Alongside the roadway in Talladega, Alabama, a young Rose Garrison plucked maypops — or passion fruit — christened for their month of abundance and the pop they make against open palms, producing seeds and sweet nectar. At her family’s farm bustling with chickens, hogs, and nourishing gardens, Garrison quickly learned how to cultivate her own food from nature’s goods.
Family recipes from her mother and grandmother included mashing sweet potatoes into pies to churning homemade peach ice cream. These culinary traditions are so rooted in experiential learning that her family is still trying to resurrect her grandmother’s recipe for fried apple pie, which was never written down. Garrison watched and learned to transform the blackberries, wild plums, and crabapples from the woods into jellies and jams. Though she’s since taken root in Tallahassee, she’s sustained these pickling and canning traditions for the past 35 years.
Garrison is looking forward to the upcoming Frenchtown Heritage Fest 2016. Now in it’s sixth year, the festival will unite local businesses and artisans for a full day of community celebration in one of Tallahassee’s historic neighborhoods. She hopes her booth will introduce attendees to the new flavors and be a hub for connection through food.
“Everything has a season,” states Garrison. “I like foraging for my fruit out in the woods and looking for U-pick markets. I’ll go to my neighbors and ask if I can pick some of their pears or tomatoes, then I pickle half and give them half — I get some, you get some.”
A rich family tradition of home cooking allows Garrison to reach back into history to a practice that has since been forgotten. She explains that while canning itself is a universal piece of culture across United States’ agriculture, its roots are strong in the southernmost regions. The culinary artistry she employs comes across in her many creations as proprietor of Marie’s Jelly, Jam, and Herbs.
Though she had watched her grandmother for years, Garrison was mostly self-taught at canning in the beginning, accruing her culinary skills at Florida A& M University’s main dining hall. Just as the history of canning has ties to survival in winter or other extreme conditions, Garrison too began making jams in her early twenties out of necessity as she and her husband raised their three young children.
“It saved me a whole lot of money,” says Garrison. “We didn’t have to worry about going to the grocery store and my kids would always tell their friends, ‘We don’t eat jelly out of the store, momma makes our jellies.’ As I got more into canning, I would talk to other older women that were doing it, because young women aren’t as much into it.”
Garrison attributes this declining interest to a lack of education and motivation surrounding food sources and the ubiquity of the “instant” or “microwave” generational trends. She can remember from her childhood having neighbors over and taking part in community- based art forms like quilting and canning as a way of keeping up with one another and sharing each other’s company.
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