Lessons From the Kitchen Table

Eloise Ward's Pepper Hash Relish

12 green peppers

12 red peppers

12 onions

2 cups sugar

2 cups vinegar

2 tsp salt

Take a soap box if you're too little to reach the meat grinder (ours was mounted on an old wooden table in the back yard), a towel, and your peppers in the bucket we used to water the horse and go outside. Grind peppers. Take your peppers inside and give them to your mother who will put them in a big soup pot and cover the peppers with boiling water. Clear a path from the kitchen to the table outside. Go grind the onions. Start grinding. Stop and sit on the soap box to cry and wipe the vapors out of your eyes with the towel. Throw the towel over your shoulder (added to instructions after laying the towel on the table under the meat grinder where the onion juice dripped on it and wiping eyes with towel).

Start grinding again. Note: crying does not make the cat or neighbors feel sorry for you. Do not walk away from the table or leave your post unattended. Your older sibling will bring more onions in an effort to torture you. You are now unable to see out of one eye. Look out of your good eye to make sure your older sibling did not put a chair or clothes basket in your path so that you would break your leg or worse yet - have to grind more onions. Carry your pot of ground onions to the kitchen. Give them to your mother who has drained the peppers and put them back in a big pot. She will then add the ground onions, sugar, salt, and vinegar to the peppers.

Go get a kitchen chair to stand on if you can't reach the stove. You must stir this until the onions and peppers are mixed together. Simmer everything in the pot on low for one hour. This is a good time during which you can go flatten the tires on your evil siblings bicycle. Return in time to find your mother making a 7-Up float and help her sterilize the small pint jars that hold the pepper hash relish. Fill jars, seal. Remember to call your father and remind him to bring home the bicycle pump and more ice cream. Makes enough pepper hash relish to last your father eight weeks as long as his brother Wilbur doesn't come over to go fishing and stay for dinner.