Cooking My Past
My grandmother had a plum tree, several apricot trees and about a zillion rose bushes. Every year, it seemed that the apricots all ripened at the same time, and my mother would drag us all over to grandma's house for a weekend of jam making. As kids, our job was picking and pitting. My older brother chopped and my mother and grandmother did the actual canning of the jam.
Apricot jam was the staple of our house. Being of a frugal nature, my grandmother did not let a single apricot from any of her trees languish on the branch or rot on the ground (she kept a tidy yard, did Grandma Peg). In fact, it was nearly the only jam I tasted in my childhood. Grape and strawberry, the glistening purple and red jewels of the grocery store, were rare treats at our house. Rarer still was plum jam. Unlike the unrelieved sweetness of apricot, strawberry or grape, plum jam makes use of the very tart, less ripe fruit. The skin is still very tart and tangy and lends a little frisson to every bite.
I also realized why it was so rare. Plum jam is also the only jam I've made that requires you to cook the fruit first before making it into jam. Pitting apricots is literally child's play (okay, child's drudgery, but you know what I mean) compared to sitting with a large, overfull basket of washed plums and a four-inch paring knife and systematically relieving about 40 pounds of plums of their pits and stems. If there's such a thing as plum-pitter's thumbs, I've got them. The attraction of just letting the kids eat them is awfully strong. But my sense of nostalgia is stronger.
The one smart thing I did was to use the food grinding attachment for my KitchenAid to chop the things. It meant that in about 20 minutes, I had finely chopped all the plums into two enormous bowls, ready for jam.
At the end of it all, I have 2 dozen pint jars and 13 half pint jars (that's 15 quarts + 1 cup) full of the flavor of my youth. It's already set up nicely, and is a beautiful rosy pink, just like I remember. I cut open a fresh loaf of sourdough and toasted the heel (my favorite part of the bread) and spread it thick with the fresh jam.
Ahhhhh. In my mouth, I'm young again.
Apricot jam was the staple of our house. Being of a frugal nature, my grandmother did not let a single apricot from any of her trees languish on the branch or rot on the ground (she kept a tidy yard, did Grandma Peg). In fact, it was nearly the only jam I tasted in my childhood. Grape and strawberry, the glistening purple and red jewels of the grocery store, were rare treats at our house. Rarer still was plum jam. Unlike the unrelieved sweetness of apricot, strawberry or grape, plum jam makes use of the very tart, less ripe fruit. The skin is still very tart and tangy and lends a little frisson to every bite.
I also realized why it was so rare. Plum jam is also the only jam I've made that requires you to cook the fruit first before making it into jam. Pitting apricots is literally child's play (okay, child's drudgery, but you know what I mean) compared to sitting with a large, overfull basket of washed plums and a four-inch paring knife and systematically relieving about 40 pounds of plums of their pits and stems. If there's such a thing as plum-pitter's thumbs, I've got them. The attraction of just letting the kids eat them is awfully strong. But my sense of nostalgia is stronger.
The one smart thing I did was to use the food grinding attachment for my KitchenAid to chop the things. It meant that in about 20 minutes, I had finely chopped all the plums into two enormous bowls, ready for jam.
At the end of it all, I have 2 dozen pint jars and 13 half pint jars (that's 15 quarts + 1 cup) full of the flavor of my youth. It's already set up nicely, and is a beautiful rosy pink, just like I remember. I cut open a fresh loaf of sourdough and toasted the heel (my favorite part of the bread) and spread it thick with the fresh jam.
Ahhhhh. In my mouth, I'm young again.
posted by Aoibheall | 9:54 PM
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