Strawberry jam

Making strawberry jam is a ritual best performed in my mother’s kitchen: a sticky, steamy endeavour to preserve summer’s red treasure against winter’s white want.

We have our moments of triumph. We embark on a quest to find fruit fresh from the field, and discover the perfect family-run berry farm in Huron County. They offer strawberries specifically suited to jam making; the berries that aren’t so pretty – irregularly shaped, ripened past their visual prime – imperfections which make them unsellable on grocery store shelves.

But the taste of this smaller, uglier fruit is Ambrosia: its sultry flavour immortalizing the sweet, deep summers of yesteryear.

We have our moments of panic, when boiling-hot liquid must be stirred and timed for exactly one minute, and then quickly poured into glass jars and sealed. In this moment, four hands are surely better than two.

We have mantric moments of calm. Each berry’s little green hat is methodically doffed with a sharp knife. Berry after berry after berry drops into the bowl and awaits its culinary fate. Close your eyes and you can still see them, but your mind is free to wander…

For some reason, I think of my grandmother, and how she must have preserved fruit alongside her mother, and her mother before her.

Feeling unjustifiably sorry for myself, a tad grumpy & bored with COVID19 isolation and inconvenience, I pause for a reality check. My grandmother would have made strawberry jam during two world wars and the Great Depression. How did she manage? The fruit grown in her garden would have continued to grow prolifically despite global conflicts, but how did she acquire the mountains of sugar required to make jam for a husband, 7 children, and extra for farm workers and unexpected visitors and all their children.

I imagine a young Susanna Steckle (1895-1966) with my great-grandmother Mary Ann Sitler (1872-1952), and my great-great gramma Hannah Groh (b1848) with her mother Susanna Miller (b1822) and her mother Hesther Wanner (1796-1864) performing this same strawberry circuit; harvesting, cleaning, chopping, boiling and pouring, but in much greater quantity, and in much more difficult circumstances, drawing water from a well and boiling the mixture in a ‘summer kitchen’, without electric lights, or air conditioning, or CBC news on the radio…

At long last comes the moment of reward, when the final product is sampled. One dollop of sweet ecstasy; the sacramental fruit alive in the earth only hours before, spread over fresh bread, with a cup of slowly brewed tea. A foretaste of heaven.

Thanks to Craig Martin for our maternal family tree.