Jammin'

raspberry jam at the beginning of the process

I've got a pot of apricot-chili barbecue sauce bubbling on the stove. But as I don't yet know how it's going to turn out (I messed with the recipe), I'm not going to tell you about that right now. I have been meaning to tell you about jam, though, cunningly illustrated with photos from my last jammin' session (the kind on the stove, not with a guitar).

all of ONE jar of raspberry jam!

The event in question involved raspberries and black currants, both from our garden. Well, the currants are strictly speaking from the neighbour's garden, but they hang over the fence, and the neighbours are glad if we clean off our side of the bushes. The raspberries are genuinely from our garden, planted just three years ago. The bushes grew quite nice and big, but unfortunately, they got shorted on water while they were fruiting this year, so the berries were for the most part too tiny to pick. Ah well. I did get half a pound (200g) of berries off the bushes (ooh, aah!), and turned them into jam. That's right. It made precisely one jar, and I hope it's tasty (I also hope to buy some more raspberries at the farmer's market, if there's any left, and make more of the stuff, as it's popular around here).

Raspberry jam is one of the easiest jams to make. The biggest amount of labour is in picking the berries, actually - once that's done, you just wash them, dump them in the pot with sugar, boil, and you're done. To be specific: I make my jam by weight, European style. Five parts berries, four parts sugar, so 1kg of berries to 800g of sugar, or, in this year's case, 200g berries to 160g sugar. For jam, I never use commercial pectin, it works quite well without, and I like the taste much better that way (jelly is a different matter; I have yet to manage a jelly without pectin. I might try it with the concord grapes this fall.).

a rolling boil

The basic jammin' technique is as follows: put the berries in the pot with the sugar, stir. Start boiling on high heat (jam always runs on high heat, never turn it down), stir a lot. Bring to a rolling boil, which means it boils so hard you can't stir it down (see picture). A rolling boil rises really high in the pot, to about twice the height of the original mix, so leave lots of room in the pot. Boil for a while (it varies according to recipe - for raspberries, just a few minutes; strawberries and peaches, more like fifteen minutes). Skim off the foam and put in a cup; it's really tasty on toast. Take pot off burner. Immediately ladle jam into scrupulously clean containers. With jam, I don't bother either sterilising the jars, or hot-water-bath processing them; jam is preserved by its sugar content, not a vacuum seal like other canned produce. I do use the screw rings with the metal lids (which I boil in hot water) and put them on immediately; the heat from the jam is usually enough to seal the lid to keep dust, bugs and air out (the latter will dry the jam out, which isn't so lovely). But you could even just tie some waxed paper or cellophane over the top; it just wouldn't keep as long as in properly airtight jars because the top of the jam will dry out eventually. (As far as keeping quality goes, this kind of jam in well-closed containers could literally last for several years on a cool dark basement shelf. It's best in the first year, and generally it gets eaten long before then, but, you know, just sayin'.)

jelly test (see the drip?)

One more thing: with many jams and jellies, you know they're boiled enough when you can do the jelly test, i.e. when a drop of jelly running off the spoon sort of hangs together (see picture). With raspberry, that's not the case; it'll be completely runny when you put it in the jars, but as soon as it cools it sets up nice and firm-ish. As I said, it's the easiest jam to make - no pitting, peeling, stemming or other fussing with the fruit, and it pretty much always turns out. Well, so far it did for me.

black currant skimmings

The black currant jam needed a bit of a different technique, and it didn't turn out terribly well this year - too runny. But still very tasty. I use the recipe from Marguerite Patten's book Step by Step Cookery (it's Brits, from 1963, quite amusing). It calls for 1 lb. black currants, 3/4 pint water, and 1 1/4 lb. sugar;  you boil the fruit and water first until the currants are soft, and then proceed as above. As I said, mine turned out a bit too runny this year; it should be really great on pancakes.

Life, the Universe, and This Year's Jammin'. Come on over and try some.

the completed glory

Stacks of Austen and Some Jam

I went to the university library yesterday because I had some holds in. Even though I'm taking my degree through a distance ed university, I get to use the library of the local uni. That deal is called COPPUL, the Consortium Of Pacific and Prairie Libraries; they have an agreement to let each others' students use their libraries. So I get to take out whatever I want - and boy, do I ever!

I've always said that the library is the one place you can impulse-shop with impunity. Whatever catches your eye and strikes your fancy, grab it and take it home. The worst thing that could happen is that you forget to renew it and get hit with overdue fines, or perhaps that you spill your tea over the book and have to pay for it. But in the latter case, you usually get to keep the book, so if you liked it enough to take home, you might not mind owning a copy, albeit a somewhat tea-stained one.

So I had five holds in yesterday - and I walked out of that library with twenty-seven books altogether. Ahem. Well, they made me take them out! C'mon, wouldn't you grab a copy of Jane Austen's letters, or James Edward Austen-Leigh's memoir of his aunt Jane, or Jane Austen on Screen (with a lovely picture on the cover of Kate Winslet smiling winsomely at Allan Rickman)? You wouldn't? How strange. Well, I did.

The thing is that there's a real head rush about browsing the stacks in the library, something that only real bookworms understand. Collecting books with shameless abandon, and only stopping because you can't carry any more - I haven't done that in quite a long time. In fact, it was having a job at the library that made me stop doing that. When you work in the place, you don't browse the stacks any more. You take out what comes across the desk, and what you've ordered in because you found it in the catalogue. And then when I quit my library job, I never did go back to browsing, at least not in the public library. But now I'm doing it in the uni library, and it's lovely.

So am I actually going to read all twenty-seven of those books I took out? Nope, not on your life. I will flip through them, and pick out the bits that interest me and are useful for my paper. But there are some that'll be keepers. My favourite of this lot is The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries by Emma Thompson; I already have a copy on order through ABE books. I've always liked Emma Thompson, ever since I first saw her in that movie (she plays Elinor, as well as having written the screenplay), but reading her diaries of the filming, oh my. She's utterly hilarious. And after reading that, I'll be watching the movie with rather different eyes. For example, when she gets up from Marianne's bedside after her night's vigil and rubs her   stiff neck - that's for real. She really did have a sore neck that day, and put it to good use in her acting.

In other news, we got four pounds of raspberries off our bushes in the garden yesterday, which made me quite happy. I only planted those vines two years ago; they were hand-me-downs from when my sister-in-law was pulling out her raspberries. So this morning I made jam, eight jars worth of lovely ruby sweetness. And being afflicted these days with early-waking insomnia, I was up in time to get it done by 9:00 - that's a record, for me.

Life, the Universe, Browsing the Stacks and Raspberry Jam. The small pleasures of life.