Tales from the Wood – The Diary of a Badger Watching Man

We’re jamming
I wanna jam it with you,
We’re jamming, jamming
And I hope you like jamming too
(Bob Marley)

Making Raspberry Jam

OK, this is another one of those diary posts.  Over the last week my wife and I have picked 2.6kg of blackcurrants.  After freezing some this left a nice, round 2kg for making jam.

I didn’t really understand jam until a couple of years ago when we started getting a surplus of fruit from the garden.  Rather than buying fruit at any time of the year from the supermarket, we now get more than we can possibly eat for a month and then nothing for the other 11 months of the year.  We need to find a way to preserve it.

Being interested in the idea of primitive living I like to use good, old fashioned methods.  I live in a Victorian farm workers’ cottage and I like to try to carry on the old ways as much as I can.  We’ve tried all sorts of ways of bottling, pickling and drying the produce from the garden.

Hence the jam.  Proper home-made blackcurrant jam is a real treat.  Unlike shop-bought jam that tastes of nothing but sugar and something vaguely synthetic, our jam has a really intense fruit flavour.  It tastes like the very essence of the fruit itself.  I love it.  Unknown to my wife I have a jar in the fridge and I eat a spoonful every now and then when I fancy something sweet.  It’s nicer than anything from the sweet shop.

Anyway, enough rambling.  I’ve made raspberry jam and blackcurrant jam, to say nothing of the cherries in syrup.  It’ll be time for the blackberries soon…