In Defense of Jam
The ages-old condiment has recently come under fire for its sweetness: But what is jam without sugar?
Summer is a season of rituals, of hot pavement and cool cones, ice cream running in rivers through fingers; of long, light-filled days and the relief of water on skin, a balm to bodies baked in sun. In the canon of summertime, these moments are near the top. But above all, to me, always, summer is about jam.
It’s been this way since I was a child. Rising early to beat the midmorning heat, my mother would walk me and my siblings into blueberry patches in the Indiana countryside, where we’d roll the fruit off its stem and catch it in the drum of an old Folger’s coffee tub. To find strawberries, we crouched under the streaking sun, three towheaded children turning over leaves and separating stem from fruit. Raspberries and blackberries, with thorn-covered canes and brambles that pricked and scraped in defense of their harvest, required the most attention.
Buckets full, we’d return to my grandparents’ picket-fence farm, with its sprawl of green lawn and uneven wood floors. The table in the cream-colored kitchen would be set with old issues of The Times of Northwest Indiana, the tap turned on cold. When everything was in place, we’d tip our cans carefully, and the berries would tumble from their grip…
