We Jammin'

“The rule is jam to-morrow and jam yesterday but never jam today.”
The White Queen, Alice in Wonderland

Jam is so cool. I love jam. I love to open a jar of apricot jam and enjoy a too large dollop of it atop my levain toast spread with sweet butter. Sadly, after I put the jar back in the fridge, I tend to forget all about it. It’s sad because jams are so intensely flavorful and so very much the essence of the fruit that I’m really missing out on one of the glories of the breakfast table. And I’m not kidding about the missing out: my breakfast is natto on nori (fermented soybeans on seaweed sheets—kinda like beans on toast, Japanese style). Despite my rather suspect bonafides with regard to jam-eating, I was invited back to the kitchen with Cardinal Baker Nicola and Chef Beatrice on Friday. They had decided to take advantage of the perfect June strawberries offered by Nancy at Middleton Farms (Healdsburg, CA) and make jam.

“Make jam.” Sounds so quaint, so easy. In the old days, they used to say “put up.” I think that is a more apt term for all that jam-making entails. Nicola first bought pints and pints of berries. (At least I think she did. Do I measure? No. So details like this escape me.) Then she bought cute mini-mold Weck jars, the glass and rubber gasket kind with the strawberry stamped into the lid. Mind you, they HAD to be Weck jars. Remember, this is the woman who will not give me any of her recipes because I do not follow the letter of the law. I didn’t know her commandments extended to glassware as well but at least she's consistent. I do admit the jars were cute and jam is a cute food, so it works. Then she spent all evening stemming, hulling and macerating the strawberries. By Friday morning, she was anxious to put them up.

We arrived at Chef Beatrice's midday. Just as she had done with the shortcake trials, Chef Beatrice had the multiple cookbooks out—Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc, Alice Waters Chez Panisse Fruit and some English cookbook from the 70s or 80s; the computer was opened to a site dedicated to trouble-shooting canning problems. This, of course, made me envision the canning version of the Geek Squad--those guys who travel around in their little black and white VW bugs providing computer support: the Out of a Jam Team (or the Pickling Posse) would arrive in a gingham painted Honda Element, brandishing candy thermometers and botulism pamphlets to help you get to the… Jellying Point!

Little did I know that we might need such a team. Beatrice and Nicola chose a strawberry jelly recipe from this obscure English cookbook. It promised a clear, jewel-like jelly with the fruit tantalizingly suspended. The comrades in cuisine were practically in a reverie, entranced by the idea of holding the jelly-filled jars up to the streaming sunlight and seeing a cranberry-colored Chartres pectin window dotted here and there with a perfect, barely cooked berry. They cooked the berry juice to a syrup, removing and reintroducing the whole berries (in order to quickly remove the berries’ moisture and allow each berry to retain its shape). The time came to bring the jelly to 105 degrees Celsius. 10 minutes later, the candy thermometer still registered 98 degrees. Another 10 minutes and no mercury movement. More time passed, and with each degree of centigrade unmet, the comrades’ hopes began to fall: the color of the jelly turned as the winedark sea. (Or a glass of Zinfandel if you haven’t read The Odyssey lately.) Cardinal Baker Nicola turned up the heat but quickly turned it down again as foam formed on the top, threatening the clarity of the syrup. Nicole began to frown and pace but tried to show that all was under control. After all, she had made many jars of jam. Chef Beatrice turned to the computer looking for answers, and then she re-read the recipe. “Rapidly boil. We need to rapidly boil!” It was like the ER surgeon realizing what would save the trauma patient. The heat went to high. The syrup boiled vigorously and—hallelujah--came to the jellying point. As the jelly rested for the requisite 10 minutes, we retired to the living room, Nicola's and Beatrice's frayed nerves calling out for a glass of wine. But the jam was not done.

Back into the kitchen we went to put the hot jelly into the sterilized, hot-out-of-the-oven jars. The jelly was clear but dark, dark like oxblood, with the berries clustering like platelets. I thought the jars were beautiful but the comrades were not pleased. The jelly didn’t look like how they imagined it. Uh, but how does it taste? We each dragged a finger across the sticky puddle left in the pot. “Too sweet,” Beatrice announced. “Like a Popsicle,” Nicole offered. Not what they were going for. Beatrice made notes in the margins of the recipe and both Beatrice and Nicole thought the recipe, by not indicating that the syrup must be boiled rapidly, had let them down. The author had let them down, and she would not have their trust so easily the next time. “Next time we make the apricot jam,” Beatrice announced in her get-back-on-the-horse fashion. “But we’ll use another cookbook.”

And, so, it came to be that it was jam tomorrow but never jam today.