J is for JAM

If you cared to glance out of the kitchen window in the home where I was raised, you could see for miles. Over to the left was the village where we went to school and where dad collected his morning and evening papers, bought essentials that mum had run out of and also got the car serviced. There was an honesty about the whole village to the point where, even if he failed to make it into the shop before closing time, the evening copy of the Belfast Telegraph was left in a little grey box with a hinged lid just outside and if you went there at eleven o'clock at night, your copy would still be waiting for you.

Looking out the front you see all the way to the spires of the cathedral in Armagh and beyond, to the hills of Newtownhamilton, but in the summer time your gaze would not have gone far beyond the fir tree at the bottom of the garden that towered above everything else and the fruit trees that provided the raw materials for part of mum's jam making enterprise. In this particular area we had Victoria plums and though they were extremely pleasant to eat, she preferred only to use them for jam in the absence of something more appealing, so normally the plums were left to ourselves and the wasps to fight over and I can tell you there is nothing more apprehensive that closing your hand around a plum in the process of picking it, only to find a wasp nestled happily on the other side and not impressed by your disturbance.

We had therefor, to travel a little further to get the fruit that made the best jam and indeed, more correctly the jam that dad favoured and this was to be found on the delicate and fragile branches of the damson tree. To collect damsons was a dangerous occupation for at any moment a branch on which your ladder was resting, could snap without any prior warning and you were usually left either hanging precariously to an equally fragile neighbouring twig or else in a heap somewhere below the tree. But there was a method of being able to rest your ladder against such trees so that not all of your weight pressed against the wood. Anyway the trees were never very tall so any fall was unlikely to cause permanent damage. Dad probably had about twenty or thirty damson trees around the farm and often sold much of the fruit to neighbours and friends who either made it into jam or sold it on at markets. However, a selected amount was always kept for the home jam industry, not that any of the finished product ever made it beyond our home, except occasionally jar full was given as a present to an aunt, a granny or the odd visitor.

Anyway, along with some strawberries that were grown by a neighbour less than half a mile away and a few punnets of raspberries bought from one of the minor small fruit enterprises in the area, mum now had the essential ingredients to make enough jam to last the whole of the autumn, winter and spring.

Not all the jam was made at the one time, as the different fruits ripened over the whole of the summer but regardless of the fruit involved, the process didn't seem to change very much. It always involved collecting the used jam jars and marmalade jars from the out house where they were stored, washing them thoroughly in hot water and then leaving them to dry naturally. Meanwhile mum would have made a trip to the local supermarket to buy the little packs of covers that would be used to seal in the freshness until it was needed later in the year. These consisted of little circles of translucent, greaseproof paper that would sit directly on top of the jam surface, larger transparent circles of cellophane that would become the 'lids' and a selection of rubber bands that kept the covers in place. Also there were lots of little rectangular labels on which you could write the name of the jam being made. Not being an avid jam maker myself. I've no idea what other ingredients mum used, apart from plenty of sugar and some setting agent, which she tipped, with the fruit, into a huge grey, metal saucepan that had a handle attached across the top much like that found on a bucket. The fruit and sugar seemed to stew away for hours on the cooker hob and eventually she would bring the whole concoction out into the scullery and with the help of a small jug, would pour it into the waiting jam jars. After the mixture had cooled sufficiently, the covers were put in place and the completer pile of jam would be stored away in a cupboard and appear again throughout the next year.

Isn't it true that when something is placed in the right hands, even something as simple as a damson plum, it can become completely different. It would have been easier to leave the plums on the trees for the birds and the insects for it was never an easy job to collect them and they were certainly not a fruit that was very popular to eat raw, but they made beautiful jam. And so it is with us, left to our devices, we can never be what God intends us to be but when we hand everything over to Him and He takes control, He can make us into beautiful vessels to do His work and complete His plan for our lives. In John's Gospel, Jesus says 'I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.' No greater sweetness is found than in the presence of the Master.