No, that's not a typo.
We had berries in our backyard this year. Actually, our neighbors had them in their backyard. But branches from their bush flopped over our shared fence like bangs on an emo teenager. You could find me out there each day for a week or so, tugging gently at the little black clusters to see which ones came off easily.
They looked like blackberries, but there are so many blackberry variants and children, each with its own identity, that we decided to just call the fruit backberries.
And I wanted to turn them into jam.
I've never made blackberry jam before, so I turned to the smattering of preserving books that I own. What better way to compare them than to read each one's approach to my simple goal?
The first up was Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It by Karen Solomon. This book has been getting a lot of positive press, in part because Solomon is friends with a number of Bay Area food bloggers. But the positive press also comes from the accessible recipes. They're clearly laid out, written in a friendly tone, and obviously developed by someone who lives in a snug home without a lot of extra space for kitchen gear: Her beef jerky recipe uses a low-heat stove instead of a separate dehydrator, numerous smoking recipes use a stovetop smoker and sawdust instead of a backyard smoker, and so forth.
But it doesn't contain a recipe for blackberry jam. This omission became a theme. When I showed the book to a friend, he was surprised that he couldn't find information about cornichons. Last week, I tried to find advice on making traditional cucumber pickles, the kind that sit in a salt-only brine for 2 weeks and require a daily skimming from the cook. No luck, though she does offer a technique for kimchee. (I should note that the book does include a strawberry jam, but I didn't know if the exact same proportions would work.)
I suspect Solomon simply didn't have space for all these items. You might guess from the title that the book is just about preserving, but Solomon tackles the entire pantry. Alongside recipes for jam, cured meat, and pickles, there are recipes for crackers, chocolate candies, infused spirits, homemade pasta, and other foods that at first seem out of place. Such breadth in a slim book does not allow for much depth. The recipes may inspire cooks to try new things, but they may not provide answers for cooks already inspired to try one specific thing.
From Solomon's book I turned to Putting Food By, the classic, but perhaps hard to find, book on preserving by Janet Greene, Ruth Hertzberg, and Beatrice Vaughan. Every time I rummage through this chunky little paperback, I am charmed by the prose. It's written in a slightly archaic tone — the book was originally published in the early '70s — that evokes a stout Midwestern homesteader teaching a new neighbor the ropes. Consider this text on freezing seafood:
Fish must be cleaned immediately and washed in fresh, running water; ocean fish may be kept alive in sea water, but neither fish nor shellfish should be cleaned or cooked in sea water … You will be meticulous about sanitation and sterilizing surfaces. The packaging materials will be adequate for preventing ice crystals or freezer burn. The seafood will be sharply frozen, stored at minimum temperature, and used relatively soon.
Of course PFB, as the authors refer to their book, has a blackberry jam recipe. In fact, it has two: One is a diet version with less sugar and more gelatin. The one I used has optional extra steps for de-seeding the blackberries — I opted to not de-seed — but emphasizes the important detail: "… you will be adding an amount of sugar equal to the measurement of prepared berry pulp." The proportions mirror the ones in The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard, which friends of ours recommended to us.
Small-Batch Preserving, as its name suggests, gives techniques for the quantities non-homesteaders might deal with. It occupies a space between Jam It and Putting Food By: It has a depth of recipes closer to Putting Food By but without the wrapping prose; like Jam It, it is little more than recipes.
In the end, my tour of preserving books stopped at Putting Food By, but with a twist. I put my "backberries" through the maceration step mentioned in Jam It's strawberry jam recipe.
Maceration simply means letting solid ingredients sit in liquid ones. Winemakers use maceration to extract the color compounds and tannins of grape skins into the clear liquid: It's how you get red wine. In simple terms: the longer the maceration, the more tannins and color in the wine.
But what role does it play when making jam? Winemakers remove the skins and seeds floating on the wine, but a jam maker dumps everything into a pot: The raw source of color and flavor compounds is still there. Solomon doesn't offer an explanation, but The Oxford Companion to Wine notes that maceration, at least in a winery, extracts compounds via diffusion from cells whose walls remain intact during the crush. The Oxford Companion to Food offers a different theoretical rationale for the step, saying that maceration softens the ingredient in question.
Jam It is a good, solid book, despite the gaps in coverage. I'll flip through it often and no doubt make many pantry items from it — crackers, homemade peppermint patties, and more all caught my eye. But my preserving heart still belongs to Putting Food By.
