Some things at Kitchen Kettle are best forgotten but as you can tell from my last post many early memories remain with me. 

When we began our business in earnest,  we had 75 kettles and 50 gas burners set up in the kitchen which was housed in our new garage – thus the name Kitchen Kettle Foods.  After a few years of gas burner production, we were advised that the very best jams are possible when cooked in a 40 gallon steam jacketed kettle.  This required a two story cement block building to expand the cooking operation and house an oil burner that I was sure would explode very quickly.  Fortunately to this day I was wrong and that fear has never materialized.  Our ingenious Amish neighbor Ben Stoltzfus engineered  the design of our entire manufacturing process which still stands today.  He envisioned storing the sugar on the second floor allowing it to come down through a chute into a container with a scale that hung over the kettles.  It would make adding sugar to the fruit extremely easy.   Only problem was getting the 100 pound sugar bags to the second floor.  So Ben installed a grain elevator which was a new invention at the time.  Ben had worked at the small factory down the street where the grain elevator design sparked a new era in the world of farm machinery. 

All this equipment expansion was a big jolt to our small profits.  The new steam jacketed kettle supplied the only heat to the room.  The money ran out before we got to take a pipe from the production sink to the tank underground so when we drained the sink, the water poured out all over the floor in every direction before it flowed to the floor drain which emptied right into the septic tank. (What would the government inspectors say today about that?)  One of the Amish cooks threatened to quit because she was tired of working in her boots and being splattered by water every time we needed to fill the sink!  The real kicker for me came later after working all day in this sticky jam with such an inefficient clean-up system, trudging home, which admittedly was just out the front door, and being greeted by my husband with “Don’t we have any hors d’oevres?”  You see he had spent the day working outside the jelly factory so our family could survive and after all it was the 1950′s.  Couldn’t every working man expect cocktails and hors d’oevres before dinner in that day and age?

Enough stories for today!  I’ll be back later in November.  For those of you who can relate, please let me know.  Although I felt somewhat alone back then, I wasn’t.  Many women were starting businesses – we just had no way of communicating to each other.  Now we do!  I’d love to hear from you.