For as far back as I can remember, every summer I used to help my mother make strawberry jam. Taking the greenery off was always my least favorite part of the job, even with the nifty little tool to do it with, and stirring was always my favorite part. No, I lie - my favorite part was eating the first piece of bread with fresh strawberry jam on it.
This was freezer jam so there was no cooking it, and while it always seemed like a long production to me, I now know that it takes a half hour from start to finish, including boiling the mason jars to clean them.
We did this every summer and that jam was the only jam we ever had in the house. It went on toast, it went on pancakes, it went in peanut butter and jam sandwiches and I guess I kind of took it for granted.
One year, I think I was about fourteen, we ran out of jam in May. Strawberry season doesn't begin this side of the 49th parallel until mid-June if you're lucky, close to July if you're not. So we had at least a month to go before we would be making jam. So a jar of strawberry jam was bought. Now I knew why my mother made jam every summer. It wasn't to save money, it wasn't because it was tradition, it wasn't for any reason other than homemade strawberry freezer jam tastes so much better than store bought jam. Like by a thousand degrees. Homemade strawberry jam is bright and tastes like you've just crushed a fresh strawberry. Store bought jam hardly even tastes like actual strawberries, it is mostly just sweet and red.
We gave up on having jam with our toast and our pancakes. We no longer had peanut butter and jam sandwiches. At least until the end of June when we gathered in the kitchen and made another batch of strawberry jam. I do believe that bottle of store bought strawberry jam sat in the fridge until my mom finally threw it in the garbage despite her horror at wasting food. Yes, I heard "there's children starving in Africa" more than once when I didn't want to finish my supper, so throwing food out was a big deal in my house.
I still won't eat store bought strawberry jam, and I still try to make my own strawberry freezer jam every year. Like I did this morning.
Now I have to go because there is a piece of toast with fresh-made jam, with my name on it!
Sean
smut fixes everything (and homemade strawberry jam helps a lot of things, too!)
