NEW WEBSITE!

Greenvalley has moved.

I've got a new site at

http://www.savingtheseason.com/

The format at the new location will look familiar, although the design is more elegant thanks to the design brilliance of my college friend Alex Pincus. The new platform also allows for easier navigation and better access to the GREENVALLEY RECIPES ARCHIVE.

Please link through here to stay abreast of the new recipes for AUTUMN JELLIES I'll be posting in the coming days.

NEW POSTINGS AT  SAVINGTHESEASON.COM

RECIPE: HEIRLOOM TOMATO SAUCE

Sixty cents a pound.

That's what I paid the other day for heirloom tomatoes at the Studio City Farmers Market. At that price, a twenty-two pound box of the most gorgeous varieties including Brandywines, Pineapples and Cherokee Blacks came to $13 dollars even.

How could it be?

They were "seconds"—dead ripe 'maters that had been slightly bruised in transport that morning. I'm usually wary of second-class fruit, because a preserve can only be as good as the ingredients that go into it. But with food, you can usually smell quality, so I picked up the ugliest, mashiest tomato from the table and sniffed it. It was great—no whiff of that sour smell that comes off smashed tomatoes after only a few hours. Back in July I paid $4 per pound for tomatoes no better.

But still, sixty cents a pound?

An old lady saw me staring at the price sign in disbelief.

"These are good," she reassured me as she packed about 4 pounds worth into her bag.

Farmer Nestor, a young guy with dark hair and blue agate eyes, heard us talking and came over.

"A lotta people make sauce with'em," he said.

My plan exactly—thanks to Cindy & Nick. Back at Claire & Ben's engagement party, Nick & Cindy, married partners in a Green-energy consulting firm in Northern California, told me about the overwhelming productivity of their backyard garden last year. Their heirloom tomato vines in particular yielded by the bushel. When Cindy said she ground much of the harvest into tomato sauce, I was shocked. Romas are for sauce, I protested, and heirlooms should be lovingly sliced on a platter and sprinkled with coarse sea salt and basil chiffonade.

"But why?," she asked. "Heirlooms have the best flavor. They make the best sauce."

"It was in-CRED-i-ble," said Nick, who is English and shares his countrymen's way with wild exclamation.

It turns out Nick & Cindy were right. Because each variety of heirloom tomato has a different flavor profile, the sauce from a mixed batch has the equivalent of a four-octave range. It hits the palate with a burst of bright, tangy coloratura and then glides down into a dark, almost meaty basso. It really is incredible—a homemade "Ode to the Tomato."

HEIRLOOM TOMATO SAUCE

Any quantity of mixed heirloom tomatoes (One word of caution: weight your mix heavily in favor of red tomatoes over lower-acid yellow ones, since the high acid content of tomatoes is what allows us to safely can them using the boiling-water method).

1 Tablespoon of bottled lemon juice ***PER PINT*** (must be bottled, not fresh, for controlled acidity)

1 Prepare the tomatoes: blanch them a few at a time in a large quantity of boiling water for 1 minute, then lift out with a slotted spoon and plunge into a basin of ice water. When cool, remove them to drain but do not begin to peel until you've blanched them all.

2 Now you need to work quickly: peel three or four tomatoes and quarter them into a pot large enough to hold your entire batch. Crush the tomatoes (I just squeeze them with my hands). You want to have enough pulp and liquid to cover the bottom of the pot. Bring to a boil.

3 Once the boil has begun, continue to peel and quarter tomatoes one at a time. Press them into the boiling pot so that they heat through as quickly as possible. Stir occasionally so your pot doesn't scorch, but maintain a steady boil. Once all the tomatoes are into the pot, boil for 10 minutes.

4 Pass the tomatoes through a food mill. (I use a coarse blade because I like the texture, but use a finer blade or a Chinois if you'd prefer to strain the seeds.) Return puree to the pot.

5 Return to a boil and reduce while stirring by half, or until thickened to your preference. Salt to taste—but use a fairly light hand, since you may further reduce the sauce when cooking with it later.

6 Line up your clean jars. Add into each jar 1 Tablespoon of bottled lemon juice ***PER PINT.*** (Ie, a quart jar gets 2 Tablespoons lemon juice.) Ladle tomatoes into your jars, seal and process in a boiling-water bath per USDA guidelines: 35 minutes for pint jars (at sea level), 40 minutes per quart (at sea level.)

7 When boiling-water bath is complete, turn off the heat and allow jars to sit in the pot of water, uncovered, for 5 minutes. This allows the pressure inside the jars to stabilize and prevents leakage when you remove the jars to cool.

YIELD

22 pounds of tomatoes yielded 10 pints of sauce

ROAD TRIP: CRATER LAKE TO EUGENE

Driving north from Crater Lake towards Eugene, hand-painted signs for something called the Burger Deli at R&D Market caught my eye.

R&D Market is a road-side gas station, and when I walked in, a tough-looking lady behind the cash register met my eyes. I asked if the Burger Deli were open. She answered "yeah" as if that were a stupid question and nodded towards a separate Deli counter off to the left.

A weathered guy sauntered over there to take my order. He looked like a roughneck trying to make good after some drunken brush with the law led his girlfriend to threaten to throw his no-good ass out that door once and for all if he didn't start to fly right for a change. It occurred to me that his girlfriend might be the lady behind the cash register.

I placed my order for a jalapeño burger (adorned with pickled green chiles, you know) then saw a sign for milkshakes. The word "cherry" popped out at me first.

"How are your shakes?," I asked

"What kind you like?," the roughneck answered in a surprisingly cordial tone suggesting that he knew the menu and was prepared to steer me thoughtfully through its options.

"How's the cherry?," I said.

"It's good," he said, but only after a hesitation long enough to indicate that he wouldn't rank it among his favorites.

Then I saw those magic words "Black Raspberry," last seen the day before when I was grazing from the undergrowth in Berkeley's native plant botanical garden.

"How about the black raspberry?," I asked.

"Between the cherry and black raspberry, if it was me, I'd do black raspberry," he said. "But you might have your preference."

My preference was for black raspberry.

The roughneck not only took orders but also handled kitchen duties, so I was very curious to taste how this lunch would turn out. The first good sign was that he would not be distracted from his cooking. While the he was in the kitchen, a diesel pickup rumbled up to the gas pumps in front of the R&D Market. Oregon state law forbids self-service and requires a station attendant to pump gas. The lady hollered down from the Market.

"You wanna get that diesel," she said. It wasn't exactly a question and I decided she must be the girlfriend.

"Not really," he hollered back. "I'm making a burger."

I could smell it frying, and when he turned on the milkshake mixer, I could feel the machine's motor vibrate through the rickety floor and up the legs of the stool where I was sitting.

"Here's your burger," the roughneck said when he slid it and the milkshake across the counter. Such as burger as he presented deserved more ceremony. It was dazzlingly handsome, assembled with a food stylist's astute eye for presentation.

I tried the shake first, and it literally could not have been better, thanks of course to the quality of the Eberhard's Dairy ice cream but also to the roughneck's assembly, which brought together the perfect proportion of milk and the perfect amount of mixing to yield a taste and texture remarkably close to home-made ice cream licked off the dasher of a hand-cranked churn.

The burger was so good I laughed out loud. Its fundamentals were correct—good meat handshaped and cooked pink, smooshy bun, melty cheese square—and the addition of a real, ripe tomato and a bed of gutsy local lettuce turned it into the paradigmatic roadside hamburger. Pickled jalapeño slices standing in for the more conventional cucumber pickle were like July Fourth sparklers, lots of flare but manageable heat. (Note to self: develop a GREENVALLEY PICKLED JALAPENO.)

The meal left me thinking about how simple food like hamburgers, milkshakes and, yes, jam is imprinted by its maker. The roughneck was no chef, clearly, but he is a cook, in the sense that Italian national treasure Marcella Hazan has always denied being anything more than a cook. A cook, I would say, understands his ingredients, is in command of his technique and thinks first of the well-being and pleasure of those who will eat his food. The cook isn't striving for showy originality or self-congratulatory invention, but that does not mean that his food lacks style. To the contrary, the best home cooking strikes a chord because it is part and parcel of the person—it conveys someone's style. Your grandmother's cobbler or Uncle So-and-So's barbeque sauce are irreplaceable precisely because they aren't made the same way by anyone else. I've always said that taste isn't a democracy, and that is certainly true of simple food, which at its best expresses a point of view that is singular—perhaps one might even say tyrannical. Good cooking doesn't need to be novel, but it does need to be decisive.

You have to have your preference.

ROAD TRIP: BERKELEY TO DUNSMUIR

I didn't expect to have anything to post from this leg of the road trip, but fruit is rampant this time of the year and jammers are everywhere.

Before I left Berkeley Friday afternoon, I took a few hours to indulge my other passion, for California native plants, at the Regional Parks Botanic Garden up in Tilden Park. It's the most inspiring garden I've ever been in, not just because of its sheer beauty but also because it has existed for over 50 years now as a living museum of California's extraordinary and diverse native plants.

There's also good stuff to eat in the undergrowth, if you know where to look. The thing that's in season right now is berries, and I was especially taken with the sprawling, prickly blackcap raspberry, rubus leucodermis, which is native to the state's northern coast. The common name tells you everything: the berry is nearly black when ripe (see the left middle of the picture ABOVE) and it falls free of the core so that it looks in your hand like a miniature version of those groovy knit caps Marvin Gaye used to wear. Incidentally, all varieties of raspberries come off their core this way whereas blackberries don't, which is how you can reliably distinguish between them regardless of their sometimes misleading colors. Oh and the blackcap's taste is inarguably raspberry, although less acidic than the red kind.

Friday night I stopped in Dunsmuir, a former logging town in the Cascades that's practically in the shadow of Mount Shasta. I was up early the next morning and as I was leaving town, what do you think I saw in a vacant lot? Blackberries, ABOVE. Let's compare raspberries with blackberries.

RB like cool and shade.

BB like heat and sun.

RB are have light canes and neat fruit.

BB have vigorous canes and blousy fruit.

RB will snag your clothes and scratch your skin.

BB will rip your clothes and draw blood.

RB are just about my favorite fresh fruit and make one of my favorite preserves.

BB are just about my favorite fresh fruit and make one of my favorite preserves.

We don't have enough of either in Southern California, but when I get back to Greenvalley I'll post my recipes for blackberry and raspberry jams and other preserves.

ROAD TRIP: BONNY DOON TO BERKELEY

I made it to Berkeley last night in time for supper at Chez Panisse. David was working, so he arranged for me to meet him in the kitchen and eat there at a tiny table squeezed between the counter where Amy was making the first course (cannellini bean salad with roasted peppers, heirloom tomatoes and olive toasts) and the pastry station where Mary Jo was making dessert (angel food cake with summer berries.) David was sort of everywhere at once but mainly down by where the line cooks were making the middle two courses of sea scallop and lobster fritter with zucchini, cilantro and lime ("chicken-fried scallop" is how David described it) and pork loin with wild fennel, mustard greens and corn pudding.

It occurred to me this morning that I was eating about five feet away from where Alice once instructed me to "do everything neatly always," which became one of my two eternal Kitchen Commandments. I was happy as a clam to sit there by myself, eat, watch. Everyone was intent but unhurried, serious but not stern, focused on the immediate task of making his or her dish but also attuned to the rhythm of the entire meal. Chez Panisse is a self-aware community engaged in a common task that is both aesthetic and ideological, and I think that's ultimately what sets this restaurant apart from most others. The generosity of the enterprise—and this is 100% true of David—is that even casual guests like myself are made to feel like part of the community during their brief visit.

At one point during the meal, I dimly overheard David asking Mary Jo for two cups of sugar, a request which caught my attention only because it seemed odd given that he was in the middle of spit-roasting whole pork loins. As we were leaving later, he was carrying a clay bowl of jam. It turns out he had had a handful of good apricots and decided to cook them up. As I wrote the other day, putting something up takes less time than one might imagine; David made apricot jam during the middle of dinner service for 100 people.

This morning we ate some of his apricot jam—potent and sweet—and I opened jars of FIG JAM WITH WILD AROMATICS and WILD STRAWBERRY JAM for David to taste. In return he gave me some incredible quince syrup that he puddled in the bottom of a dish then dollopped with creme fraiche. It's a brilliant preserve that I'll try to reproduce when quinces come in this fall. The other ideas he shared were a wild fennel syrup he recently used at the restaurant and his version of limoncello.

Let me also note that we opened a jar of wonderful yellow plum butter with ginger from Tom. As soon as I'm back to Greenvalley, I'll consult with him and work up a recipe to post here. If one were so inclined, one could also keep cooking that plum butter down until it reduced to a thick paste, like membrillo, to serve with cheese. Those recipes will be coming soon.

But I have to dash for now—back on the road this afternoon.

ROAD TRIP: BIG SUR TO BONNY DOON

I'm on my way north to the Bay Area and Oregon. Monday night I left Greenvalley at about 9 o'clock after I'd put up PEACH JAM, ANOTHER WAY and got as far as San Luis Obispo. Yesterday I did one of the most beautiful driving trips in the world, up Hwy 1 through Big Sur, and then I stopped over in Bonny Doon to see Kristen and Greg and their daughters, Auden and Abigail. Here are a few pictures from the day that relate to SAVING THE SEASON.

I'm crazy about any kind of wild edible or wild aromatic, so I was excited to see that Big Sur is just lousy with California bay laurel trees, Umbellularia californica. They grow everywhere and look like this.

Here's the other staple wild aromatic in the Greenvalley cupboard: wild fennel, in this case growing around the base of the bay tree pictured above. (See the glossy bay leaves in the background?) Bay leaves and fennel seeds are the flavors in my favorite FIG JAM WITH HONEY AND WILD AROMATICS.

Going through Big Sur, I stopped at the Big Sur Bakery for breakfast. What really caught my eye were the homemade donuts filled with peach jam show here with branches of bay laurel. My Big Sur souvenirs.

Twenty years ago this summer, Laurent Dubois and I borrowed my mom's car and drove around the country. Literally around the country: 12,000 miles in four weeks. We were on break after our first year of college and I can't imagine that we had much money. Still, we ate two meals en route that I still think about to this day. The first was in Big Sur.

By then Laurent and I had been driving for a couple of weeks and we must have been sick of cheap road food, because we decided to eat at a nice white-tablecloth restaurant. The prices on the menu would have been alarming to us, I'm sure, but the plat du jour was a piece of roasted local salmon that had been caught that morning, said the server, just offshore. How could I resist the idea of a fish that had practically been a part of the view?

I'm not certain that I'd ever eaten fresh salmon before then, and it just changed me. As I remember, the salmon was served with a little sauce of huckleberries (yes it was the Eighties) and the dish was imbued with such a profound sense of place that it has become a touchstone in my life for the ideal of local cooking. I've always wanted to go back to that restaurant, which I remembered had "Oaks" in the name, but over the years when I've driven through Big Sur with various traveling companions, I hadn't noticed it again.

Since I was by myself yesterday, I decided to find it, and sure enough I spotted the building easily enough. Except now it's called the Roadhouse or some such, and it hadn't yet opened for the day. The place looked so modest compared to the grandeur of my memory that the sight of it left me dissatisfied. Maybe this wasn't the place after all. Then I looked across the street and saw a sign for the Glen Oaks Motel, ABOVE. I went in and told the proprietor about my long-ago meal.

This is what he said: "Twenty years ago, that restaurant across the street would have been the Glen Oaks Restaurant and chef Forrest Childs's menu was California nouvelle cuisine. He was last heard of making gourmet gas-station food that's sold around the Monterey Peninsula."

This morning I did a Google search but couldn't find chef Childs. Anyone know him?

That name looks familiar! Although in Monterey County, they clearly don't understand that Greenvalley is one word.

I hadn't known it, but when I got to Bonny Doon yesterday I found out that it was Greg's birthday. Kristen put together a picnic supper to celebrate and we all piled into Greg's pickup for the short drive up to a gorgeous piece of property owned by their friends.

The meal was antipasti and artichokes.

And I pitched in a jar of Greenvalley beets in red wine vinegar from Linda Ziedrich's recipe. Abigail loved them and then when she smiled her teeth were pink.

RECIPE: PEACH JAM, ANOTHER WAY

Note to all fruit lovers: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has announced that it will host an exhibition of still life paintings by 18th-century Spaniard Luis Melendez, one of great masters of the genre, ABOVE. The show, which originated at the National Gallery in Washington, opens here on September 27.

***

Before blasting out of town today for a road trip to northern California and Oregon, I needed to put up the Elberta peaches that have been patiently waiting for me since Saturday, when I got them from Bettina at Bee Green Farm.

I figured I would just make another batch of RUSTIC PEACH JAM FOR AKASHA and maybe ease up on the sugar. Then this morning while blanching the fruit, I thought I'd rather do a peach butter instead, since as I explained in my post for APRICOT BUTTER, fruit butters don't require any planning: measure out cups of stewed fruit and add half as much sugar. But then I thought again, this time about how I like some chunk in my peach preserve. In the end I decided to start as if making butter and then proceed as if making jam: ie, cook the fruit a bit then add the sugar and reduce to a textured spread. Why do it like that? Just to see what would happen if I were to make peach jam another way.

I put to use three things I learned from Valerie: reduce the sugar, stir like hell for the sake of consistency and add lemon juice at the end to keep it bright. Well, actually I sprinkled the peaches with a little lemon juice at the start to prevent them from browning, but then I added more Meyer lemon juice at the end for flavor.

I like the way this jam turned out. It's more suave than the rustic farmhouse jam I made with Akasha, although I should add that it's not as refined as Valerie's jams, even though I was following her lead. It's definitely a Greenvalley Preserve. The old saying is that the flavor of the sandwich is in the hands of the maker. Jam is kind of like that as well. Each small choice that the jammer makes—how to measure the sugar, how to stir, how to manipulates the heat—is personal and the result is that jam expresses a personality. I'm sure that my fascination with jam lies therein: it is a language with a severely limited vocabulary—fruit and sugar—that's nonetheless capable of expressing any voice and every point of view.

PEACH JAM, ANOTHER WAY

BASIC RATIO by weight

2:1

7 lbs peaches, pitted and sliced (about 8 pounds whole fruit)

3.5 lbs sugar (7 cups)

juice of 1 lemon (the Elberta peach, an heirloom variety, has a wonderful acid tang, so I didn't think it needed much lemon. If you're working with a sweeter peach variety, you probably want to use 2 lemons for this amount of fruit)

1 Blanch the peaches and slip them out of their skins. Pit and slice thinly (I did sixteenths), working over a bowl so you capture all the juices. As you start to work, squeeze half a lemon over the sliced peaches to prevent them from browning and as you continue, periodically stir in the new fruit so it gets coated by lemon juice as well.

2 Put sliced fruit into a large heavy-bottom pot and heat. There should be enough juice to begin cooking without fear of scorching it, but if not you can always add a few tablespoons of water.

3 Stirring constantly, bring fruit to a boil and cook for maybe 10 minutes or more until the fruit is soft and the liquids have started to reduce.

4 Add sugar and return to boil. Stir, stir, stir until sufficiently reduced, then stir in the juice of half a Meyer lemon (or more to taste) and return briefly to a boil. Allow to sit for a few minutes to stabilize, then ladle into jars and seal. Process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

YIELD

8 pounds fruit yielded six pints

3 x pints

4 x 8 oz

4 x 4 oz

RECIPE: COCKTAIL ONIONS FOR GREENVALLEY GIBSONS

Folks who have followed my canning exploits—by which I mean, patient friends who have stoically endured my endless chatter about canning—often ask the same two questions. Or three, if you count their first asking "Have you lost your mind?" I'm not sure I'm most qualified to answer that one, but I can speak to the other two questions that often arise next: What am I going to do with everything I've put up? And how long does it take?

I'll answer #2 first.

It depends, of course, on what you're putting up, but the short answer is, "less time than you might expect." Canning something isn't a weekend project, it's more like a couple of hours, if that. Yesterday I put up a batch of COCKTAIL ONIONS FOR GREENVALLEY GIBSONS just to kill 30 minutes waiting for Alexander to call back after taking P (for Puppy) to the dog park. Admittedly, the tedious work of peeling the tiny onions had been done a few days earlier when I put them in the brine. But still, that couldn't have taken more than half an hour. Then another half hour yesterday to pack the brined onions into jars, cover them with hot vinegar, seal and process. That's like two Tivo-ed episodes of 30 Rock.

And if you drink Gibsons (a martini with an onion in place of the olive) then you will be amazed by how vastly superior these are to store-bought. A GREENVALLEY GIBSON is a whole different beast than anything you've tasted before, I promise.

Which brings us back to the question of what I plan to do with all these canned goods. Once you get into the habit of having your own jam and pickles in the fridge, it isn't hard to put a serious dent in your stash. Then you can give stuff away—for holidays, birthdays, thank yous and whatever else. Apart from the obvious, though, let me also underscore here a few other pragmatic and ideological reasons to lay by a store of home-canned goods, including: the thrift of preserving home-grown produce, the pleasure of enjoying one’s own handiwork, the virtues of self-sufficiency and the ecological benefit of sourcing and processing foodstuffs locally.

So, in response to that first question about my sanity, canning doesn't sound entirely crazy now, does it?

COCKTAIL ONIONS FOR GIBSONS

Ingredients for vinegar syrup are given per pint of cold-packed onions (about 4-5 bunches)

1 pint tiny onions, 1/2" to 3/4" in diameter

2 cups Champagne vinegar

3 tablespoons sugar

1 3" dried chile de árbol

4 allspice

4 clove

6-8 peppercorns

8-10 coriander seeds

2 bay leaves

half a 3" cinnamon stick

a few grains of cardamon (individual seeds, not entire pods)

1 trim the roots and leaves of each onion and peel away the outermost layer to reveal the pristine and glassy interior.

2 place onions in a nonreactive bowl and cover with a brine of 1/4 cup coarse sea salt to 4 cups water. (Iodized salt will discolor the onions; flakey, airy kosher salt won't give you the correct measure.) The best way to keep the onions submerged is to partially fill a ziploc bag with some of excess brine (not plain water) and lay it over the floating onions to press them down. (That invaluable tip comes from Linda the Great, Linda Ziedrich.) Leave onions to brine overnight in the fridge. (I got busy this week and left this batch for several days to no apparent ill effect.)

3 Combine vinegar, sugar and aromatics in a pot, bring to a boil and simmer for 15 minutes.

4 Meanwhile, drain brine off the onions and pack them snugly into jars.

5 After 15 minutes, ladle hot vinegar syrup over onions and seal, leaving a good 1/2" head space. Process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes for shelf storage, or just put them in the fridge. They'll stay crisper if you don't process them, but either way, allow at least 2 weeks before using.

YIELD

10 bunches onions yielded over 1.5 pints

3 x 8 oz

1 x 4 oz

GREENVALLEY GIBSON -- for 2

4 oz dry British gin such as Tanqueray or my favorite Boodles. (I also love Hendricks and Junipero, but these more floral gins aren't right for a Gibson.)

scant 1 oz dry white vermouth (The cult of the dry dry dry martini is absurd. If that's what you want, then ask for straight gin, which is a fine and bracing drink. A Gibson, however, is a cocktail, the success of which depends on the interplay of gin and vermouth.)

cocktail onions

Technique and timing are everything here. Before you begin mixing, lay out equipment and ingredients: a jigger, a shaker, a stirrer, ice cubes, onions and opened bottles.

1 Chill the glasses by floating an ice cube in each.

2 Fill the shaker with ice and pour in gin and vermouth. Stir steadily and in one direction only for 30 seconds.

3 Working quickly now, drain glasses and vigorously shake out water clinging to the inside of the glass. Strain the chilled alcohol into glasses. Add one cocktail onion per glass and an additional 5 drops of pickling vinegar from the jar.

4 Drink immediately while still viscous with cold.

BEST MEAL OF THE YEAR

Here is a picture of the best meal I've eaten all year: a tomato sandwich followed by half a cantaloupe (var. Ambrosia). Pappaw used to say that there's only two thing that money can't buy, "and that's true, true love and home-grown tomatoes." Well, these here 'maters wasn't grown at my home, but they were grown at James Birch's (Bella Flora Farm) and that's close enough for me.

Close enough to Heaven, I guess I should say, because as I stood at the counter eating my sandwich, I was just walloped by the thought that I am grateful to be alive and able to enjoy the bounty of God's creation. Then it occurred to me that those words more or less constituted a blessing on the meal, or "Saying Grace" in Tennessee speak. That gave me pause as an atheist, but as a hedonist I can't see anything wrong with giving thanks for Sunday lunch in late July, when all you have to do is slice a tomato and cut a cantaloupe to eat better than any king.

As for other apostasies: yes, locavores, that is a jar of Miracle Whip in the Greenvalley kitchen. Now just simmer down. I know how to make mayonnaise and in my time I've eaten enough aioli to drown a Provencal peasant. But when I eat a tomato sandwich, I like it with Miracle Whip and, when I can find it, Wonder Bread.

RECIPE: WILD STRAWBERRY JAM

I had lunch yesterday with some delightful new friends, Rachel and Beth, who contacted me about the blog. They were curious to know how my whole jamming thing got started.

Well, do you know that mania that descends at the farmer's market when you're standing in front of a massive amount of edible beauty—let's say a table of heirloom tomatoes? It happens to me all the time. I look at the tomatoes and get this particular kind of happiness, the components of which include: joy at seeing something so pretty, gratitude for the extraordinary abundance of nature and panting greed, which is all the more fun because unlike the avarice I suffer when looking at, say, a Maserati Quattroporte or Old Master drawings, I can afford to indulge it. Indeed, the only time I feel really rich—ie, in easy possession of formidable economic power—is at the farmer's market. When I feel happiest is when friends and family are eating the food I've cooked for them. Buying produce puts me right in the middle of those two powerful emotions. Is it any wonder that the farmers' market sometimes makes me loose my mind?

It usually goes like this: I'll pick out a few tomatoes for myself. Then, because I'm feeling so magnanimous, I'll get a few more so I can invite friends for dinner. And a couple extra, perhaps, just in case extra guests arrive. And maybe it wouldn't hurt to get another nice one to slice for my breakfast the following day. And a couple more especially handsome specimens would make a gorgeous still-life on the kitchen counter. And since the damn things only cost a few bucks, why not just grab a few more for the simple pleasure of buying them. It all makes perfect sense at the time. Then I get home, lug the bulging bag up the stairs to Greenvalley and discover, to my shock, what 10 pounds of tomatoes actually look like on my kitchen counter. Gran used to gently chide me if I left any food on my plate by asking, "Were your eyes bigger than your stomach?" Ten pounds of tomatoes is bigger than a family of stomachs.

Now back to Rachel and Beth's question about jam: I got the Big Eyes while buying strawberries in April 2008, and as I was walking back to my car, wondering what in the tarnation I would do with a whole flat (about 12 pounds) of strawberries, Gran's freezer jam crossed my mind. It suddenly struck me as odd that I had never made jam, despite being confident in the kitchen and nostalgic about my Southern roots. So I decided to learn. That's how this whole thing got started.

***

Wild strawberries are being cultivated by a few brave farmers here. I say brave because the berries are tiny, highly perishable and unfamiliar to consumers. Here in LA, everybody seems to want those huge, glossy, lipstick red fruits that dangle grossly the end of a long stem. Berries like that sure look fancy, but bear in mind that water is what makes them swell to D-cup size. Excess water dilutes flavor and also ruins the texture, since extra-sturdy cell walls are needed to hold in the liquid. My French-Canadian shrink disparagingly describes the texture of such mega-berries as "crisp as an apple."

Wild alpine strawberries from Europe, known in France as fraises de bois, don't have anything to do with that. They are hardly bigger than peanuts and their texture is the opposite of sturdy: you can mash them with a careless glance. They are also, allow me to say it, outright ugly, which is something I almost never say about fruit. But look, BELOW. They range in color from green-white to acne-red to almost black. They tend to be misshapen and are densely covered with scratchy seeds, which gives them the unsavory look of a teenaged boy who hasn't learned to groom himself.

But the fragrance of fraises de bois is glorious—profuse and profound. Once you've experienced it, you will understand why seventeenth-century English physician William Butler wrote about strawberries: "Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did."

I got 12 half-pints of fraises de bois at the SMFM on Wednesday. The two French cookbooks I consulted suggested using a 1:1 ratio of fruit to sugar, which struck me as too much. My berries weighed about 2.5 pounds and because they were so sweet and perfumey, I decided off the cuff to cook them with just 1.5 pounds of sugar.

Note that because these small berries have little excess water, they reduce quickly and set up beautifully. My one tip here is to stir them vigorously while cooking, so that the individual berries break down into a consistent paste. (This comes from Valerie Gordon of Valerie Confections and I have a whole post to devote to her and her refined jams as soon as I can do it.)

The color of WILD STRAWBERRY JAM is singular (at TOP, the far-left stack.) I'd call it sang de lievre, hare's blood, because it reminds me of the blood-based sauce in my favorite rabbit dish, lievre a la royale.

But what's best about this preserve is that it expresses the flavor of the fruit clearly, including the slightly bitter edge imparted, I would imagine, by the seeds. This astringency, unusual in jam, imposes a restrained shape on an opulent raw material, and that, I would argue, is one way to understand what we mean when we say the word "elegant."

ELEGANT WILD STRAWBERRY JAM

2.5 pounds wild strawberries (12 half pint containers)

1.5 pounds sugar (3 cups)

juice of 1/4 Meyer lemon

1 Sand the sugar and when ready add the berries. (Gentle readers: I'll have to explain this later because I'm late to go buy Persian mulberries right now)

2 Stirring vigorously, bring to a boil and reduce, all the while continuing to stir.

3 When almost ready, add a few drops of lemon juice to taste. Ladle into jars, seal and process for 10 minutes.

YIELD

12 half-pints of berries, 2.5 pounds, yield 5 pints jam

8 x 4 oz

1 x 8 oz

ODA AL TOMATE

La calle

se llenó de tomates,
mediodia,
verano,
la luz
se parte
en dos
mitades
de tomate,
corre
por las calles
el jugo.
En diciembre
se desata
el tomate,
invade
las cocinas,
entra por los almuerzos,
se sienta
reposado
en los aparadores,
entre los vasos,
las matequilleras,
los saleros azules.
Tiene
luz propia,
majestad benigna.
Devemos, por desgracia,
asesinarlo:
se hunde
el cuchillo
en su pulpa viviente,
es una roja
viscera,
un sol
fresco,
profundo,
inagotable,
llena las ensaladas
de Chile,
se casa alegremente
con la clara cebolla,
y para celebrarlo
se deja
caer
aceite,
hijo
esencial del olivo,
sobre sus hemisferios entreabiertos,
agrega
la pimienta
su fragancia,
la sal su magnetismo:
son las bodas
del día
el perejil
levanta
banderines,
las papas
hierven vigorosamente,
el asado
golpea
con su aroma
en la puerta,
es hora!
vamos!
y sobre
la mesa, en la cintura
del verano,
el tomate,
astro de tierra,
estrella
repetida
y fecunda,
nos muestra
sus circunvoluciones,
sus canales,
la insigne plenitud
y la abundancia
sin hueso,
sin coraza,
sin escamas ni espinas,
nos entrega
el regalo
de su color fogoso
y la totalidad de su frescura.

—PABLO NERUDA

Neruda wrote this and the rest of the Odas elementales in his native Chile, which is of course why he refers to December early in the poem—that's the peak of the Southern Hemisphere's summer tomato season. A full translation of the poem is here.

RECIPE: WHITE CHERRIES IN RASPBERRY SYRUP

Mostly this blog is about putting up; sometimes it's also about taking down. As I said in my initial post, the entire purpose of saving the season is to enjoy your efforts later on.

First thing this morning I went to the fridge and found the jam shelf pretty much depleted—just a smear of SMOOTH APRICOT JAM WITH MAPLE AND VANILLA in one jar and a small dab of DAMSON PASTE in another. Both struck me as pretty gutsy stuff for six a.m. on a soft morning. I wanted instead a taste of something delicate and—to openly pronounce the word—pretty.

What to take down? It's one of those questions that focuses the mind, like the question of what to drink with dinner. When I lived in Paris, I would go for weekends to stay with Philip and Patricia Hawkes at their moated chateau in Burgundy, where every Saturday evening guests were requested to "dress for dinner," which meant—in the Edwardian parlance of the English upper classes—gowns for ladies and dinner jackets for men. ("Black tie" we would say stateside.) On Saturday afternoons, Philip's last chore before heading upstairs to dress was to choose the wines for dinner—always a Champagne, a white and a red—from the vintages aging in the chateau's dank cellar. I loved to watch surreptitiously when he slipped off and reemerged fifteen minutes later with bottles in hand and cobwebs in his hair. The cellar was the one corner of the estate Philip selfishly guarded for himself, his Lordship's domain, and I'm sure that visiting it before Saturday dinner was a principal pleasure of his week.

Later in the evening, Philip would engage his dinner guests in a game he called Mystery Wine. When we arrived at table, the bottles he had chosen earlier would we standing on a massive walnut sideboard with their labels to the wall. Philip poured for everyone, again guarding the label from view, and then asked us to taste the Mystery Wine and guess the grape, region, village, producer or vintage. This ritual was repeated twice each meal—Mystery Wine #1 was a white poured with the first course, Mystery Wine #2 a red served with the meat—and Philip would begin the guessing with the statement "This wine is white" or "This wine is red." (Philip's Champagne was always from Champagne, so no games attached to its service before dinner.)

On my first visits chez Hawkes, Mystery Wine intimidated me because I didn't know enough to venture even the broadest guess beyond white/red, but eventually after four years of drinking my way through Paris winters, I could usually form an opinion about the region and sometimes the village. I knew I had earned a shred of credibility when one Saturday afternoon Philip invited me to accompany him to the cellar. It was like being asked to join an exclusive club.

Philip's cellar had the disordered appearance that men's private quarters often do. His mismatched wine racks were organized by region, but then bottles were arrayed within them by some idiosyncratic system that Philip had devised over 20 years. He tried not to preen excessively as I admired the rarest labels, but his pride peeked through when he showed me bottles he had laid down at the birth of his only child, Lucy. The wine—I can't quite remember what, perhaps a fine Riesling—was to be opened at her fast-approaching 21st birthday. Philip fixed me in his gaze as he imparted this information, and I wondered then and many times since if he harbored a touching but misguided vision of marrying Lucy off to me, if only as a tack against her then-current suitor, a Pakistani boy who did not meet Philip's approval. Today I think about Philip every time I look at a wine list or consider the racks of bottles my garage. If anyone else is around, I'll say: "Here we are faced with the most important decision of the day."

Like a wine list, a jam cupboard offers options, only one of which will seem perfect at the moment of choosing. This morning I addressed myself to the cherry section of the jams and decided capriciously that the one I wanted was WHITE CHERRIES IN RASPBERRY SYRUP.

I guess I would call this a preserve instead of a jam because it consists of halved "white" Ranier cherries suspended in a translucent jelly that is tinted and scented with raspberry juice. But some might also call it a jam. This particular batch set up exactly as I like: the jelly is firm enough to cut with a spoon yet won't hold a hard edge. It slumps on a plate much like a cold beef consommé rather than standing at attention like an aspic with its upright resolve.

The recipe is adapted from Christine Ferber's Mes Confitures but made a bit more practical by using (gasp!) a pinch of commercial pectin to help achieve the set since cherries are a low-pectin fruit. (Ferber calls instead for homemade green-apple jelly that she puts up for use as "pectin stock.") Note that Ferber applies processes that cause this recipe to diverge from the standard American farmhouse-jam method. The first is a two-stage cooking. One: Ferber macerates her fruit with sugar, heats it to a simmer, removes the mixture from the heat and allows it sit overnight. Two: the next day she cooks it again to the jell point. But here, too, Ferber adds an additional step. Before the second cooking, she strains the cherries and reduces the juice by itself. Only when it begins to thicken does she add the cherry meats, return the mixture to a boil and cook it to the jell point. Are these refinements necessary? It's how one Frenchwoman does it.

This preserve is the definition of pretty.

WHITE CHERRIES IN RASPBERRY SYRUP

2.2 lbs (1 kilo) Ranier cherries, pitted, about 4 cups

1 lb raspberries (about 3 6-oz baskets after you've eaten a few from each basket)

2 tablespoons water

4 cups (2 lbs) sugar

juice 1 lemon

1 teaspoon pectin

1 Stem and pit cherries and combine in a bowl with lemon juice and sugar. Allow to macerate for an hour.

2 Turn cherry mixture into a pot, bring to a simmer and then remove from heat. Cover with parchment paper and refrigerate overnight.

3 The next day, gently bring the raspberries and water to a simmer in a small saucepan and allow to stew for 5 minutes until soft. Strain through a fine sieve to collect the juice. Discard the raspberry seeds and pulp.

4 Collect the juice off the cherries by straining them into a preserving pan. Add the raspberry juice and bring to a boil. Reduce at a rapid boil for 5 minutes. Add cherry meats, return to a boil, skim, and continue cooking for perhaps another 10 minutes until the jell set is achieved. Ladle into jars, seal and process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes.

YIELD

2.5 lbs whole cherries and 1 lb raspberries yielded 2 pints preserves on 31 May 2009

3 x 8 oz

2 x 4 oz

NOTES

As with all of Ferber's recipe's, reduce the sugar next time.

RECIPE: MULBERRY-PLUM PRESERVE

Persian mulberries are like fruit from a fairy tale: a familiar thing—the dark summer berry—transformed by preposterous imagination into something strange, enchanted and enchanting.

They grow not on brambles but in trees and are so fragile that they can hardly be picked without disintegrating. Their juice is an indelible dye of indescribable color, closest perhaps to the ancient Mediterraneans' Tyrian purple, the color Enobarbus had in mind when describing his queen Cleopatra's conveyance upon the Nile:

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;

Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were lovesick with them.

Antony & Cleopatra (II, ii)

In the mouth, mulberries are contradictory. They are liquid reservoirs and yet, unlike watery and insipid grapes, they have an intensely concentrated flavor. At first the taste seems too sweet—innocent and flamboyant—until, in the blink of an eye, it contracts into a dark inner core and reemerges as something something winelike and poignant. Mulberries are almost too much, but as with the rose window at Chartres, some mysterious proportion—of acid to sugar, earth to perfume, black to red—exalts the excess.

Don't count on finding mulberries at the grocery store. Their shelf life from tree to rot has to be measured in hours, not days. When you find some at a farmer's market, expect to pay dear and plan to eat them quickly. If, however, you're lucky enough to have a tree in your yard, then you can make a mulberry preserves that, while perhaps not as dazzling as the fresh fruit, is still unlike anything else.

In an odd twist, this recipe was inspired by two Bettinas. My friend and artworld advisor Bettina Korek told me about the mulberry jam her mother used to make from their backyard tree. Then Bettina Birch, who sells her own Bee Green Farm mulberries at Surfas in Culver City every Saturday, told me that she puts up mulberries by packing them cold into jars and pouring hot plum syrup over them. Lordy I can't afford to do that, since the cost of mulberries works out to twenty-some dollars a pound. But working off that idea, I bought four little cartons of mulberries from Bettina B and stretched them with some of her terrific cherry plums.

The below recipe is more like recipe notes than a well-tested master recipe. My objective here was to maintain whole berries in a jelly that set up firmly. It worked well, with a few small caveats noted below.

MULBERRY-PLUM PRESERVE

24 oz mulberries

24 oz (about 2# whole fruit) dark red plums like Santa Rosas, pitted and sliced

2 lbs (4 cups) sugar

juice of one lemon

1 Toss plums with half the sugar and lemon juice and leave to macerate for a few minutes. Very gently pick over the mulberries to remove leaves and fermenting fruits.

2 Turn plums into a pot and heat. As they warm and release their juices you can stir in the remaining sugar. Bring to a boil, moderate heat and skim. Continue stirring and skimming until the mixture has reduced to stage three. (More later on this new system, ya'll, but for now just take it to means that the preserve is almost to the jell point.)

3 Add mulberries. Return to a slow boil, shaking the pot instead of stirring to prevent the berries from sticking. Cook for at least another five minutes or until the preserve has reached the jell point. Ladle into jars, seal and process for 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath.

YIELD

3 lbs fruit yielded 2.5 pints

4 x 8 oz

2 x 4 oz

NOTES

I'm undecided about the plum skins in this preserve. Next time I'd try sieving the plums before adding the mulberries. And the sugar could come down as well.

RECIPE: RUSTIC PEACH JAM FOR AKASHA

I've put on the apron in a professional kitchen exactly three times in my life. The third was today, when I went to jam with Akasha at her eponymous resto in Culver City. Each time I learned something useful.

For the first two episodes, we have to go back almost 20 years, to when I was hanging out in Berkeley at the periphery of the food scene, sort of vaguely hoping to get inside. The benefactor of my ambitions, such as they were, was David Tanis, who at that time was chef upstairs at Chez Panisse Cafe and who today runs the restaurant's illustrious prix-fixe dining room downstairs. Twice David hooked me up with a stage, which is restaurant lingo (pronounced with the Gallic "a," like "stahj") for an unpaid internship.

Stage One was at Greens, the legendary vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco co-founded in 1979 by Deborah Madison, an alumna of Chez Panisse and the San Francisco Zen Center. In the history of American meat-free cookery, Greens was (and remains) the pivot between the days of the Back-to-the-Land hippies—a well-meaning but rather primitive tribe who believed that meat is murder and that the secret of the Green Goddess can be found deep inside The Moosewood Cookbook—and the current era of the Eco-Locavore hipsters, a wealthy but bone-thin people who rigorously seek out organic, raw, vegan, cruelty-free small-plate offerings at cruelly expensive gathering places like M Cafe de Chaya. Between those two, Greens is neither fish nor fowl, as it were, but like Chez Panisse is an institution and a genre in itself. Greens justifies the otherwise seemingly oxymoronic phrase "vegetarian cuisine."

I worked for one day at Greens in the fall of 1990, I guess it was, and the kitchen smelled of simmering stock pots and baking butternut squash. There was some sort of mushroom pasta on the menu, and as the most junior grunt I was put at a counter with a flat of wild mushrooms, which is a lot of wild mushrooms when you consider that they are small, fragile, dirty things and that bits of forest duff cling tenaciously to their damp surfaces. A cook—I wish I could remember his name—demonstrated the necessary light brushing technique by which I was to clean them. And then he gave me an indelible bit of advice.

"Treat each fruit individually," he said.

That he classed the mushroom as a "fruit" was striking enough, a pretty high-class way to put it, I thought. But more importantly, that he saw the mushrooms in front of us as specific and not generic shifted my worldview on its axis. That is to say, I saw a tiresome number of one thing—mushrooms—that needed to be cleaned, which effort could be understood as an attempt to bring each into conformity with some ideal. The cook implored me to see instead an assembly of many varied individual things that were unique in themselves and hewed to no external standard. "Treat each fruit individually" represents an important epistemological distinction between Plato (there is a perfect Mushroom but perhaps no single such mushroom) and Buddha (every mushroom that is, is yet another aspect of Mushroom in its infinite expressions.) In the Greens worldview, food comes from nature and the ideal function of the cook is to reveal an ingredient's inherent qualities as unobtrusively as possible. Over time, that worldview has become my own. Food comes to the cook from nature, and as it passes through his or her hands, it become culture, and a very specific culture at that. The culture of Greenvalley Canning could be summed up by the motto "treat each fruit individually."

Stage Two taught me something technical, so it's easier to explain. David got me into the kitchen at Chez Panisse one particularly busy Saturday afternoon when extra bodies where needed to—literally—peel potatoes. I was nervous and let my peelings fall about my work station as they might, creating a mess that drew Alice Waters's attention. As she swept through the kitchen at one point, she stopped, pushed me aside and crisply put everything in order, with whole potatoes in one tidy pile to the left and peelings in their own compact stack on the right. "Do everything neatly always," she said before darting off. I'd nominate that sentence as the single best piece of kitchen advice ever imparted.

Today I tried to keep both phrases in mind when I went to Akasha, although I have to admit that I was intimidated to be there as a teacher instead of a stagiere. But that's what 20 years will do to a person. Akasha had never put up jam before today, but last week when we had dinner, she was intrigued by my obsession with preserves and asked if I could show her the basics.

Of my three restaurant shifts, today was definitely the most fun. It was a thrill to push such big pots around the top of Akasha's industrial gas range, and she was the best company one might have, by turns encouraging me to join Twitter and then spinning out ideas for how she might serve the peach jam. (My favorite: with buttermilk ice cream and rosemary shortbread.)

Suddenly she stopped to ask me, "What's the cost per serving?" It had never occurred to me to wonder, but now it seemed like the most obvious and essential question to answer. Akasha did, and quickly, with a few calculations on her iPhone, LEFT. I probably shouldn't repeat that proprietary information, but when I asked "Is that expensive?," she said it was—very.

"The thing to do," she said after thinking a second, "is to wait until every farmer has more peaches that he can pick and they're giving them away for a dollar a pound." Exactly, I thought, that's the spirit of saving the season.

As for the recipe: the more-or-less standard ratio for peach jam is 5 parts by weight of prepared fruit to 4 parts sugar. I told Akasha I wanted to try dialing back the sugar a bit, so we used a 4:3 ratio and I crossed my fingers that it would work. I'm happy to report that it did, although I found myself wishing the jam looked more elegant. At the start of the day, I had been nervous to arrive in Akasha's kitchen, and I was sloppy in my work. I forgot to consider each fruit individually and cubed them all roughly rather than slicing each one neatly. I failed the Two Commandments, and I was mildly disappointed with myself.

I tried to play it off by calling it "farmhouse jam"—it did taste awfully good thanks to the Alberta peaches from Bella Flora Farm—and told Akasha we could always run it through a food mill if she wanted to refine the appearance it a bit.

"No, I like it," she said. "It's rustic."

Yes. When she said that word "rustic," I snapped out of my disappointment. I remembered that the beauty of jam, the reason I love jam, is that every jam that is, is yet another aspect of Jam in its infinite expressions.

Do I need to point out that Akasha is Buddhist?

RUSTIC PEACH JAM FOR AKASHA

BASIC RATION by weight

4:3

FOR A BIG BATCH

8 pounds Alberta peaches, peeled, pitted and sliced (Note that 10 pounds whole fruit yielded 8 pounds prepared.)

6 pounds sugar

juice of 3 lemons

1 To peel peaches: cut a shallow X in the stem end of each fruit and, working in small batches, blanch briefly for perhaps 30 seconds until skin begins to visibly loosen. (see photo) Remove from boiling water. When cool enough to handle, remove skins (most will readily slip off), pit and slice into eighths.

2 Stir together prepared fruit, sugar and lemon juice in a large shallow pot. Bring to a full rolling boil. Moderate heat, skim and continue stirring until mixture is thickened to the jell point. (I didn't time this batch, but I'd guess it cooked about 25 minutes. Peaches are juicy and time some time to reduce.) Ladle into pint jars, seal and process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes.

YIELD

10 pounds whole fruit yielded 6.5 pints

6 x pints

1 x 8 oz

SPEAKING OUR LANGUAGE

My friend Michael Kucmeroski—aka Kuch—is a talented baker and an all-around adventurous eater. I like the way he talks about food, and I suspect he'd say the same about me. Today Kuch sent me this link to an article in the Washington Post about a jammer who's speaking our language.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/06/AR2009070603910.html?hpid=artslot

ITALIAN PLUMS

This Is Just To Say

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

—WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

RECIPE: DON'S PLUM SAUCE or WEDDING JAM

Last spring my mother sold her house in suburban Greenville, South Carolina, and moved out to the country. How country? There's a grizzled old plum in the yard, a wild blackberry patch out back and—Heaven's blessing—half a dozen persimmon trees in the thicket.

My first visit there was last Fourth of July, when Mom told she was getting married again. I already knew something was up, because she hadn't been calling as much as usual, and when she did, she would kind of quickly mention that she had been away for the weekend with "a friend." She didn't say Rhonda, or Jane or anyone else I know—and I know all of them. It was just "a friend." I'm old enough to catch the meaning of that kind of friend.

Turns out that the previous October Mom had reconnected with Don, a widower, at their 40^th high-school reunion, and they fell head over heels just like high-schoolers do. It was all pretty fast, my mom admitted, but she said she was old enough to know her own heart, and before the winter was out, she and "Donny" had decided that time was too short to postpone spending the rest of their lives together. Don, by the way, is terrific. I liked him literally from the first moment I saw him because my mother looked so happy and pretty standing next to him. Don brings out my mother's womanly side because he's so manly. Drives a Ford F 350 diesel pickup, hunts deer and wild turkey at his place in the South Carolina pine flats, owns a tractor. But he's also a gentleman to the core and just dotes on my mom. He won't let her cook dinner and even fixes her lunch to take to work every day. What more could a son ask for?

At any rate, that July 4th weekend the plum tree was pelting the ground with a literal windfall, and the blackberries were ripe to the point where you could tickle them off the vine. The backyard harvest became my wedding present.

I collected two gallons of blackberries for a jam to spread between the layers of their wedding cake. Then we picked about a half-bushel of plums that would, I thought, make for a nice cupboard of plum-cinnamon jam—a memento of my mom and Don's first summer together that would last through their first winter of marriage. I undercooked the first batch of fruit, though, and it didn't set, so the result was more of a thick sauce. That night I confessed to failure and served it over ice cream. Don went nuts. He loved it just as a it was—oozy—and jokingly claimed the sauce as his personal stash that we couldn't touch unless he was there to ration it out.

The next day, I cut up enough plums (pictured at the top right of the blog) to make six pints of DON'S PLUM SAUCE, which they served at the wedding with the cake and ice cream. The last few pounds of plums went into a second attempt at jam, which this time did thicken up after enough cooking, a useful demonstration of sustained heat’s effect on pectin, the naturally present carbohydrate that causes cooked fruit to set. Thus a cinnamon-plum preserve entered the Greenvalley repertoire as WEDDING JAM.

I wrote out the recipe for DON'S PLUM SAUCE OR WEDDING JAM last year for another use, and I didn't work out the ratios by weight. But it works fine as it is, I know, because I used it last week to cook up five pounds of Santa Rosa plums. Like MOM'S FAVORITE APRICOT BUTTER, this is a "family preserve," so the entire batch is for Don alone—and maybe for his wife, if he's willing to share.

DON’S PLUM SAUCE or WEDDING JAM

Plums are an exceptionally varied family of stone fruit and they recommend themselves to the home canner for a host of reasons. Meaty, inexpensive, mildly flavored and pleasant to work with, they also have an exceptionally long season thanks to the rolling harvest dates of the many varieties. Plums are also naturally rich in pectin, so they set up nicely if you want them to. As a final asset, plums’ unassertive flavor marries well with aromatics and other fruits alike. Note, however, that the varieties can’t really be used interchangeably. Purple-skinned damsons, tart and somewhat dry when raw, turn into a perfectly balanced plum butter when cooked with ginger, while the luscious Black Beauts and Elephant Hearts, perhaps the most delicious plums out of hand, becomes a sweet, unctuous, naturally vanilla-scented jam. I don't know what variety my mom's plum tree is, but Santa Rosas are close enough and they're what I'd recommend for this recipe.

The basic ratio of fruit to sugar below will yield either a sauce or a jam, depending on how long it’s cooked.

BASIC RATIO by volume

6:5

12 cups plums quartered and firmly packed, about 6 pounds

10 cups sugar

2 lemons

2 3-inch cinnamon sticks.

1 Pit and quarter the plums, then add lemon juice and cinnamon sticks and cover with sugar to macerate for an hour.

2 Put in a pot and heat to a full boil. Moderate heat, skim and keep boiling. Check for a loose set at about 10 minutes or a firm set at 15. Discard cinnamon, ladle into jars and seal. Process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

YIELD

5 lbs plums yielded 4 pints

7 x 8 oz

2 x 4 oz

LORA'S CRAB FEED

No kitchen work today. I went to Lora Zarubin's cabin in Laurel Canyon for crabs and slaw, and it turned into an all-day affair.

    Lunch was heaven: six of us, 10 fat dungeness crabs (brought by Valerie and Stan) and, oh, probably 10 bottles of wine, including Lora's selection of gorgeous California chardonnays (Heitz, Melville, Ramey, an amazing 1998 Stony Hill), that flew in the face of my every snobbish preconception about flabby, over-oaked California whites. I staggered home at five o'clock for a little siesta and woke up 3 hours later, just as the sun was setting. Happy Fifth of July.

     There are relevant details to report: Lora has put down a couple of gallons of vin de pamplemousse—citrus macerated for 40 days in white wine and this and that. She learned to make it in Marseilles and has offered to show me how. Look for the recipe here soon. 

     Also I took a jar of FIG JAM WITH HONEY AND WILD AROMATICS for feedback from the food professionals. Good marks all around. Lora ate it off her finger—you know how chefs are—and declared "that's major, Hon." Valerie, who has an exceptional palette and is probably the most deliberate taster I know, complimented the flavor profile but thought it could be less sweet, which I think is probably true, since the honey really ratchets things up. 

     But here's the best part: Chris made a flan flavored with Pernod for dessert, and as the custard ran together with the jam on Valerie's plate, she had a eureka moment. "The Pernod makes it sing," she said as she tasted them together. That's the kind of thinking that separates a competent home cook like me from a master like her. But I'm not too proud to seize a good idea when I hear it, and as soon as I can I'm making a batch of FIG JAM WITH HONEY, PERNOD AND WILD AROMATICS. Stay tuned.

RECIPE NOTES: PICKLED ONIONS

I got 10 bunches of little onions on Wednesday at the SMFM. The next day Claire and I went for a hike, and she said out of the blue: "I know what I want you to pickle next—onions." Then this morning Beatrice said her favorite pickles are onions. What do you know? The 10 bunches made three pints of pickles which I just took out of the hot-water bath. One for each of us.

I've put up several batches of onions already, but for this one I'm trying to refine the flavor. Although it seems extravagant, I used Champagne vinegar. I haven't been able to find a white wine vinegar I love, I didn't want the color imparted by red wine, sherry or malt vinegars and for this batch I didn't want cider vinegar's flavor, either. The Champagne vinegar isn't exactly neutral—you actually get a passing sense of the chalk-and-chardonnay taste that characterizes the wine—but it's mild and pleasant.

Here, for record-keeping purposes, are the aromatics I used along with the Ball canning technique. Anyone else reading this should consider the below an unproven recipe. I'll update with tasting notes once the pickles have sat for several weeks.

PICKLED ONIONS—recipe notes for 3 pints onions

3 cups Vilux brand vinaigre de Reims

2 tablespoons sugar

1 3'' chile de arbol

3 Mediterranean bay leaves

6 all-spice berries

3 whole cloves

15 whole peppercorns

1/2 teaspoon whole brown mustard seeds

a few cardamon seeds (less than a whole pod)

Follow the procedures from Ball, except I did two changes of brine because of the onions' size. Process in a hot-water bath for 10 minutes.

YIELD

10 bunches onions yielded 3 pints

UPDATE: BRINED CUCUMBER PICKLES

This is what the brined cucumbers look like after 5 days.

   They started to ferment at 3 days. I tasted one and it was delicious—a nice crunch and a haunting dill flavor—but clearly not quite there yet. 

     On day 4 the surface of the brine was covered with a delicate scum that looks like crepe paper made from spider silk. I skimmed it and it returned within 24 hours. 

    On day 6, today, the fermentation seems to have slowed (fewer bubbles) and the cucumbers now look pickled—olive green instead of the fresh green. I'll jar them tomorrow.

STORING GARLIC

Last year about this time, I got a handful of garlic from Windrose Farm, my favorite stand at the Wednesday Santa Monica Farmer's Market. (Their potatoes and onions are the best you can get.) I was pretty surprised by it: even garlic is noticeably better when you get it fresh as opposed to buying it at the grocery store. A week later I went back to get more but, alas, the entire crop had already sold out. 

     This Wednesday, Windrose had the first of the new garlic harvest, and I thought it prudent to stockpile. Lincoln from Windrose said that if you wrap it in paper towels and store it in tupperware containers, it will last "for months."

     I got five pounds, which I swaddled in paper towels, bundled in brown paper and laid it down in those plastic under-bed storage bins you can get at The Container Store.

RECIPE: APRICOT BUTTER

Here's the last of my apricot work for the year. I'm sorry to be done with it, but the seasons are changing fast, and it's time to get on to peaches.

You know the concept of the cook's treat? That's the tasty bit the cook gets to put aside for himself as a kitchen prerogative, something to eat while standing at the stove or when cleaning up after the guests have left—the soft bits of carrot and chicken at the bottom of the stock pot or the charred scrap of fat left after slicing a roast.

Around Greenvalley, apricot butter falls into the same category. Fruit butter is a delicious preserve that begins by stewing fruit with a few drops of water and then passing it through a food mill to produce a smooth puree. Only then do you add the sugar and cook to reduce the puree to thick spread. One can make butter with any fruit—apple butter is probably the best known—and since you puree the fruit before adding sugar and cooking, you can use "ugly" fruits that might look bad in a chunkier preserve. While I was prepping apricots for the small-batch flavor research recorded earlier (APRICOT JAM WITH HONEY AND LEMON VERBENA, SMOOTH APRICOT JAM WITH MAPLE AND VANILLA), I set aside fruits marred by superficial blemishes such as sun freckles, scars or green patches for use as butter. Please note, however, that fruit butter isn't a garbage pail: any fruits with deep splits, brown bruises or overripe mushy spots are unsalvageable and must be discarded.

The beauty of butter is that the basic ratio is simple and infinitely flexible, since you measure cups of cooked fruit puree to cups of sugar. No need to plan anything in advance, just work with whatever happens to be left over. Use about 1/2 lemon for 2 to 3 cups of puree. My one small variation to the traditional method is to replace some of the sugar with honey, just for the heck of it.

Apricot butter is my mother's favorite for it's intense flavor and comfort-food texture, so I set it all aside for her. It's one of only two recipes I'll make for specific family members—the other being DON'S FAVORITE PLUM SAUCE—so I consider the results extra special, what winemakers might call the "family reserve." Or in this case, the "family preserve."

MOM'S APRICOT BUTTER

BASIC RATIO by volume

2 cups cooked fruit puree : 1 cup sweetener

4 cups Blenheim apricot puree—roughly 2.5 pounds. (See step 1 BELOW)

1.5 cups sugar

1/2 cup sage honey

juice from one small lemon

1 Pit and halve apricots. Place in a pot with 1/4 cup water and slowly stew for 15-20 minutes until very soft. Pass fruit through a food mill.

2 Return 4 cups of puree to the pot and add sugar, honey and lemon. Bring mixture to a boil while stirring regularly. Moderate heat, skim and keep stirring until sufficiently thickened, perhaps 20 minutes. Ladle into jars and seal. Process in boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

YIELD

4 cups puree yielded just over 2 pints

4 x 8 oz

1 x 4 oz

NOTES

Apricots can stand long cooking, so you could keep reducing the puree mixture to a very thick paste that will set up firm enough to slice. The resulting fruit paste can be jarred while hot—later serve it on a cheese plate—or poured into a pan to cool, cut into cubes and rolled in granulated sugar for an amazing apricot candy.

RECIPE: SMOOTH APRICOT JAM WITH MAPLE AND VANILLA

More flavor research with Blenheim apricots.

The other day Bettina of Bee Green Farm told me she makes apricot jam with maple syrup, lemon verbena and brandy. I loved the idea at first blush, but then started to second-guess it.

The scent of lemon verbena takes me directly to the Rive Gauche. When I lived in Paris I concluded many a late supper with a cup of lemon verbena tea—it's called verveine over there—to sober me up before walking back to my flat on Quai Voltaire. The reason I probably needed sobering in the first place was that I'd drunk too much cognac, France's most famous brandy, after dessert.

Maple syrup, on the other hand, is 100% all-American, and every time I taste it, I think about Woodstock, Vermont, where I visited the Keefer family as a kid and was told in no uncertain terms that the thick gloop oozing from Mrs. Butterworth's shapely bottle had nothing to do with Fancy-Grade Real Vermont Maple Syrup, which is pale in color, delicately flavored and only slightly viscous.

I'm all for Franco-American alliances—but in a jar of jam? Too confusing for me.

After some thought, I decided Bettina's flavorings fell into two categories: lemon verbena is bright, floating, trebly and yellow-green like something from Poliakoff's palette, while maple syrup and cognac are hazy, diffuse, resonant and yellow-brown like Rembrandt's world. I assigned the bright side to APRICOT JAM WITH HONEY AND LEMON VERBENA, and it rocked my foundations. (By the way, I forgot to mention in the earlier lemon verbena post that while I was ladling the jam into jars, two bees caught its floral scent and buzzed into the kitchen to investigate, which tells you everything you need to know about this ambrosia.)

The present recipe is built around maple syrup and brandy, and it's totally different. Vanilla bean completes a sturdy tripod of flavors. The warm smell that rose from the pot while cooking put me in mind of the winter holidays and fancy desserts, so I decided to make this a smooth jam by passing it through a food mill. My thought was that a smooth jam would lend itself to baking, perhaps spread between the layers of a dense cake or dropped onto a buttery cookie. The color turned out a translucent burnt umber minutely flecked with vanilla seeds, and the flavor is quite rich, maybe too much so for a July morning but I bet it will seem just right on a celebratory December night.

SMOOTH APRICOT JAM WITH MAPLE AND VANILLA

This closely follows the master recipe for BLENHEIM APRICOT JAM with a few additional ingredients and an extra step to mill the jam.

2.2 pounds (1 kg) Blenheim apricots, pitted and halved. (that would be about 6 cups.)

3 cups sugar

3/4 cup top-quality maple syrup

juice from one lemon

1 vanilla bean, split

2 tablespoons brandy

1 Toss apricots, lemon juice, vanilla bean and maple syrup together in a ceramic bowl, cover with sugar and macerate for several hours.

2 Transfer mixture to an enameled pot and bring to a boil. Moderate the heat, skim and continue to cook, stirring occasionally, until jam has thickened but not yet reached the jell point—about 15 minutes.

3 Turn off the flame and allow the jam to cool for a minute, then pass the still-hot jam through a food mill to produce a coarse puree. (There should be almost no waste, so keep at it until you're able to work the skins through the sieve.)

4 Return puree to pot, add brandy and resume cooking. Keep a close eye on it, because the puree will cling to the insides of the pot at this point and the more it thickens, the more liable it will be to scorching. When the jell point is reached—perhaps another 10 minutes—ladle into jars and seal. Process in boiling water for 10 minutes.

YIELD

2.2 pounds apricots yielded 2 pints jam

4 x 8 oz

NOTES

Next time I'd probably tone down the vanilla by using just 1/2 bean per kilo of fruit.

RECIPE: APRICOT JAM WITH BITTER ALMOND

The other day when I bought Blenheim apricots from Bee Green Farm, the proprietress, Bettina, asked me if I used the pits in my jam. I haven't up to now, but I've been meaning to try it. You don't actually use the entire pit, just the internal kernel that you get to by cracking open the pit. The kernel pops out of its shell, moist and neat, and has a powerful taste of bitter almond—the flavor of marzipan.

But here's the thing: apricot pits, like apple seeds, are potentially poisonous. According to internet sources of unproven reliability, apricot pits contain trace quantities of a compound called laetrile or amygdalin that turns into cyanide as it breaks down in the body. The bitter flavor, in other words, is a potent toxin, and it can kill you dead if you eat enough pits. How many is enough? Forty to fifty, if you believe the Web warnings.

The Web is also full of sites touting apricot pits as a miracle food. Laetrile is also known as B-17, and alternative-medicine enthusiasts claim it has curative powers up to and including combating cancer. So apricot pits will either kill you or save your life. LET ME STRESS that I haven't done any first-hand research, so I can't vouch for any of this.

Still, let's get real for a minute. Bitter almond is a traditional flavoring in all kinds of foods. In France, one uses whole—ie, un-pitted—cherries in a clafoutis since the laetrile in cherry pits imparts a bitter almond flavor. And when I lived in France, I ate a lot of clafoutis. Likewise, placing a few apricot kernels in the bottom of a jar of jam is a time-tested practice. How dangerous could it be?

To find out, I cracked a handful of pits, blanched the kernels in boiling water to remove the skins and promptly ate three. I'm still here.

The recipe for APRICOT JAM WITH BITTER ALMOND is exactly the same as my master recipe for BLENHEIM APRICOT JAM. The only difference is that you add a few blanched and peeled apricot kernels to each jar before sealing. How many? I'm not sure. I put up half-pint jars with 3, 4, 5 and 6 kernels per jar. I'll let you know which one tastes best. If I survive to tell the tale.

YIELD

1 kg (2.2 pounds) Blenheim apricots yielded just over 2 pints.

4 x 8 oz

1 x 4 oz

NOTE

I cooked this jam for something like 27 minutes to get a firm set. Christine Ferber gives a recipe for apricot preserves with slivered almonds—you add the nuts in the last 5 minutes of cooking—which would be a nice variation if you wanted to play a sweet almond flavor against the bitter.

RECIPE: APRICOT JAM WITH HONEY AND LEMON VERBENA

Beauty in a work of art entails not just what is included, but what is left out. That is not to say, however, that all ornament is excess, as some Modernists in the last century believed. While nature is perfect in itself, art is nature acted upon by imagination. Art is the result of a will that strives alternately towards purity or towards adornment, and adornment properly bestowed becomes beautiful. Dvorak is said to have taken birdsong as the source for certain melodies in his "American" string quartet but only the composer's efforts are magnificently and enduringly beautiful—are art.

Of course cooking is a craft and not an art, and—even at that— jamming occupies just one small corner of the kitchen repertory. Still, we know that the cook, like the artist, exercises his imagination in divergent directions. Sometimes, he moves towards purity, distilling a single flavor to its most intense essence. "Chaque viande dans son gout naturel est toujours plus agreeable/Each food in its natural taste is always more agreeable," wrote Nicolas de Bonnefons in 1654 in his influential early cookbook, Les Délices de la campagne. Other times the chef works towards adornment and orchestrates an equilibrium between multiple discrete flavors, as was succintly explained 85 years after Les Délices in Les Dons de Comus, an Enlightenment-era guide to cooking and table service written by François Marin, who had worked in Paris' grand aristocratic households. "The science of the cook," explains the introduction to Les Dons,"consists today of deconstructing foods, turning them into quintessences, of taking the nourishing and light juices and blending them together so that none dominates the others." (Both texts quoted from Susan Pinkard's excellent A Revolution in Taste: the Rise of French Cuisine, Cambridge University Press.)

The recipe posted earlier for BLENHEIM APRICOT JAM tries to do the former—distill. Here's one that attempts—foolhardily perhaps—to embellish the Blenheim's perfection. But because honey, lemon verbena and fortified wine make such gracious adornments, the result is very nearly beautiful.

The fortified wine I used is a peach-infused French aperitif called Rinquinquin, but I think that a naturally sweet dessert wine could also work. The peach-and-melon scented muscat from Beaumes-de-Venise comes to mind. The below proportions are approximate. A little more or less wine or lemon verbena would be equally good—but perhaps not too much. It's still apricot jam, only now with a little something extra that you can't quite place. The added flavorings should be a mystery, not a declaration.

APRICOT JAM WITH HONEY AND LEMON VERBENA

2.2 pounds (1 kg) Blenheim apricots, pitted and halved

3 cups (600 g) sugar

juice of one lemon

1 cup honey

2 tablespoons Rinquinquin, Beaumes de Venise or other sweet aperitif wine

6 lemon verbena leaves

Follow the basic apricot jam recipe, adding honey to the sugar and lemon juice when you go to macerate the fruit. Prepare and cook as usual. When the jam has reduced almost to the jell point, add the wine and lemon verbena leaves. Cook a few minutes longer until ready. Ladle into jars and seal. Process in boiling water for 10 minutes.

YIELD

2.2 pounds of apricots yielded about 2.5 pints

4 x 8 oz

2 x 4 oz

NOTES

I cooked this batch 25 minutes for a firm set—a true fork jam. I might slight the honey next time for a less sweet finished product. Then again I might not. I'll update these notes after tasting the jam on toast with butter, etc.