Month: June 2020

Summertime In A Jar: Blackberry Jam

Blackberry jam. Pure goodness. A rare and precious thing.

One of the most poignant and bittersweet memories in my childhood is of steaming vats of water in an already-steamy, un-airconditioned rustic kitchen, used first to slip tomatoes of their paper-thin skins and then to boil Ball jars filled with said tomatoes, chopped, until the satisfying “pop” of a vacuum jar meant they were safe to store. These bright red jewels (and others, like blackberry jam, and strawberry, too) lined the shelves of the stone steps that led to a dirt basement under the kitchen and ensured a winter’s worth of sauce and a fresh burst of summer flavor on even the bleakest days.

I was a reluctant helper. It seems the sauce always popped when I passed by, burning my skin, or the tomatoes were stubborn in their skins. Mostly I passed through the kitchen as quickly as possible, fleeing to books or shady spots on our wooded property, ever-mindful of snakes.

These days I understand better the value of those jewel-toned jars.

They represent plenty, excess even, so much abundance that it must be stored away. They guard against want on short days with not much sun and preserve a summer’s effort so that you can slide into those lazy days when there is two feet of snow on the ground outside the window.

Blackberry jam is one of the first products of early summer, ready before tomatoes bent the shoulder-high tomato plants under their weight. Gathered carefully, ever mindful of snakes that enjoyed resting on their ample leaves, blackberries turned into sweet-tart blackberry jam are one of life’s best pleasures.

My lovely friend Martha of Full Moon Acupuncture has happy blackberry vines in her Baltimore backyard and is generous with them This blackberry jam is made with only three ingredients: blackberries, sugar, and lemon juice. Because blackberries are naturally high in pectin, it is not necessary in this recipe for low-sugar blackberry jam.

The formula for blackberry jam is simple if you want a stereotypical batch: weigh your blackberries and use an equal amount of sugar. For me, this results in sickly-sweet jam that tastes more of sugar than sunshine-y blackberries. For this recipe, I weighed my berries and used half that amount of sugar. You could use even less for a low- or no-sugar blackberry jam, but that would take longer on the stove.

Low-Sugar Blackberry Jam

(makes five half pints, plus a little leftover)

Weighing your blackberries is the best option here, as cup measurements are challenging. I use half as much sugar as blackberries – it’s a good formula for a juicy, blackberry-forward, low-sugar blackberry jam.

Ingredients

Just over six cups of blackberries, by weight (50 ounces)

Just under 3 cups of sugar, by weight (20 ounces)

Two tablespoons lemon juice

Method

If you are planning on water bath processing your jam, get your jars ready first. Wash jars and lids in warm, soapy water while you bring a stockpot of water to boil on the stove. Boil clean jars for two minutes, then move to a clean dish towel. Dip lids, ladles, and anything else you will use in the canning process into the boiling water and set aside.

Put a clean plate in the freezer to test the blackberry jam for doneness. This will become clear soon.

Place blackberries, sugar, and lemon juice in another large pot (leave lots of headspace for the jam to foam). Mash slightly and bring to a boil.

Play something nice on the radio, or load up a podcast. Lower heat to medium low, and stir as the jam boils/simmers. Stir the foam down as it rises.

Over time, your jam will stop foaming, become glossy, and thicken substantially. This could take between 20 to 30 minutes. Be patient. Be attentive. Take this as an opportunity to be mindful.

To see if your jam is ready, remove the frozen plate from the freezer and spoon a bit of jam onto it. Let cool for a couple minutes, then drag a finger through the jam. If it makes a path that does not get filled immediately by liquid-y jam, it’s ready to can.

If the path fills in with blackberry jam, keep boiling and stirring. Wash the plate, dry completely, and put it back in the freezer. Test after another ten minutes until the path your finger makes stays clear.

Ladle blackberry jam into prepared jars, leaving ¼” headspace. If you are not planning on water bath processing, set aside and let cool at room temperature without moving overnight, then move to the ‘fridge or freezer.

To water bath can, heat a large stockpot of water to boiling. Carefully lower the jars of blackberry jam into the boiling water (make sure the water is at least an inch above the jars). Boil for five minutes, then remove to cool on the counter overnight. Listen for the lid to “pop,” indicating a seal. This might take a full 24 hours. If the lids don’t pop, you could either remove the lid, add a new one, and reprocess, or you can place in the freezer or ‘fridge.

Blackberry jam is good in the ‘fridge for a couple weeks (maybe more, depending on how much sugar you used), and correctly processed for years.

Recipe Notes

You could make a sugar-free blackberry jam with sweet berries and lots of time, too. Keep the lemon juice to brighten up your berry flavor.

For a blackberry jam recipe with pectin, follow the directions on the pectin package for best results.

If you prefer a seedless jam, strain the jam after it thickens and before pouring into jars. This is a bit of an arduous task but results in a silky-smooth jam.

Go even further and add a tablespoon of fresh lavender to the jam and let it cool slightly before straining again and processing as desired.

Reflection

The Susquehanna River.

So I am reading The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, a book from 2017 that reminds me of how elemental it is to retreat to a natural space when it’s time to consider things – to reflect, if you will.

This week, KWeeks and I hit the road for a couple of days to camp, only to realize on our one full day there how challenging it is to just leave everything behind simply because you get in the car and make the wheels turn.

But sitting on the banks of any kind of water, surrounded by birdsong and only just a faint hint of traffic noise, is a good way to begin to release, to loosen every clenched thing inside that you didn’t even know was clenching.

It was not enough time, nearly, but it was a taste, and my first trip out of town since February. This blog does not mean I am back – I am keeping all of my writerly things close to my chest in terms of poems and other work – but it seems fitting to post the theme of this latest retreat here.

As ever: wear your mask. Be kind. Black Lives Matter.

BUT WE WERE ON A BREAK

So this is it for me. I am officially going on a break with this blog, at least until the fall, I think, or until I redesign the blog and move it to another host, or something becomes so compelling that I simply MUST SHARE with the three regular readers of this blog.

What, Three Readers, will you read when I am gone from here?

I have been through the stages of COVID-induced writing: defiant daily chronicling of quotidian thoughts, a desperate ploy for some kind of structure, haphazard posting of things that I find interesting.

I have made some delicious food here. I will make more.

But just not for a while.

For now, I will defy the nature of the season and the people who are flouting the virus that still runs rampant and turn inward for a but. Turns out, this space may be more of an avoidance tactic at this point.

But it’s not serving anyone. S

So adieu, for now. See you back when the shadows lengthen and the days shorten.

Be kind. Wash your hands. Black Lives Matter. 

How To Be A Poet, by Wendell Berry

Walking helps. Nature is a balm.

I seem to have temporarily lost my voice.

Not my actual one – the one that I use in my work.

A combination of fear, doubt, grief, the weight of the world. I feel silenced and flummoxed and am trying to just listen, learn, and act. No one needs to hear what I have to say right now, but I can still spread the word of others.

Today, though, here’s a white man. Wendell Berry, a Kentuckian, even. This poem is for me, and, when he wrote it, also for himself, as a reminder of how to do this thing that, for me, in many ways, is as reflexive as breath.

We will someday come out of these things – pandemics, the clutch of systemic racism – and be, hopefully, better on the other side.

For now, here is a note to self for when I have more to say.

How to Be a Poet

(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

 

Stay well. Be kind. Black Lives Matter.

Sunday Poem: For My People by Margaret Walker

I am finding all sorts of beautiful and heartbreaking and hopeful voices in my travels these days. I am trying to moderate my intake of the interwebs, so I am simply posting without broadcasting.

Today’s poem, “For My People” by Margaret Walker, is presented here in two forms: the written form, as is usual, and above, the poem read by Leah Ward Sears, a justice in the Supreme Court of Atlanta, Georgia.

So many layers when you add another voice to the reading of this, especially this particular voice. The video above is more than just the poem; it’s also a bit about Sears’s life and why she chose this as her favorite poem. She is connected to this poem through her life as a child, and then again in her life’s work.

Please enjoy.

For My People

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
dragging along never gaining never reaping never
knowing and never understanding;

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama
backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor
and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking
and playhouse and concert and store and hair and Miss
Choomby and company;

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn
to know the reasons why and the answers to and the
people who and the places where and the days when, in
memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we
were black and poor and small and different and nobody
cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to
be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and
play and drink their wine and religion and success, to
marry their playmates and bear children and then die
of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox
Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New
Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy
people filling the cabarets and taverns and other
people’s pockets needing bread and shoes and milk and
land and money and something—something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time
being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when
burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled
and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures
who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in
the dark of churches and schools and clubs and
societies, associations and councils and committees and
conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and
devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,
preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by
false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way
from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,
trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,
all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless
generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a
bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs
be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
rise and take control.