"Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold" ~William Carlos Williams

 

 

 

  

Nostalgia with Fruit & Jam

 

 

I love strawberries, sliced and bright red...heaped with bananas atop my Sunday morning French Toast with Real Maple Syrup from the East. It is a simple, bountiful breakfast...and it has always comforted me. Sundays at the breakfast table...it means family and a warm stove. It reminds me of skiing at Sugarloaf in Maine when I was young.



But the nostalgia cooking really kicked in when I was pregnant and has continued as my son gets older. At my home in the Colorado mountains I started craving dishes from my childhood...memories of the wood table I shared with my brothers...the flavors of my mother's recipes. The sage of her Pork Pie, the tomatoes and green peppers of her Spanish Rice...even the Chicken Pot Pie she would pull from the freezer for the babysitter on evenings when when she and my father would go out...all popped into my head vividly and I needed to get the recipes. I had to resurrect her Gingerbread House, her Cinnamon Rolls, her Buckeye Balls, her Apricot Bars, her Buckwheat Pancakes...her Strawberry Jam.





I grew up in a small seaside town in Maine, in a three story Victorian built in 1903, with my three older brothers. Our house had turrets, a secret passageway and a former elevator shaft...and there was always an array of jams in our fridge. There was raspberry jam for my mom and there were white jars of British orange marmalade for my father. But the strawberry jam was the only jam I ate...on toast or on p,b&js. I preferred things sweet and I never understood mint jelly. There was a dish my mother used to make for dinner...lamb with woody rosemary and it was always served with mint jelly. Everything about this dish was over the top for me....and the jelly was all wrong.

My mother made strawberry jam when I was little...from the farm fields on the other side of our rural, picturesque town. We would load up in the station wagon and head over to Jordan's Farm...to pick strawberries. There were rows and rows and we'd spend all afternoon on our knees picking...then come home with our bounty. Fond memories of growing up in a gorgeous town on the coast of Maine...with farms, fruit and simplicity. My mom would stand over the stove...pot boiling, stirring, steam rising, thick strawberry sweetness filling the house. She'd spoon off the bubbling foam and top each French jam jar with paraffin wax and stack them in the old cupboard of our home. It was a thinner jam than Bonne Maman's...and the strawberries were little and she left them mostly whole. It was a distinctive jam that I remember well....but I always wished it was a little thicker.

 



Dressed in jeans and LL Bean flannel shirts we'd go to Terison's Orchard to pick apples in the fall. I can't remember a more perfect moment in time than climbing those trees with my brothers in the crisp air of our youth....smiling, climbing, adventuring in the orchard. In the evening, after dinner, my father would have a piece of cheddar on a slice of the pie my mother had made from the apples we'd picked.



My brothers and I were raised as skiers. In the winter we'd travel the East in our big, red Suburban. We'd have competitions at Loon, Waterville, Killington and Stratton. Sometimes we'd drive all the way to Big Boulder in Pennsylvania. We'd travel like the Swiss Family Robinson...like a troop of skiers...with a cooler filled with my mother's homemade food. We'd pull into the parking lot, unpack our skis, boot and poles...then carry in the cooler and stake our claim in the baselodge. The big green Coleman stacked with frost white Tupperware containers sat like a homing device in the baselodge with my mother. It was a basecamp of sorts...a refuge from the sideways sleeting snow that would pellet our faces as we rode the chairlifts of the unforgiving East. There was fried chicken, deviled eggs and sandwiches...and lots and lots of baked goods. Cinnamon rolls, date bars, molasses, chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies...nestled between layers of waxed paper...sugar combined with the hearty warmth of flour, oats and butter. It was a treasure chest...like the black trunk my brothers would take to summer camp...filled with a sense of the comforts of home. Often there were apricot bars. The apricot center was my least favorite part of the bar. The chunky, tart, orange jam seemed like a bad trick, a hoax to get us to eat fruit, in the middle the oats and brown sugar layers I adored. We may not have loved everything she made, exactly the way she made it...but, we never went hungry. Looking back on it...it was a sort of edible oasis...in the Utopia of  my youth.



In high school my best friend and I would cruise with the top down in my brother's convertible... by the strawberry fields. We'd breathe deep the strawberry jam-filled air. Senior year my boyfriend drove a green Ford F-150. His extended family of aunts and uncles and cousins owned many of the farms in our town...including the strawberry field we used to go to when I was younger. One afternoon he brought a crate of strawberries for my mom and she baked them into a wonderful pie.



 

We had a plum tree in our yard and a pear tree. The plum tree was about the size of an apple tree and produced inconsistent fruit. Some years there was enough fruit for my mom to make a few jars of jam. The pear tree was tall...more linear than the plum tree, and I can't recall ever eating it's fruit. Eventually the plum tree got old and weak and infested with earwigs. The pear tree was hit by lightning and my mother commissioned an ex-boyfriend to bring his chainsaw and take it away. There had been fruit all around me as I grew up in Maine.

 

 



 

Making jam is a new passion of mine. The Art of Making Jam!  It has reopened my eyes to the fabulous world of fruit. In my quest to learn more about making jam and fruit I have discovered a great deal: The scents, the textures, the unique and individual seasons, poetry that speaks of fruit, the histories, growing climates, even the natural pectin contents...and the glorious colors. Wild Maine Blueberries, Plums, Pluots, Nectarines, Palisade Peaches...and Strawberries! Italian Plums. Apriums. Quinces. Fraises des Bois. Black Mission Figs.

 



When will I get to taste a Damson? I am awed by the Damson. Apparently its skins have a gorgeous blue hue that were once used to die yarn in Great Britain...where the trees are mostly found. The Damson, I have learned, is very tart and requires sugar to be palatable...and therefore it is perfect in pies and in jams. While many of the old Damson trees were pulled up when sugar was scarce after World War II, many trees have since been replanted in the UK. And legend has it that Damson trees have been found growing wild in Oregon. There are many who adore this fruit. This history connects me to a romance I can not fully explain.  I can only say that it as a love of beautiful words and thoughts of a long ago time..and of a respect for a simple, sweet and colorful thing that grows from the land.  Most of all...thoughts of fruit, making jam, making pies...it all brings me to a happier (more poetic, more creative, more vibrant, more flavorful) place.



There is a poem that often runs trough my head...it is William Carlos Williams' poem: This is Just to Say. It is one of my favorite poems, particularly when it is plum season. I wonder sometimes what he meant when he wrote:


I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold


I prefer to think he had awoken early, before his wife, and left her a note...letting her know, sharing with her, how delicious the fruit was. I have read that some think it was boastful, rude and selfish...a confession of a man who ate her cherished plums.

 



Nonetheless, it is a poem that in some way captures the complexities of fruit...or our lives and our relationships. It is a multifaceted poem to me. It can be simple...so simple. Beautifully simple. Yet if you read it again...it can mean so much more. I first read the poem in high school. Back then it resonated with me when when my brother got mad at me. He was on some sort of self imposed, philosophical diet...and in general seemed irritated with the world.  When I accidentally dropped some of his precious fruit on the floor (while I was unpacking the groceries)...this was the end of the rope for him and I "was an idiot". Now it just reminds me of how irritated he was during that time...and how I tried not to irritate him. Which I more often than not did. But it also reminds me of being young and being a sister.

 

 



The poem is still in fresh my mind...when I am choosing fruit at the store and when I look at at a gorgeous pluot in our fruit bowl...next to the lemons. Now, it reminds me to cherish the fresh wonderful fruit in my house...in my life. Sometimes when I see a plum...I am reminded of my brother. When I see strawberries...I envision my mother in our old kitchen stirring the strawberry jam...and I can smell it. There are so many memories when I look at fruit today. Memories of my family and my childhood in Maine. What would life be...without jam on your toast, sans the tart and devoid of the idea of the plum? This new found passion is a bountiful awakening of nostalgia...and new experiences. My own jam. My own pie. My own recipes. Flavors for my own family to enjoy.