Strawberry Saturday

Strawberry Saturday

A Saturday post should be practical but relaxed, like the day itself, right? This post is about making jam, and if you have never had a jam-making experience you have missed out! It is a treat for all the senses, easy, fun and a connection to our ancestors.

Now that it is strawberry season it is the ideal time to start. There is something magic about strawberries, perhaps because they are the year’s first berries. Even more ideal is to have the whole experience, from picking the berries yourself on to the ladling the finished product into jars. The ultimate, of course, is picking wild strawberries on a sunny hillside, but wild strawberries are tiny, tiny little things and you need a ton of them. Also it is difficult to find the requisite hillside. The aroma and taste are exquisite and the color of the jam a joy to behold. When my mother used to write to say that she had made a dozen jars of wild strawberry jam, I would picture the warm sun on her back as she picked on the hill behind the house, smell the wafting aroma in the kitchen, see the pink froth on the kettle and the light shining through the finished jars lined up on the windowsill. I have to get my berries at the Saturday market, but going there is a fun experience in itself.

 Back home, with the jam at the boil, the house fills with delicate aroma while I admire the pale pink of the skimmed off foam and wait impatiently for it to cool so I can enjoy a first taste. Then comes the ladling into jars of the deeper pink sweet fruit itself. Some will be taken to friends and some will fill jam tarts next winter. But the first jar will be presented at Sunday morning breakfast and spread on toast. What better start to the year’s celebration of nature’s bounty can there be?

I said at the beginning that some posts will not be “green”, and this is one. On second thought, however, isn’t the enjoyment of nature a basis for all environmental concern?