So, you must be wondering what happened to my blood orange marmalade? Well, it’s made, tastes delicious, and with its deep, ruby-orange color looks very pretty in the glass jars now tucked away on my shelf for future giving and eating. Gleaming, fruit packed jars on my shelf always make me happy. I love being able to grab one when I need to give a simple gift, to hand over to my kids when the other jam runs out, or occasionally leave on my neighbor’s doorstep as a friendly gesture. Making jam offers a satisfaction that for me is just not found in baking a batch of cookies to share (though I love to do that too)–home preserves tend to linger in the kitchen just a little longer, adding a brightness to a thick slice of toast, say, on a rainy morning like today, as often telling a story, bringing with it a particular moment in time, or the taste of a season–always a delicious and welcome surprise.

I have made jam and marmalade for years now, starting as a youth, when I first made blackberry jam during a summer Lyceum camp. On that occasion, we picked our own berries and added lots of sugar and commercial pectin (not something I do anymore). The resulting jam was a deep purple color, sweet and thick, and awfully good (perhaps as much because we made it ourselves). My first solo attempts at making jam were often messy affairs, my kitchen walls, clothes, arms and face splattered with the stain of ripe fruit, leaving me looking like a kid who had just spent hours gorging on the small, juicy, cherry plums that line many an old neighborhood. 

Eventually, I graduated to making jam with my stepmother, a French-Italian transplant, who similarly loved to gather and preserve the season’s best in a jar–one year we canned fresh apricots in their own juices, a process that included cracking the hard pits to get at the kernels, added for flavor. Our sometimes day-long excursions to pick the fruit took us into the local parks (chestnuts in the fall, and pears in the winter), far-off orchards, you-pick fields, and neighbor’s yards from Big Sur to Gilroy and beyond.  I learned to make marmalade, the more complex art, from my neighbor when I lived on Partington Ridge. Kate, the daughter of an English painter and an American explorer, and herself an excellent canner, is known for her thick cut, deeply caramelized orange marmalade. Hers is sticky sweet, almost candy like, with just a hint of bitterness, made from fruit from her own trees.

Other fond jam-making memories take me Bolinas, the north coast, renegade beach town where I spent the summer after graduate school; my neighbor was a poet (and my former professor) and we shared a property with at least a dozen, if not somewhat forgotten, fruit trees–heirloom apples, pears, plums, nectarines and more–and a love for canning, so we took to booking a weekly date for making jam as well as quick pickles. These afternoons became part of his poetry practice, a routine that found their way into his writing, 4 line visual poems that have since been shown in NY art galleries. His Apri/Cot/Jam/Jar is one of my favorites, and one in xerox form, that I have tacked to my wall as a reminder of the sweet pleasures of words on paper, and yes, preserving fruit in a jar.

(A recipe for Blood Orange Marmalade to follow in the next few days–look for it under RECIPES).