Jam

Today marked our first adventure in making jam, and as I was thinking about what to write about tonight, it seemed an appropriate topic.

However, as I typed the word "jam" in the title, another meaning of jam hit me. A concert or show. And then the other meaning, traffic jam.

That got me curious about the actual definition of jam. According to Google, it is quite simply to "squeeze or pack (someone or something) tightly into a specified space."

So, for once, a word used in multiple contexts seems to have a logical, transcendent term.

The word "jam" as in concert or show took me to a video-conference I had this morning with the Hip-Hop Education Think Tank's "Def" committee. And the idea of transcendence in meanings seems to make sense in that context, as well. We are striving to squeeze or pack tightly the meaning of an entire consciousness and cultural way of life into about ten or fifteen definitions. We agreed in our video conference this morning that the terms needed to be able to be transparent and easily understood across all communities and groups of people who find value in hip-hop. In short, no one should have to go to a dictionary to understand what the terms are about.

Now, the making of jam. For us, it was strawberry rhubarb jam -- a freezer jam (which doesn't require pressure canning in a hot-water bath), as well as a standard jam. Afterwards, we used the leftover strawberries to create a strawberry rhubarb pie, and then realized that we still had enough rhubarb to make a rhubarb jam.

But it's not just strawberries and rhubarb. The tightly-packed thing that constitutes jam also requires some water, to soften and tenderize the rhubarb, a product called pectin (which essentially allows the cooked down fruit to congeal) and a fair amount of sweetener: three-quarters of a cup of honey in the case of the strawberry-rhubarb varieties, and a whopping five cups of sugar (for six cups of rhubarb) in the case of the rhubarb-only jam. In years past, that amount of sugar would have been enough to stop me in my tracks. Now, I realize that I probably will eat very little of this jam. Most of it will be appreciated by my sweets-loving husband.

I read Little Women as a youngster, and remember well Meg's ordeal of trying to get her jelly to gel. That late nineteenth century story and the mess in the kitchen that it provoked also deterred me for years from even beginning to believe I should ever try making such a thing. And, indeed, we did not make jelly, merely jam, which turned out to be a surprisingly easy process.

How does it work?

Well, like almost any cooking procedure that involves fresh produce, the biggest task is prepping the fruit. We used our super-whamodyne food processor to chop the rhubarb, but I sliced about six cups of strawberries singlehandedly. Since we ended up making three different kinds of jam and a pie, the slicing was relatively easy since I could do it in shifts.

The second biggest task is probably preparing the jars. If you're going to do it right (and there's a whole lore behind canning that gives you every reason to do it right), you need to sterilize the jars. That means gathering the jars, their metal rings, and their metal tops and boiling them all in a massive pot initially for about 10 minutes, and then letting sit in the pot of water to stay warm. My husband doesn't trust me with any kind of sterilization procedure so I left that thankless task to him.

For us, we faced a third task, which was converting our powdered pectin to liquid form for both of the strawberry-rhubarb jams we ended up making. Not having used pectin before and being indoctrinated by the lore of canning risks referred to earlier, we consulted recipes and canning tips carefully. One word of advice was to not substitute whatever type and amount of pectin the recipe called for with something else. One of our recipes called for liquid pectin and the other for powdered. We found the latter in three different varieties but not the former. Partly by accident, we ended up buying all three (like boxes of jello, pectin is cheap), figuring we could find a different strawberry rhubarb jam recipe, other than the one we had that called for liquid pectin.

We then discovered that you could turn powdered pectin into liquid through a fairly simple process of boiling the powder in a half-cup of water, then adding more water so that the substance came to one cup. We did this, and then realized that one of the three packages of powdered pectin that we purchased was an "instant" variety, useful for freezing but not necessarily for canning. That's why we ended up with one batch of freezer jam.

After these tasks are out of the way, however, the process flows fairly smoothly. You put the rhubarb in a pot with a little bit of water. You bring it to a boil, then simmer it down so it cooks itself tender. Then, in the case of the strawberry jam, you add the strawberries with two tablespoons of lemon juice, and then the 3/4 cup of honey. After the honey has dissolved, you bring the concoction to a boil and stir in the liquid pectin. Give it one minute of a hard boil, then turn off the heat. Start pulling jars out of the big pot in which they've been "sterilizing", dry them out with a clean towel, and ladle in the jam. Leave a quarter-inch at the top, press on a lid and seal with a metal ring. Put the jars back in the water, bring it back to a boil, and let them boil happily for about ten minutes. Remove them from the boiling water with tongs, and let them sit undisturbed for about 24 hours.

We probably spent three hours making 15 jars of jam, plus the pie (which, by the way, is sitting unbaked in the refrigerator overnight because neither of us could bear the idea of looking at either strawberries or rhubarb any more for the day). As mentioned earlier, I am not the world's biggest jam fan. But we began baking our own bread last winter, and in so doing, my husband began eating jam ravenously. We probably spend about $6 on a single jar and go through one jar every two weeks. Do the math and you see that the costs of jam can add up. For this project, we spent about $16 on strawberries (some of which were lunch snacks for me yesterday), $3 on sugar, $10 on pectin, and $24 on a half-gallon of honey. We have leftovers of everything, except the strawberries, and enough jam right at the start to last about six months. And an unbaked pie sitting in the refrigerator.

So, jam. Early summer squeezed into a preservable form to be enjoyed in the cold days of winter.