July 11th - Jam-making for beginners

My young cousin, Catriona, has been here for a few days this week. She has been working in Paris and has been, so far as we can ascertain, mostly hungry and broke (as Parisians neither eat nor pay very often). We therefore considered it a particular honour that Catriona used her hard-earned dosh for a return ticket on the sleeper train to visit us. So we have had three (hopefully) fun-filled days of ice-cream and sight-seeing.

We arrived back from Carcassonne on Tuesday to be surprised by Flick, bearing a large carrier bag full of yellow plums from her garden. A very large carrier bag. Over 2 Kg. With the best will in the world, rather a lot for John and me. We did eat a few on our picnic on Wednesday, but today there were still nearly 4lbs left in the carrier bag – taking up a whole shelf in our fridge. They were beautifully sweet. To waste them would have been a crime. So I made jam.

I haven’t made jam before, so I found myself dusting off an old Constance Spry cookery book that dates back to my time at Winkfield Place, the Cordon-Bleu school she founded with Rosemary Hume. What can you say about a book that states “it would seem to be the simple duty of any woman with a home to run, of those with any sort of civic conscience, to understand about food and cooking … but there is still a tendency to consider the subject suitable primarily either for girls who cannot make the grade for a university or for those who intend to become teachers …”

“I aspire to perfection”, was the school moto. Though, in my case, nothing could have been further from the truth.  “I aspire to produce anything that remotely resembles the photo in the book”, could have been mine, or “I aspire to adhere to the Time Plan”, as time and time again, the teachers lamented my “too big” profiteroles, my “too yellow” custards, my “too sweet” salad dressings, or my liberal interpretation of practically any recipe you care to name. I passed the course anyway, and still use this splendidly sexist and imperial cookbook whenever I need a traditional turkey stuffing, liver pâté, jam … or just a good laugh.

The first line of the recipe reads, “Stone plums. Break about half the stones, extract the kernels, and blanch.” Constance Spry, unlike Delia Smith, credits her reader with a little too much common-sense. I am sure Delia’s recipe would have included some idiot-proof method of breaking plum stones, but Constance Spry’s didn’t. I discovered quickly that a mis-hit with a rolling pin turned them into sticky little missiles, while a well-aimed smack reduced the whole to a mass of pulp and nut shards. I really, truly, hope they add some flavour to the finished jam.

When finished, I had filled eight little jars with a pleasantly amber-coloured concoction. As I came to label them, I was reminded of a story about an old family friend, jazz singer and art critic, George Melly. As a small boy he had been taken to tea with an elderly (and rather prim) aunt. As his mother and aunt exchanged polite conversation, George suddenly piped up, “Mummy, why do you always say that Auntie looks like a monkey?!” The aunt glowered, while George’s embarrassed mother searched for words to change the subject. “Lovely plums …”, she said, looking into the aunt’s fruit bowl.

Milk and then just as it comes dear,
I’m afraid the preserve’s full of stones,
Beg pardon, I’m soiling the doileys
With afternoon teacakes and scones
from “How to get on in Society”, by John Betjeman

This entry was posted on 12/07/2008 at 01:22 am and is filed under Uncategorised. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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