When the “U-Pick” signs start to sprout at our local orchards and farms, and canning supplies are massed in the supermarket aisles, the urge to make jam comes upon me. But so does the urge to remain in the hammock, reading. So I was delighted when I came upon an essay by Mary McCarthy, in which she claims, “You can learn how to make strawberry jam from Anna Karenina.” Here was an opportunity to do some literary browsing in the interests of honing my skills, while remaining comfortably horizontal.
McCarthy isn’t suggesting that Tolstoy had actually included a recipe in his classic work, as do many of today’s authors, especially mystery writers. Rather, she is celebrating the richly detailed, factual descriptions that she believed to be a hallmark of the great novels of the past. As I found, however, her claim is a bit of an exaggeration. Anna Karenina will not serve you well as a cookbook. Nor will the jam-making scenes I tracked down in a couple of other 19th-century novels. What’s more, these fictional portrayals of fruit preserving uniformly present a rather negative view of that wonderful summertime activity.
The jam-making scene in Anna Karenina takes place in the sphere of the novel that centers on Konstantin Levin, the idealistic owner of a country estate trying to make it on the land. It is summer, and Levin and his pregnant, young bride, Kitty, have been joined on the estate by her sister, Dolly, and their mother, the Princess Shcherbatskaya. These city-bred noblewomen are determined to introduce into the Levin household their own method of jam making, which eschews the use of water. Levin’s lifelong servant, the peasant Agafya Mikhailovna, who gets to do the work, is resisting—she’s always used water, so why mess with the tried and true?—and has already engaged in sabotage by sneaking water into the strawberry jam. To avoid this happening with the raspberries, the Shcherbatsky women have gathered on the terrace to oversee the process. The ladies try to be tactful, pretending to be absorbed with knitting and chat, and complimenting Agafya Mikhailovna on her pickles, but it’s clear that this is a battle of wills, with the princess issuing periodic instructions while the peasant woman silently fumes, praying that the jam will burn.
The depiction of the actual making of the jam is too sketchy to serve as a recipe. We learn that you have to move the pan of fruit over a brazier, that the foam has to be skimmed from the surface, that the jam is ready when it leaves a tail when poured from a spoon. But important details about ingredients (how much sugar?) and techniques are missing.
Worse, no one seems to be having a good time. There’s very little description of the sensual rewards of the process—the smells, the colors, the taste; no mention of a sense of achievement or satisfaction in the result. We don’t even learn how the waterless jam turns out. Compare this with the famous scene in which Levin spends a day reaping hay, another skill McCarthy claims you can learn from this novel. While it, too, fails as a how-to guide, it is thrilling in its depiction of how Levin is brought to a state of near rapture by his harmony with the peasants, the beauty of the fields, and the hypnotizing effect of his rhythmic toil. It makes you want to snatch up a scythe and head to the nearest meadow. The jam scene makes you want to stick to Smuckers.
You won’t get any rosier a picture in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, that other famous tale of an unhappy adulteress. When Emma Bovary returns home to Yonville after a brief escape in the big city, she finds her claustrophobic, provincial town suffused with a pinkish steam emanating from piles of currants cooking on every corner. It is jam-making time and, as you might expect of a place marked by stultifying conformity, the townspeople all make their jam on the same day.
In the household of the pharmacist Monsieur Homais, Emma comes upon a chaotic and somewhat comical scene of large-scale food processing gone amok. Furniture has been overturned, pans have overflowed, and the pompous apothecary is having a temper tantrum because his servant has fetched an extra pan from a room where the medical supplies are stored. From his ranting, Emma learns where the arsenic is kept—a bit of information that comes in handy when she later decides to do herself in. So the jam making here proves, albeit indirectly, to be the death of Emma!
Granted, Tolstoy and Flaubert were more concerned with character and plot development than in teaching their readers to cook. It’s also fair to assume that they had no personal experience of the preserving process, and so couldn’t appreciate its rewards. But what of our women writers? George Sand is said by her biographer to have adored making jam, but I’m not aware that this was reflected in any of her novels. And it is interesting that even Louisa May Alcott in Little Women takes a break from championing domestic pursuits to serve up a scene of fruit preserving as a comical disaster.
In an episode worthy of “I Love Lucy,” the newly-wed Meg, striving to become the perfect little housewife, decides to make jelly from her homegrown currants. After a day of exhausting labor, the fruit has refused to jell, and Meg ends up sobbing in the kitchen, amidst multiple batches of fruit in various stages of boiling, burning, and dripping. Then her husband, outdoing even Ricky Ricardo, comes home with an unexpected guest in tow, chuckles at the mess and her tears, and asks that she serve them dinner! Not a pretty picture.
So if you want to make jam or jelly you’d be better off seeking out a good cookbook than a novel. And please, don’t let these grim fictional portrayals discourage you from engaging in one of summertime’s most gratifying experiences. Just as wood is said to warm you twice—first, when you cut it, the second time, when you burn it—so can jam and jelly delight the senses not only when you eat them, but when you make them. The aroma of the cooking fruit, the jewel-like colors, the magical moment of transformation—the “jelling”—and the gratification of seeing the fruits of your labors tucked away—these rival the considerable pleasure you will have from the actual eating of your homemade preserves.
You can even add even another layer of pleasure by picking your own fruit. As in those old recipes that start “First, catch the chicken,” you have to first pick your fruit. And you owe it to yourself to do it yourself, in the many fantastic farms and orchards of the Hudson Valley. Not only will you get the best and freshest fruit, you will have a wonderful time. Lodged forever in my memory is a magical day I spent with friends picking sour cherries in a Columbia County orchard. It was a transporting experience to plunge into the trees, reaching for the neon-red fruit glowing against a bright blue sky, surrounded by spectacular views of the mountains and valleys.
Before you tackle a specific recipe, here are some helpful general hints.
Jam and jelly
Jams and jellies are both made from fruit and sugar. Jam is made with the flesh of the fruit, chopped or crushed into various degrees of chunkiness, so that in the final product bits of fruit are dispersed throughout a soft jell. Jelly is made just with the juice of the fruit, with the fruit pulp strained out, so that the final product is a clear jell, usually somewhat stiffer than jam. (From whence come the lyrics of that great jazz and blues favorite, “It Must Be Jelly [Cause Jam Don’t Shake Like That],” which describe the effect of certain movements on certain anatomical parts.)
Pectin and jelling
There is a kernel of truth to the portrayal of fruit preserving as a technically difficult process. A lot of it has to do with what the poet Elma Mitchell called the “terrible chemistry of … [the] kitchen,” specifically, the vagaries of pectin, the substances that turns the sugared juice into a jell. Pectin is a kind of carbohydrate found in all fruits and vegetables, where it helps to maintain the structure of the cell walls. When fruit is cooked, the pectin is liberated from the cells, causing the fruit to soften, and the juices to emerge. To get the juices and sugar to jell, the pectin molecules need to reassemble in the liquid. The reassembling process is helped along by heating, stirring, and by the chemical effects of sugar and acid. Lots of things can prevent proper jelling, including overcooking (what probably happened to Meg in Little Women) or insufficient amounts of sugar or acid.
One way to deal with this is to add commercial pectins, extracted from fruit, which come in both powdered and liquid forms. When I first started making jam, the only such available products had additives that I wanted to avoid, and the directions called for much larger proportions of sugar than traditional recipes without added pectins. So I did without the added pectin, relying on the pectin naturally in the fruit, and haven’t found any reason to change my ways. I’m willing to risk a less-than-fully-jelled product, since I actually prefer a runny, relaxed jam to the stiffer kind. And if it doesn’t jell at all, I call it syrup or sauce and get on with it.
But I won’t be like the Shcherbatskys and insist you do it my way. By all means, add commercial pectin if you prefer, especially since you can now find purer, even organic, pectins on the market, and some don’t even require sugar at all. If you use these, follow the recipes and directions that come with them, which stipulate the amounts you need for optimum results.
If you choose to proceed the old-fashioned way, without added pectin, be aware that some fruits are higher in natural pectin than others, and are more likely to turn out well. These include berries, sour cherries, apples, and citrus. Unripe fruit is higher in pectin than fully ripe fruit, so when you pick or select fruit, try to include some that isn’t fully ripe.
How to tell if your cooking fruit has jelled? Princess S. said you’ll know it has if it leaves a “tail” when poured from a spoon. We call this “sheeting.” When you dip a metal spoon into the jam or jelly, and let it drip off, the droplets that fall from either side of the spoon will coalesce in the middle and form a sheet. Another method is to periodically put a dab of the cooking liquid on a plate, where it can cool quickly, and you can assess its texture at room temperature (jam thickens as it cools).
Sterilizing and sealing
The origin of fruit preserves lies in the discovery that cooking fruit in sugar is a way to stave off rot and keep it edible for months, even years, past the time it came off the tree or vine. That both the sugar and the fruit are transformed into something wonderfully greater than their individual selves is a bonus. While the sugar and the acid both help to make the fruit inhospitable to harmful microorganisms, you need to take some additional measures to fend off spoilage if you’re keeping the preserves for any significant period of time. First, you must sterilize the jars (and their lids) into which you’ll pour the jam or jelly by covering them with water and bringing it to a boil. Leave jars and lids in the hot water until they are needed.
To keep it for more than a couple of weeks longer, you’ll need to take further measures. You can simply put the filled jars in the refrigerator and rely on the cold to keep them. (I was surprised to read in Anna Karenina that Agafya was used to keeping her stuff on ice, which seems to have been available in Russia even into the summer.) This is a good solution if you make a smallish batch of preserves and/or have lots of room in your refrigerator. In fact, making only small amounts of jam or jelly is a good solution for reducing the general level of effort entailed in a somewhat arduous process. After all, unlike our forebears, most of us are not relying on our own jam to provide us with food through the winter. And in these carbophobic times, you may not want huge quantities around.
If, however, you’re looking forward to stocking your pantry, or just don’t want to crowd your fridge, you need to provide some kind of air-tight barrier to protect the surface of the fruit from contamination while it sits at room temperature. The old-fashioned way is to pour a layer of paraffin onto the surface of the fruit. Or, as Princess S. instructed Agafya, if you place a piece of rum-soaked paper on top of the jam, you can do without ice. Today, there are special canning-jar lids that automatically form a vacuum seal as the contents of the jar cool. I prefer these; I like to hear the tops go ping! when the seal is formed. Follow the directions on the package.
Whatever your choices—added pectin or not, refrigerator or pantry, paraffin or pop-top lids—you will not regret making your own jam. So do not be deterred by Agafya’s resentment, Meg’s tears, or Emma’s fatal discovery. It may take some effort, but it will be worth it. And when you open those jars on a cold, gray, winter day, you will be transported back to that summer afternoon you made it, with all of its colors, tastes, and smells, and the satisfaction of a job well done.
This article appears in July 2007.
