Red Jam Day

When I was growing up we always ended up at Grandma's house for a week or two in the Summer. My mom's mother was a prodigious canner. She made all kinds of perserves. Living on a 40 acre peach farm in Western Colorado, there was a bounty of veggies and many fruit from the peaches and the cherries and a couple of old gnarly plum trees.

It was always my job, along with my sister's, to pick the Santa Rosa plums for canning and jam making. It was kind of a layed back thing since the trees were pretty tall and the fruit was scattered. Its only care was the feeding from the chicken yard that it sat over. Little water, no pruning and they just grew.

At any rate, jam was made and so was jelly from the fruit of these trees. Although the prized jam came from the sour Damsen tree down by the canal.

So all summer long the major sweetness on the table was this plum jam and jelly. I really didn't like it so much then. It was always the same flavor.

Fast forward from the 12 year old kid to the 59 year old man. I have a plum tree that was a sport off the Santa Rosa plum. It was a remarkable plum in that it produced beautiful plums with wonderful flavor two to three weeks earlier than the Santa Rosa. My friend who had the sport, patented the tree and named it. When production began to make many more of these for sale a series of very unfortunate events occurred. Great rows of these trees were inadvertently plowed over. This farmer, teacher fought hard to get this tree out there. The industry fought to keep it off the market... or so it seemed.

This friend of mine gave me a bare root of this tree early in production. He knew that I would be a willing backup if the industry froze him out and destroyed his discovery. So I planted it and it grew. Every year it produced very nice fruit, but what do you do with it besides eat the fresh plums? I could make some dreaded jam. I recently found out from my friend (I had not seen him in 10 years) that the tree was not consistent in commercial production because it required a pollinizer at a particular time of blossom. A pluot would do however since it is in bloom very early. Yep, I have a pluot and that is why it is a consistent producer.

Surprise.. I made some jam a year or two ago and believe it or not I sort of like it. Today was a canning day.. and I made 6 pints of it (two batches). Sue even likes it.. especially if it stays red.

Plum jam takes a bit more work. The plums do not come off their pits. So they have to be cut off the pits. They have to chopped. A batch takes 6 1/2 cups of chopped cooked plums. That is about 8 cups of fresh chopped off the pit stuff. Then it goes into the food processor. Everything is chopped really fine. They it is heated to boiling and simmered for 5 minutes with a 1/2 cup of water. Then its the standard low sugar mix of 6 1/2 cups of fruit to 4 1/2 cups of sugar. First the pectin is added with a quarter cup of sugar. As it cooks in, it has to boil for a minute. Then the just of the sugar is added along with a couple of lemon cubes that I saved from the Fall harvest. Everything heats to a point where you cannot stir down the boil and it must boil for a minute. Then it all goes in sterile jars. The lid surfaces are wiped and the threds of the outside of the glass jars are cleaned. lids are aligned and rings are installed, Each jar joins the others for a bath under 2 inches of water that is is brough up to boil. The jars are boiled for at least 15 minutes.

I learned today that while canning jars a tough, the temperature change can be brutal. They can make the jars crack. Dropping cooler jars with canned apricot halves into the boiling canner resulted in two quart jars cracking and dumping their sweet contents in the boiling water.. what a mess. So I am a little more careful about temperature changes. Jars are put into luke warm water and then heated with the water. Jars are also allowed to cool down to luke warm terperature before they are pulled out into the air. Live and learn.

At least now I can say that I finally appreciate plum jam. I have also learned about the physics of cold and hot water.

All is not lost today.

: ) Pat