The world feels scary right now, the threat of social division simmering, barely contained on our streets. With everything going on, I retreat to the calm of the garden to take stock.  The early sweetcorn, tidied away now, was lush. The courgettes and beans were plentiful, the raspberries and tomatoes have been endless. With all this abundance, grounding myself, the early autumn has been all about saving as much of the sunshine as I can.

I’ve always loved making jam and preserves, baking my own bread, and bottling produce from the garden. Not in some Trad-wife, hark back to a fantasy of women’s place in the home, but in a radical feminist, environmental honouring of the skills that working-class women have always honed from necessity rather than ideology.

There’s a pleasure and a power in opening the cupboards in the depths of winter, to pull out a jar of something sticky and sweet. The hodgepodge stack of mismatched jars gleam in the light. Opening one, the crackle of cellophane lids removed with the snap of an elastic band, there’s the furtive licking of the jam paper, a gift to whomever gets there first.

I learned to make jam, not at my grandma’s knee, but from a tattered copy of The Farmhouse Kitchen Cookbook. Recipes I no longer need to follow, guided me on weights and measures, how to test the set, and the need, or indeed not, for an expensive sugar thermometer. There is very little kit you really need. A pan big enough to boil fruit, a saucer to test the set.

Decades of using the same pan, now instead of scales, I eyeball the ratio of sugar and fruit that, if not always perfect, is always close enough.

There’s a frugality to jam making, the finding of food for free in the hedgerows connects my wild woman soul to a time when we might have all identified Hawthorne, rose hip and sloe.

Raising a big family on a budget, making bread and jam stretched my purse when things were tight. In early summer, the odd bag of sugar would be added to the shop, empty jars would be saved, washed and ready. Laying down stores for winter was a work of months, not days.

Now, no longer feeding a family, no longer saving for sugar, I make jam for the memory of it, the smell of fruit scenting the air for days. Gifted a glut of blackcurrants, I pass on a few jars of jam to neighbours (always share what comes your way, never hoard it for fear of bad luck). The kids have all had first strawberry, then raspberry jam, now blackcurrant, and then blackberry, with Christmas marmalade next to come.  With smoky tomato chutney ripening on the shelf, the cupboards are full.

There’s a slow meditation to preserving what we have nurtured and grown. Picking the fruit can sometimes feel like a burden in the heat or the rain, but I can think of worse ways to pass an hour.  Sitting on a chair in the garden, a bowl between my knees, my fingers all Lady Macbeth, I plop raspberries into the pot.  

A moment of quiet in a world gone mad, there is a patience in creating like this, a trust in the future.  Historically dismissed as women’s work, lacking in value or skill.  Reduced to a cliche of the WI.  Working-class women’s contribution to feeding their family is not some right-wing Trad-wife-no-rights-facist bullshit; this woman’s work is nothing short of political resistance.  

So, pass the butter, baby, join me in the struggle. We’re fighting the patriarchy one jar of jam at a time.

And don’t be thinking you need to forage in the wilds to make your own jam. A couple of bags of supermarket frozen fruit will work perfectly.

Recipe

Equal weight of fruit to sugar. ie 1 kg fruit – 1 kg sugar.

A lemon

A knob of butter

Add fruit to a heavy-bottomed pan. For blackberries, add a tablespoon of water for every 500g , other berries need no water. Gently heat up the berries, letting them simmer until they are soft – approximately 15 min.

Stir in the sugar on a low heat. Do not let the mixture boil until the sugar has melted and you can no longer see any sugar crystals. (Look on the back of the spoon – if you can see specks of sugar, wait until it has melted.)

Add the juice of a lemon and one-half of the squeezed-out lemon, as well as the knob of butter. Bring the pot to a boil and boil for 15 minutes, skimming off any scum that bubbles up.

Turn off the heat and test to see if the jam is set by dropping a spoonful onto a plate. Let it cool for a moment and then push the jam with your finger; if it has set, the skin on the jam will crumple.

If it’s not set, return jam to heat and boil for 5 min. Test again until you get that crumple. (Make sure to lick your fingers to get that first delicious taste of jam.)

Once set, fish out the half lemon and discard. Ladle hot jam into a jug and pour into clean, sterilised jars. Press greaseproof circles onto the skin of the jam, top with a plastic cover, and secure with an elastic band. Add the screw lid and share pics of your bounty with me.

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