Time for jam

Posted on | August 27, 2005

 

Each year, at around the same time, I get out my copper preserving pan and start my «jam week».

This pan has a history. My wife gave it to me, just a few months after we arrived at Vingrau. I understood that day…that she understood me. Because, to give a preserving pan to the man in her life was not enirely part of her concept of « prince charming »*. After having looked for a long time, she had chosen, with a great deal of wisdom, to adapt her concept of her « prince» and stop looking. A good thing for Clos des Fèes, which, without her, wouldn’t exist. Ok, I stray…

All that to say that to make jam is my first act of vinfication of the year. Let me explain. One first needs to find perfectly ripe apricots. For that, my friend Jeannot leaves me two or three well endowed branches in his large orchard, such that the fruit was already harvested more than fifteen days previously, quite green, quite hard, just like the supermarkets love them… Then, when I gather these deep coloured apricots, spotted with red, with melting and perfumed flesh, I think it is one of the best fruits in the world, a world which walks on its head because it accepts to eat fruit which is green without saying anything. Perfectly ripe fruit is obvious. It is more complicted for grapes, but also obvious once one has understood: a good wine can only be made with mature fruit…

All whilst gorging myself, I reflect on the sugar I will add. 800g for a kilo? 700g? 600g? All the recipes or nearly all are based on bought fruit, which is less rich in sugar. Instinctively, I look for the good dose. Too little, and the jam won’t keep. Too much, it would be cloying. Not really a recipe: one must let it express its feelings. One exploits and enriches at the same time a personal «savoir faire», a «knack».

After, the stones removed, it is time to macerate cold. And yes, even in wine, it brings colour, taste and texure. The second day, cook the syrup whilst I peal the apricots. What, you have never eaten jam from pealed apricots? Well, it leaves you something great to discover. Nothing else between the roof off your mouth and the earflaps, just crystallized fruits, which melt and surrender without holding back… A marvel. A revolution (of the palate): It’s impossible, after, to go back because this jam is too different, the pleasure…superior. For cooking, no thermometer. There also, one lets one’s instinct speak. One risks of course not waiting until the perfect moment but, in the end, one really has made ONE’s jam. With intelligence. With memories. With one’s heart.

And it’s then, whilst skimming my jam, that I start to think, for the first time, of this year’s wine-making.

At the top, a photo of my production this year: « Rouge du Roussillon » with Bourbon vanilla« Royal Roussillon » with diced mango, « Mara des bois » with Madagascan pepper.

Hervè Bizeul

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