I was drunk the first time I ever made jam. My friend Nick and I had been running around my neighborhood in Long Beach, boosting each other up on bridged hands or shoulders to reach the branches of fig, lemon, and other citrus trees overhanging back-alley fences. We came back to the apartment with grocery bags full of pilfered fruit that we cooked down with sugar and squeeze pouches full of pectin. It was a sticky mess, and a hell of a lot of fun. And we did it all, in a sense, because of art: It was 2008, a few years after the collective Fallen Fruit began to experiment with the idea that, in Los Angeles, fruit could be a public good, free for the taking. There were neighborhood maps of trees that branched over public property — technically making the fruit hanging from them public property — fruit-related works of art, and Public Fruit Jams where people would come together as a community to make jam from the figs, loquats, guavas, Meyer lemons, kumquats, endless varieties of oranges, and other fruits that thrive in Southern California.
So we did it for ourselves, a fun weekend night with an old friend in town: drinking and stealing fruit, drinking and boiling it with sugar. California, still brand-new to me as a place to live, appeared impossibly full; if I needed a lemon, I could just walk outside and get one. That felt like magic, and it still does.
In the years that followed, the act of jarring a special bit of fruit — and learning more about where it came from, the way that the sugar preserves it, and the people who did the canning — became a part both of my work and of my social life. Jam was suddenly trendy, and the idea of it, of capturing a perfect ingredient at its prime, became both a basis and metaphor for a new version of the same California cuisine that we've been reinventing over and over again since Alice Waters first made a salad. Rather than a community undertaking, jam was turned into a lifestyle product, a brand, an aspiration. And then quite suddenly, it was not.
Two people, both professionals in their own manner, taught me how to really make preserves: without pectin, without stolen fruit, and with the necessary skill so that a jar can actually be kept in the cabinet for a year instead of in the fridge for who knows how long. I learned to watch how hot jam droplets slide off the bottom of a spatula, knowing that the moment when two cling together was is a signal that the pot is done. There was fruit to try from old trees, from trees that were never watered, from trees that no one else grew. A fruit grown almost solely for the purpose of making jam, that DH Lawrence breathlessly likened to “autumnal exrementa”? Of course we wanted to make something out of that.
While I was forever game to tag along if there was something new or different to try, I never had the money or the patience to make more than a bit of my own jam in California. But it always scratched a particular itch that I’ve had at least since I was 10 years old: for better or worse, my brain is inclined to learning how to make things from their most basic, almost elemental parts. It's why I spent hours sewing books and sorting lead type in college, why I fell down an internet rabbit hole the other night that went past browsing for non-ugly brooms to reading about growing broom corn and how Shaker-style brooms are made. There’s comfort in the knowing, in the doing.
So it was no real surprise that in the fall of our most wretched year, after the fruit trees were harvested, I threw myself at jam-making like I never had before. Faced with a few bushel baskets of apples and peaches (at the top of Gurney Hill, peaches ripen just after the equinox) I felt a quiet desperation, knowing sunshine-y and cider-like smells would quickly give way to rot. Sure, I needed something to pass the time, but it was more than that: this year has finally pushed me over some invisible threshold into a solidly prepper-adjacent place, and I had the opportunity to stash away a lot. Still, I didn’t can anything out of necessity born of hunger, or even purely of not wanting to waste. Trying to make things from the garden last through the winter is pleasurable, something to enjoy even when I’m not eating (but especially so when I am). Having a stash of jam tucked away with the garlic and dried beans has become aspirational in a new way, because I now unfortunately want to be able to grow everything for myself. Or at the very least enough canning tomatoes to carry me through to fresh ones coming back into season again.
The tomatoes were a bust this year, but in the orchard the peaches had a particularly great crop, and fruit on the bushel-scale almost demands canning (or freezing or drying). There’s really no other way to use that much short of opening a pie shop (btw!). So late September became jam season, a race against rot: After Story was asleep and after dinner, I turned the stove back on to blanch peaches and simmer and strain chopped apples and boil jars.
I had plenty of time to think while nursing those bubbling pots, and you won’t be too surprised to hear that I spent some of the time thinking about jam. We fed Story yogurt with fancy jam stirred into when she was a baby; we got a cut-rate deal for quart-sized plastic containers from our jam friend who was, at the time, so close that our daughter called her “aunt.” We gave out jars of jam — strawberry-rhubarb, with a customer sticker — at our wedding. If things had gone differently, my name might have been on the cover of the ill-fated jam cookbook published earlier this year. But they didn’t, and it wasn’t.
Technically speaking, I didn’t make an actual jam. My goal is to fit as many pounds of fruit as possible into each pint jar, so instead of peach jam I made peach butter, which has a much lower yield (and more concentrated flavor). I made a lot of apple jelly too, which I’ve never managed to crack before. If you get it right, the flavorful, pectin-rich liquid leftover from cooking a lot of quartered apples—cores and all—boiled again with a rather astonishing amount of sugar yields a clear, ruby-colored jelly with a perfect soft set. The cooled jelly quivers, but isn’t sturdy enough to cut into cubes like jell-o; spread over hot toast, it half melts and tastes wonderfully of rosy apples. But if you don’t boil it hard enough and long enough, hitting 220 degrees, you end up with syrup, which is all I’ve ever ended up with in the past. This year, I’m sending our jars for Christmas presents, and still have plenty at home.
Recently, Helen Rosner asked a question that the California Jam Era was never really able to answer: “what on earth do people do with jam?” she wrote in a much tweeted about aside in her New Yorker story about the drudgery of pandemic cooking. You can use jam outside of breakfast and dessert, but only here and there; as delicious as it can be in and of itself, as an ingredient jam is far from transformative. Even the idea of saving one fruit’s flavor to enjoy in the season to come, when another will ripen, isn’t much more than a novelty when you have a year-round growing season like California’s. When the cold is coming, when there will soon be nothing fresh to bring in from the garden for at least six months if not longer, it just hits different.
So what do you do with jam? Hold on to something for longer, and spread it on toast.