The things we know best are often the ones hardest to describe in words. Try to teach a pal that thing you learned last month? Piece of cake. But to explain, step by step, how to do something you’ve been doing intuitively for years is often to endure a humbling experience.
Thus, I will not write an instructional post for fruit preserves the way I make them, though a certain type of reader just might come away with a new trick or two up her sleeve. Rather, this shall, again, be the kind of writing that helps me figure out why a thing is as important to me as it is, and which aspects of it affect me with the greatest intensity. As I write this paragraph, I imagine I may include a fast-paced list of handy tips, but my confidence level is moderate. Depends on how many of those tips elbow their way into my prose in the first place, in those parenthetical ways I so love (which could be likened to the pinches of spice that I am completely against in jam-making.)
I mentioned intensity. In jams, jellies and preserves this seems a matter of taste, but perhaps isn’t. Aroma is crucial to flavor. Select the brightest, most beautiful fruit, or select the fruit that is available, but don’t bother with fruit lacking in essence. And cook your fruit in such a way as to minimize the time it spends stewing in watery juices: this is how bright aromas are lost, never to return. Small batches and wide saucepans always, always, always result in better jam. The exception? True preserves, the kind with candied jewels of fruit suspended in thick syrup. Here, it makes sense to make a batch of substance, because the process involves lots of straining, cooling, waiting, and re-immersing. However, it is an exception that, as they say, proves the rule: the fruit spends nary a moment stewing at all. Instead, it is called upon to participate in osmosis, which replaces the water in its cells with luxe syrup. Worth it, especially when (and, for me, only if) sour cherries are involved.
Back to intensity. A long time ago, I read somewhere (possibly in Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, a formative read) that salting food is not, in fact, a matter of taste. Nor is it something that can be compensated for at the table. Food, according to my source, needs to be salted throughout, not just on its surface, and the right amount of salt is exactly the maximum that can be added before arriving at “too much.” Science, really. Physics, even. But back to jam. It seems to me that there’s an analogous principle at work with the amount of sugar, except the right amount is not, in this case, “just shy of too much,” but rather “just enough to be more than not enough.” This is a notoriously imprecise formula, one I swear by, even if, on occasion, I, too, get it wrong. Undersweetened jam lacks flavor. It’s texture is too thin and mushy. And it requires that great amounts of it be eaten at a time. It is, in practical terms, not so much jam as, say, a fruit-based side dish. Oversweetened jam, in turn, lacks subtlety flavorwise and has a texture that is far too thick, either too gooey or too dry. The great science of economics has a term for this: the Goldilocks principle. So do fairy tales.
It’s tempting to combine fruit types and experiment with spices and other seasonings. After all, how else can I set my jam apart from all the jam already out there? This is why all those artisanal makers of jarred goods tend to add vanilla to apricots, cinnamon to plums, bourbon to peaches, lavender to blueberries, ginger to oranges, and so on. I occasionally delight in such gustatory excursions when it comes to baked fruit desserts, but jam, to me, is like great coffee or tea. In 99% of cases, no added aromas are necessary (with regard to caffeinated goods, it’s cardamom, jasmine, and bergamot that are wrecking the average). Then again, de gustibus non est disputandum and all that, so who am I to tell you that you should prefer for your fruit to fly solo? But tell you I will, because years of all kinds of jammery have gone to my head. The one exception I tout? Some rhubarb in my strawberries, every time. Not too much, but just enough for a thicker texture, enhanced floral aromas, and that bit of tart zing. Should you try this, you might be amazed to discover that it’s the strawberries that take a much longer time to cook than the rhubarb. A shock, every time, given how the former is perfectly yummy when eaten fresh and the latter a stringy and astringent exemplar of something inedibly raw.
What about other fruit combos? Blackcurrants and blueberries looked great raw in the pot but fell flat as jam. Raspberries and blackberries made me wish I had two jars of each, not four of the blend. Ditto greengage plums plus gooseberries. But some experiments yield promising results, or at least ones worth tasting. Last year I added a yellow plum tomato to a small batch of apricots. My ten-year-old was not impressed, but I was fascinated by the way one seemed yellow, the other orange, yet the colors were nearly the same. And once my jam was complete, I was further fascinated by the flavor: floral and musky in that way apricot lovers agree is so sensuous, but pulled in a complex, sophisticated direction by the leafy and animal notes of tomato. I’ll be the first to assert that apricots sans tomato make better jam, but you can be sure I will make this tompricot curio again.
Favorite flavors? I mentioned strawberry with a boost from rhubarb, which beates rhubarb with a boost from strawberry. (Rhubarb alone is not worth saving for winter, but it’s the first jam I make in the spring for immediate eating, before strawberries appear, so it will always have a special place in my heart.) I mentioned apricot, which has such a fantastic color and texture that it tempts one to skimp on the sugar—promise me you won’t, jam needs that jammy sweetness. I also love raspberry—this one is a must every year. Blackberry has also been known to blow my mind, but if the blackberries aren’t ripe, they lack aroma. Blackcurrant is a definite favorite, and my confiture de cassis took off after I learned that, in order to soften, blackcurrant skins require some prior cooking in a bit of water before sugar is added to the pot. Sour cherries make divine candied fruit in syrup, so I tend to do that, though I wouldn’t exactly coll the finished product a jam. (Oranges are great and they extend jam making into late winter. Use regular oranges for a sweet jam, bitter Seville ones for a sophisticated bitter one. Blood oranges don’t work, in my opinion.) Tomatoes on their own make very interesting preserves, but the flavor veers on strange. (It played perfectly on an Alentejo cliff alongside pão, manteiga e queijo fresco, but it failed to play quite as well back at home.) Peaches, sweet cherries, and nectarines don’t seem worth the effort to me. If I had to pick my absolute favorite, it would be a tight race between raspberry and those rhubarb-charged strawberries I’m so proud of.
Batch size, pan size, cooking time: these are significant. I used to think making more at a time made more sense from a time and effort perspective. Now I’m convinced that canning a couple of small jars on several occasions adds up to far less labor than going big. Notably, in household conditions it produces a better result. Early on, I mentioned how huge amounts of fruit stack deeper in a pan and spend more time submerged in their own juices. This keeps them stewing in water when they should be simmering in syrup. Ergo, small batches for the win. There’s more: ladling runny hot jam into jars takes time. If during this time your jam is in that wide kind of saucepan I’m recommending, it’ll keep concentrating fast, aromas escaping, the texture thickening past the point of no return. (It is, technically, possible to return by adding some of the water lost due to evaporation. This is not ideal.)
As for jars, I like tiny ones, a cup at most, to keep things fresh in more ways than one. Screw-top lids, no hot water submersion trickery. Just boiled jars and lids and a handy jar funnel and some caution. After filling and closing, I stack my jars upside-down at first, then I flip them right-side-up while the contents are still hot. For years I’ve done this and never did a jar fail to seal, never did the contents go bad, never did anyone fall ill. Mine are not high-sugar jams as far as jam making goes, but by definition they are sugar-preserved products. If I were to can stews, soups, or sauces, which I don’t, I would follow the safety protocols I now eschew.
I like the idea of making preserves at home and reaching for a jar of my own throughout the year. I used to think this was thrift and prudence, but it isn’t: if I were to charge myself even at half my hourly rate for the time I spend making jam, I would have to concede that I make a prohibitively expensive one—and that’s even before calculating in the cost of ingredients. In fact, years ago, it occurred to me that in the time and place my life occupies, the making of jam is a bit showy in ways that are the opposite of what they seem. Not an act of going without (the convenience and quality of store-bought jam made by professionals), but instead a chance to brag. Look at what I happen to know how to do. And, more importantly, look at the free time I possess, with which I can decadently play around in the kitchen.
Last year I made nearly no jam at all. It felt like a carefree departure from a ritual that I had perhaps gotten a bit to rigid about. And then, once winter rolled around, I felt I had missed my summertime opportunity to tend to my eventual breakfast table. All those jams I imagined I would buy—I didn’t. Cardamom in plums and bourbon in blueberries, this was not for me. A year wiser, I am prudently putting up a small jar or two every now and again. The strawberry window is a long one, so is the one for raspberries. But blackcurrants? Blackberries? Apricots? I’m vowing to stay alert.