Guest Blog

Making Jam
By Patricia Crisafulli

It started in June with the first of the berries and lasted until the start of autumn when the pears ripened. All summer we picked and gathered; hulled, peeled, quartered, chopped, cooked, and canned. The fruits of our labor lined the wooden shelves in the unfinished basement, which we called the cellar, in my parents’ home in northern New York State: a long, deep row each of peaches and pears, and twice as many of stewed tomatoes. On the next set of shelves along the cement-block walls were the relishes, pickles, and jar after jar of jams and jellies capped with paraffin.

At the end of each batch, Mother would say the same thing. “This is going to taste mighty good in the middle of a long, cold winter.”

She canned and preserved not so much out of necessity, as habit. Then again, that’s what people did back then in rural areas in the 1960s. The home and lifestyle pages of the newspapers printed recipes for dill pickles and corn relish. Boxes of Mason jars were stacked in displays in the grocery store.

My two sisters and I never questioned it either. When Mother announced we were going strawberry, blueberry, or blackberry picking, that’s what we did. Summer after summer had taught us the drill. The picking was the hard part; our baskets never seemed to get full. Of course the ones that ended up in our stomachs didn’t help. Eventually, we’d be done: our fingers and the old clothes we wore stained with berry juice; our faces and bodies sweaty and dusty.

The real work came next, but I never minded this part as much. If we were making strawberry jam, we had to wash and hull the berries first and put them in a big kettle with sugar, to be cooked down to a pulp of the right consistency. Pectin was added for thickener, and finally—at the right moment—the sweet, sticky concoction was ladled into jars to be sealed with paraffin. It used to take all day, from picking first thing in the morning to the rows of jam that lined the kitchen counter in the evening. I don’t think we waited a day, although perhaps we did. Sadly, that’s one of the many small details I don’t remember so clearly anymore.

I haven’t made jam or pickles in many years; not since I moved away at age 21, although Mother kept it up until she died when I was 26. Her recipes written down in an old hard-covered Composition notebook with a black-and-white speckled cover are probably somewhere, but I don’t think any of us three sisters have followed them in quite a while. I know I never did; certainly not in a studio apartment in New York City or even in my home with a big kitchen and a finished basement outside Chicago. Having grown up with that legacy, I feel ashamed to admit that I buy my produce at the store, and the closest I get to a garden is the farmer’s market.

WhatI never fully understood in those days was that we were doing more than making jam and canning pickles. As we worked together, side-by-side, mother passed down to us girls her knowledge of taking care of a home and family, the way she knew best. None of us could see how different all of our lives would be; where choices and circumstances would take us, and the fact that—heaven forbid!—some of us would resort to store-bought jam later in life.

All we knew was that, week after week, the jars that had been emptied and the contents consumed over the previous months, were brought up from the basement, washed in scalding water, and then filled with whatever bounty we had just picked and cooked. Then down the jars would go: rows of gold and red and deep purple—a whole summer captured for the winter ahead.

We didn’t understand that at the time, and wouldn’t grasp it for many years until Mother was gone. It wasn’t in the recipe, but looking back, each one was sealed with love. The taste was unmistakable.

Patricia Crisafulli is a writer and published author who lives in suburban Chicago. She is the founder of www.FaithHopeandFiction.com, a free monthly e-literary magazine.