Put Up, Passed Down: An Interview with Lana Stuart

For the first issue of The Red Clay Journal, I wanted to talk to somebody who actually knows how to can and preserve the South’s fresh summer produce. I grew up in a family that canned everything, and my Mama still does, but I never learned how to do any of it beyond my Strawberry Freezer Jam. Lana Stuart did learn. She’s been publishing recipes at Lana’s Cooking since 2009; she grew up in Miller County down in the southwest corner of Georgia, and she is particular about doing it the safe way. We talked about the cooks who taught her, the tech career that turned her into a blogger, and what she tells people who want to start canning.

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Lana Stuart and I have been on the internet together for about fifteen years without ever once talking to each other. We started our sites a year apart, hers in 2009 and mine in 2010, and we both had to rebrand after somebody else claimed the name we started with.

We’re both Georgia girls, too. She grew up in Miller County, down in the corner where the state tucks in between Alabama and Florida, and I grew up in Macon County, right about the middle. So we spent the first ten minutes of our call placing each other on the map, the way Southerners do. She knew Oglethorpe, which hardly anybody does!

Lana learned to cook the way a lot of us did, standing next to her mother and copying what she saw.

“I just watched what she did in the kitchen and replicated that,” she says. “That’s basically the way that I learned. But I had lots of really, really good cooks in my family. Both my grandmothers lived in the same town. Several aunts. They were all really accomplished cooks, so it just kind of runs in the family.”

“That recipe went from 38 words — I counted it one time — to two pages…”

The first thing she made on her own came out of a 4-H pamphlet, a tuna noodle casserole she thought was the best thing she had ever eaten. Mine was tea cakes with my great-grandmother, so we came up about the same way.

What Lana did not have, at least not on paper, were the recipes. One grandmother cooked without any at all, and the other liked trying new ones, so Lana got some of both. When she started writing things down for the blog, she had to reverse engineer a lifetime of watching.

Her chicken and rice, still one of the most popular recipes on her site, had never been measured a single time.

“Instead of just dumping things like I usually did, I had to stop and kind of dump that in a bowl and then measure that and see exactly how much it was that I was using,” she says.

I know that struggle well. When I started my blog, I made meatloaf about ten times in a row trying to pin down what I had been throwing in there for years without thinking about it.

The old written recipes weren’t much more help. A little chocolate layer cake that came down through Lana’s family was two sentences long, something like boil this, mix this, bake it.

“That recipe went from 38 words — I counted it one time — to two pages.”

Before the blog

Before becoming a Southern food blogger, Lana spent her working life in computers. In Albany, she held a dual role at Darton College and then the Dougherty County School System, doing tech support on one side and serving as webmaster on the other.

That covered everything from running cable for networks to setting up computer classrooms to keeping instructors and staff going on their own machines. Lana built the first website either institution ever had.

Blogging was brand new in the tech world at the time, and that’s what pulled her in to start with. The first two or three posts Lana wrote were just about whatever was happening that day, the way we all wrote back then.

It didn’t take long to get around to recipes, though, once it occurred to her that a website was an easy way to save the old ones her family had been handing down for years and pass them on to younger people.

“I really feel bad for people starting out now with a blog that don’t have the tech knowledge,” Lana says. “I know that I would feel so lost trying to figure out what to do about an issue or a problem.”

On putting up and preserving

Lucy: I grew up in a family that put up everything, and my Mama still cans more than she could possibly live long enough to eat. I never learned to do a bit of it. Freezer Jam is the extent of my skill, mostly because it keeps me away from a pressure canner, which terrifies me.

Was canning something you grew up with, or did you come to it later?

We did it growing up. Every summer was spent preserving whatever. Now, my mother mostly did freezing, because that was the easiest thing, and that is still the easiest thing to do. We put up peas and butter beans and corn, whatever you can think of. But one of my grandmothers enjoyed the canning side of it, and I started learning from her.

Then once I got grown and doing it myself, I started looking at the science of it and reading and learning more about how to do it correctly, because there are a lot of incorrect procedures out there. I’m a real stickler for using correct canning procedures.

And of course, we’re lucky that we have the National Center for Home Food Preservation at the University of Georgia. They are the national authority on it. If you want to know how to can or preserve anything, you just go to their website and look it up.

The rest of the interview, including Lana’s rules for safe canning, the mistake she sees most often, and where she tells every beginner to start, appears in The Red Clay Journal, Issue One. Available to members of The Red Clay Society.