We're only a couple of generations removed from the era when most women - or at least women in rural areas and small towns - produced quarts and quarts of preserves every summer.
The canning season began at mid-summer, and ended in the fall when the last of the produce from family gardens was harvested.
Through the summer, people canned peas and carrots, string beans, a mixture of saskatoons and rhubarb, and fruits that they bought by the case expressly for preserving-peaches, pears, plums and cherries.
Jams and jellies were made from berries picked by the family - raspberries, chokecherries, pincherries, and, with luck, wild strawberries.
Ah, the wild strawberries! Hard to find and hard to pick, but worth it for their incomparable flavour.
They grow in spots all over the northern hemisphere, even in the harsh climate of the Prairie West. They're usually in small patches along trails and roadsides, on hillsides, in meadows, young woodlands and sparse forest.
You watched for the pretty white blossoms and the leaves with serrated edges. The fruit was usually under the leaves so you had to bend low and turn leaves, looking for berries that were ripe. Ten minutes of picking might yield two or three mouthfuls of berries. Picking enough to make jam was a backbreaking chore, but worth it.
You had to visit several patches, since each patch was small. You had to work carefully, because the ripe berries were soft, and easily crushed. And you had to fight the temptation to pop the berries into your mouth.
One family of four people one year happened on several fairly large patches of the berries. Even so, it took them most of a Sunday afternoon to harvest enough fruit to yield about six cups of strawberry jam.
Because she wanted to extend the treat through the winter months, and because she wanted to give some to her neighbours, the mother decided to divide the jam into eight small jars, each carefully sealed with paraffin. They were then put down in the cellar to await Christmas.
Two of those jars went to close friends as Christmas gifts.
And on Christmas morning, after the gifts had been opened, the mother made biscuits, the father brought one jar of the jam up from the cellar, and the family had Christmas breakfast - just hot biscuits topped with homemade butter and wild strawberry jam.
It was a taste treat impossible to forget.
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(Copyright William D. Koroluk. All rights reserved.)
