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.
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