Janet Cooper

Janet Cooper is seventy-five years old and grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. For almost as long as she can remember, she has been involved, off and on, in some way with preserving something at some time of the year. A great deal of what she knows about preserving and canning she learned from her mother, who grew up in several small towns in Iowa and came from a Pennsylvania Dutch background. As a young girl, Janet realized that summer canning was a natural way to spend her summer vacations, and by fall, the family basement canning cupboard was full of an assortment of jams, jellies, fruits, and pickles. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in fine arts, Janet took to wandering the United States and other countries worldwide. She’s lived from coast to coast and spent three years in Ottawa, Canada, where she taught home canning for two summers. The material she collected for that course helped her develop ideas for small-batch canning and preserving throughout all the seasons. She has touched every continent and currently resides in Fitchburg, Wisconsin.