Jam Session

I am the only person I know--or probably anybody knows--who can look at her calendar and realize with a devastating shock, she's arranged the next two months in such a way that she is going to miss strawberry season. All four fresh-from-the-farm strawberry weeks, for the first time in 38 years. This means a whole year without strawberry jam. Who can live like that?

I am the only person I know--or anybody would want to know--who can get so distressed about this, she stops everything, and I mean a heaping amount of everything: 1 job, 2 books and charity-- and runs to the next available San Francisco farmers' market to buy 6 pints of strawberries so she can make jam. I spent Mother's Day deliberating resting by doing only what I wanted to do, and that included spending an hour making strawberry jam. Frankly, there is something very old-fashioned and wholesomely mothery about stirring those berries into delight. I felt so much better with six nicely labeled jars good to go. (Thirty eight years have taught me that 1 pint makes 1 pint jar of unadulterated jam.)

The big whew! is that everybody's favorite jam seems to be strawberry. I suspect that's why my friends expect me to hand or send them a jar and my house guests wait anxiously at breakfast. This has been going on for three decades now, so their expectations are well trained. One childhood friend actually bought a bread machine to make toast worthy of it, or so she said.

People always say they like my jam because the freshness of the fruit comes as a delectable surprise. They can really taste it. This is because commercial processing requires mega mega doses of sugar and my body cannot tolerate sugar. Since I started by making jam for myself, I had to do it avoiding sugar if possible, so by experimentation I learned to get by with the least I could get away with and still have its preserving effect. I started adding fresh lime juice whose acid not only kills whatever bacteria hinders the preserving, but also, or at least I think, brightens and thus heightens the zing in fruit. Of course, once opened my homemade jam doesn't last as eternally the chemically botoxed commercial stuff does, but then people don't care because they seem to gobble it up pretty fast.

It makes people happy to not worry about high fructose corn syrup, mysterious natural flavors, or chemical pectin, which the canning jar people recommend because they profit from selling it. So I am a good Buddhist who offers a little less mental suffering by offering nothing but farm fresh strawberries, fresh lime juice, a touch of sugars white and brown, a splash of rose water sometimes and pinches of cinnamon and nutmeg. I let the jam thicken naturally as it cooks. This takes a little longer but...so? We're talking 15 minutes. People who've watched me make a batch can't get over how easy it really is. I think I've taught a half dozen eager children by now, hoping the tradition lingers.

What a great gift a neatly labeled jar of homemade jam makes. I hand somebody one and they trip all over themselves thanking me. It seems so special. I give it to make people feel special. The woman who works on my hair says it's her favorite tip because she gets to share it with her three-year-old daughter. This kind of honest, handmade food sends a message that you care, and aren't afraid to show it. The message stirred into jam is old fashioned unabashed love.

So how could someone who just wrote two food books encouraging people to relearn the beautiful basics of food because their bodies and the minds depend on it, not stop everything to make strawberry jam? How could she let a year go by without it? Especially when people seem to love me very much for offering it to them-- even a small 1/2 pint jar. It's actually been my experience that in our overly manufactured, manicured and manipulated society, a jar of strawberry jam brings more joy to the world, more peace, and more good will back at you than all the travels and travails of my contemporary Hillary Clinton who once rather infamously snapped: "Do you really expect me to stay home and bake cookies?"