Blue Ridge Country - September/October 2013 - 57

flavors

Canning with Betty Ascione
her secret to capturing the flavors of
summer in glass? “the day you pick it,
you put it in your jars.”
The Western North Carolina Farmers
Market has been in operation for
nearly 40 years, at the confluence of
Interstates 26 and 40 near Asheville,
N.C. For most of that time, Betty
Ascione has occupied a spot in the
retail building, selling not only fresh
garden produce and fruit but also
her home-canning.
“I have people come from all over
the United States for my canning,”
she says. “I’ve always canned. I
helped my mother out canning.”
She married an Italian – hence her
last name. But she’s very much a
Western North Carolina mountain
lady, a Scroggs before marriage,
from Leicester.
“If you live out there, it’s pronounced LESTER,” instructs Ascione
of the town name. “If you don’t live
out there, it’s LEE-cester.”
It was from her late mother, Pearl
Scroggs, that she learned to can. The
mountain relish called chow-chow
that Ascione sells so much of today
is right out of her mother’s kitchen:
“I put a lot more in my chow-chow
than most people. My mother made
it that way. I put green tomatoes in
it, cucumbers, onions, red bell pepper, green bell pepper, and jalapeño
pepper.
“Most people put it on soup
beans, but it’s good on hot dogs,
good on hamburgers, and with
tacos.”
As soon as I got back home after
my first visit with Ascione, I followed
her advice. I didn’t cook up a pot of
soup beans as a basis for chowchow, as I normally would. Instead, I

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opted for hot dogs, those stark red
Valleydale wieners. On the first one, I
spread a thin coating of mustard on
the bun, then scattered Ascione’s
chow-chow across the dog. The
chow-chow was so good, I decided
the mustard just got in the way.
Nailed across the top of Ascione’s
booth at the farmers market are
framed blue ribbons she earned for
her canning, at the North Carolina
Mountain State Fair near Arden. Her
home kitchen is inspected regularly
by the North Carolina Department of
Agriculture, and she and her husband Ralph are graduates of the
Better Process Control School at the
University of Georgia. In short, she
combines the best of the old, her
mother’s teaching, with the best of
the new, the most modern sanitation
techniques.
“Pickled beets, dilly beans, mixed
pickles, green tomato pickles, bread
and butter pickles, about any kind of
pickle you want, I’ll make,” claims
Ascione proudly.
She says the hottest product in
her repertoire is her hot jalapeño relish, a recipe she created, using peppers out of her neighbor’s garden.
“For good canning, you have to
have fresh produce,” she says. “The
day you pick it, you put it in your jars,
and that makes the best canning
right there. If you let it sit two or
three days, it won’t be good. You get
out of a jar what you put in it.”
What Ascione puts into those jars
is the flavor of summer, kept around
a few months longer through the art
and science of food preservation.

Larry Smith, EtSU

fred sauceman

Betty Ascione on not waiting: “You get
out of a jar what you put into it.”
ReCipe

Bread and Butter pickles
A recipe from the late Edith Ethel Koontz
Royall, the author’s maternal grandmother.
2 quarts sliced cucumbers
6 small onions, sliced
1 green pepper, chopped
1 red pepper, chopped
½ cup salt
Mix all the above ingredients, cover with
cracked ice, and let stand for three hours.
Drain. Then combine the remaining
ingredients:
2 ½ cups sugar
2 ½ cups vinegar
¾ teaspoon turmeric
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon ground mustard
½ teaspoon celery seed
Pinch of ground ginger
Pour over the vegetables. Bring to a boil.
Simmer five minutes and pack in jars and seal.
Makes about four pints.

Betty’s Home Canning
Retail Building B at the Western North Carolina Farmers Market in Asheville; 570 Brevard Road. 828-253-1691
September/October 2013 | 57

Blue Ridge Country - September/October 2013

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