation, Ingalls-style. I picked five and a half pounds of wild concord grapes and made five and a half pints of jam. Also tomatillo salsa and bread-and-butter pickles and wild blackberry jam, which was overseen by my mother. Money in the bank, as I like to say. Or, rather, who needs money in the bank when you have canned goods?

But yesterday? I prepared for the hurricane like it was 1870, canning pickles and jam in a cloud of fragrant steam. “Should we do more stuff to get ready?” I asked Michael, but he’d already taken down the bird feeders and was now onto the important task of programming our iPod: Bob Dylan, “Hurricane”; The Beatles, “Rain”; Kris Delmhorst, “Hurricane”; Gillian Welch, “Wind and Rain.” He is a man with priorities. We played “everyone picks a board game,” which represents our family’s most luxurious kind of afternoon: four games in a row (Birdy: Make Me a Cake; Me: Rummikub; Ben: Acquire; Michael: Agricola). The projected peak of the storm came and went, and we pulled rubber boots on over our pajamas and went outside, kicked through puddles and crushed fallen apples under our heels. We wandered up to the top of the golf course as the sun was setting, pink light streaming in through rolling banks of silvery clouds, the kids chasing each other, mushrooms pushing up through the green, green grass almost, it seemed, while we watched. I was so happy. I am still.

But the kids were a little disappointed—a little bit awash in the strangely dry anticlimax, although they understood rationally how lucky we had been; they understood that the hurricane had uprooted a lot of people's homes and lives. Still, we’d planned for the romance of candlelight, of boiling tea on the camp stove and living off of pickles and jam indefinitely. (I, personally, had also planned on somehow not needing to work for days on end.) So when the wind picked up late, when doors slammed spontaneously shut all over the house and the window frames shuddered, when the darkness blinked on, they were thrilled. I lit a candle. We moved their mattresses into our bedroom, and then we lay on the big bed, all of us together with the cat, and listened to the wind. And only fifty minutes later, with a couple of stray beeps, the lights came back on. But it had been something. It was enough.

Here's hoping the same for you. Sending love and safe, dry thoughts.

Dilly Beans

Makes 6 pints

This recipe is adapted from one in the wonderful book The Joy of Pickling. I think that, if you’ve never canned anything before, you should go ahead and simply make these and plan to refrigerate them and/or give them away. That way you won’t be daunted by the stress of the canning situation, and you can just make them all together in a large bowl or jar. That said, I am not going to give you full canning directions because you really need to consult the introductory chapter of a book about it: the Joy of Pickling has a good one, as does Tart and Sweet, my new favorite preserving book, and of course your library has all the classics like Ball’s Complete Book of Home Preserving.)

I am kind of {immodesty alert} famous for these pickles. My friend Becky, who is a lawyer, once traded me doing our will for a jar of beans to put in her husband’s Christmas stocking. They are crisp and puckery and perfect. If you make them with dill, they’re classic, and if you use tarragon, they taste like French cornichons. Keep a few jars around, and you will always have something good to put out with drinks.


Did you need a beginner's canning kit? Here's a nice one.


Okay, the beans:

6 garlic cloves, sliced

36 black peppercorns

3 pounds very fresh green or wax beans, washed and topped

6 dill heads or sprigs (or else tarragon or basil or lovage or cilantro--I like them all)

6 dried chili peppers or some chili flakes (optional)

3 1/2 cups white or white wine vinegar

3 1/2 cups water

4 tablespoons kosher salt

Begin by putting a large pot of water up to boil. Give six pint-sized canning jars a thorough, soapy scrub, then put them in the pot of water that you’ve put on to boil. Make sure you have six lids and rings to match. (The other thing to do is pull jars, hot and fresh, from the dishwasher—especially if you’re not planning on doing the full canning thing).

Into each of 6 sterile 1-pint mason jars, put 1 sliced garlic clove, 6 peppercorns, and a chili or chili flakes. Pack the beans vertically into the jars, adding 1 tarragon sprig (or other herbs) to each jar. You will want to gather an organized handful of beans and then cut them to size so that nobody pokes up out of the brine.

Bring the vinegar, water, and salt to a boil in a pot, then pour the hot liquid over the beans, leaving a half inch of headspace. Close the jars with hot two-piece caps. Process the jars for 5 minutes in a boiling water bath, or pasteurize them for 30 minutes in water heated to 180 or 185 degrees F. They're best after a month and keep forever.

If you're not a canner, then just make them and store them in the fridge! Or eat them. 

And if you're an experienced canner, you can do what I do though I am not officially recommending it, and the Ball folks would have a fit because NOBODY RECOMMENDS THE OPEN KETTLE METHOD ANY MORE: pour a kettle full of boiling water over the beans in a colander in the sink, then pack them in the jars hot, with scrupulously clean hands. Then they’ll can up just fine in the hot jars, without the pasteurizing step (and they'll stay crunchier). But if you have any doubts, process or pasteurize them.

I picked these at our CSA and they were so fresh and green that they actually smelled like fresh-mown grass. In a good way.

Herbs. Garlic.

Beans, packed in a jar. The things is, everything you really want pictures of I didn't take pictures of. I'm sorry! I think I'm trying not to seem like a good starting-resource on canning because if you're going to get serious, you should read a book first and not just follow some crazy blogger's slap-dash method. But I made these for *years* before I canned them, just for the record. I used to keep them in an old pickle jar in the fridge.

After you add the brine, the beans turn khaki-colored. And the garlic turns blue. And your cheeks turn pink from standing over a hot stove, canning, like it's the friggin' 19th century.

Dilly Beans! Silly beans.