Cherries

Up into the cherry tree
Who should climb but little me?
I held the trunk with both my hands
And looked abroad on foreign lands.
--Robert Louis Stevenson

On my way to pick the cherries, I came across (literally) this snake. I stepped over him before I saw him. I guess he was on his way to get the birds that get the cherries. It was lying so still that I think I thought it was a stick at first. Then I thought it was dead. But it was merely sunning itself in a very relaxed way in the driveway.

The cherry tree is in a neighbor's yard. They let me pick all I want, and sometimes they help me. The cherries are sour cherries; the sweet ones don't grow easily here.

I made a cherry-berry jam, with about half berries (blackberries and strawberries) and half sour cherries. I cooked it for about two hours before it gelled. My new jam recipe is: 2 quarts fruit and 2 cups of sugar, cook a long time slowly on low (about 2 hours); insert candy thermometer. When it gets to 208 degrees, it's probably done. Check by putting some on a cold plate and see if it gells.

This new recipe is liberating: you can make jam with pretty much anything you have. The original recipe was for 2 quarts of strawberries, but it seemed to work fine with other berries and cherries. It's not as sweet as the recipe in the Ball Blue Book or the Joy of Cooking, which is a good thing. The flavor is very intense, like "essence of strawberry" or "essence of cherry." Also, because you cook it a long time, the berries cook down a lot: 2 quarts of fruit makes 2 pints of jam, approximately, but sometimes less.

Marmalade this time

I saw my neighbor, Joe, the other day, feeding oranges to his cows. He was cutting the oranges up with a knife, having brought them from his place down in Florida. Some of the oranges were in pretty good shape, really, so he gave me about a dozen. This was just enough to make the marmalade recipe in The Ball Blue Book.

I found out, reading The Ball Blue Book, that marmalade is any jam that has citrus peels in it. So it can be made with grapefruit peels and lemon peels as well as orange peels, and it can have other kinds of fruit in it.

It took longer than I expected to cook the marmalade down to the gelling point: about 40 minutes. But the results were pretty and delicious. I gave some to my neighbor so he would keep bringing me citrus from Florida.

My second attempt at strawberry jam resulted in jam that was a little too stiff, especially after refrigeration. I cooked it too long, and the temperature got too high. So I gently warmed it again with a little added water, and voila: perfect jam again.

Strawberry Jam

I bought strawberries at the farmer's market today, and I made some jam. I had some strawberries in my own garden, but I eat them as I pick them, and there are never enough left to make jam. (The ones I bought at the farmer's market didn't taste quite as good as the ones in my garden, but they weren't sprayed.)

I found a lot of different recipes for strawberry jam. Some call for added pectin and some don't. The Joy of Cooking says that jams taste better if you cook them down to the jelling point the old-fashioned way with no added pectin; they say that pectin requires extra sugar, too. But the recipes in the Ball Blue Book that use pectin don't seem to use as much sugar per cup of berries as the recipe in The Joy of Cooking. So, what's a mother to do?

I decided to try The Joy of Cooking recipe first. It calls for a quart of berries and four cups of sugar. You bring that to a boil over low heat; then you boil it without stirring for 15 minutes. Weirdly, you then allow the jam to cool before putting it in the jars. The Joy of Cooking (1975 edition) does not call for processing in a boiling water bath.

I did boil the mixture for fifteen minutes, and I stirred in the juice of half a lemon, but then I immediately poured it hot into the jars, as I wanted to process them for fifteen minutes. I don't know how the jars would seal if you poured cool jam into a jar and then simply capped it.

The jam did set up. The strawberries are floating at the top, but in the past when I made preserves, ingredients that floated later sank into the liquid. So that will probably happen this time too.

Next, I'm going to try a recipe I found on this youtube video:


It calls for a lot less sugar than the Joy of Cooking recipe.

I also made mint jelly, but I'm not sure yet whether that worked or not.