It's Jammin' Time!

And I don't mean the toe-tapping kind, I mean the kind that adds a little zing! to a meal.

Take Crabapple jelly. Not just for toast, is it? I like to finish off a pork tenderloin with a thin little slathering, and it's a great basting for a ham.

But there's this peculiar time in August, hard to define, when you know it's time for raspberries. One of my favorite things to preserve is Raspberry Jelly and Raspberry Jam, although I don't know if anybody does it better than my friend Ida. Between her donation and a generous neighbor, I was able to pick my raspberries this year and make preserves to my heart's content.

Food has the ability to stir up strong memories. Just the smell of tart raspberry jam as it's simmering in the pot brings back a memory so strong that after almost 60 years it can't be denied. My Aunt Kathleen was famous for her cooking. Even though she and Uncle Art ran a very busy mixed farm and were raising 10 kids, they had time to make a difference in the lives of some orphans such as myself and my brothers and we never forgot those special summers when we stayed at the farm.

Making preserves was as important as feeding the chickens, as it would add some color and flavor to the winter's meals. And the best time to make raspberry jam is when there's raspberries. Since Kathleen and her oldest daughter Debbie would be too busy to pick berries, they would send out "the kids" with some buckets to the wild berry patch out back on the St. Catherine's Road. In retrospect, it also got us out of their hair!!

The dust. The heat. The flies. But my god, the fun! I guess a few raspberries made it to the buckets, because I know lots made it to our bellies. On the long (or so it seemed) trek back, we giggled and laughed and then complained about how hungry we were. We would be starving!! Only one of Kathleen's delicious biscuits topped with her home made butter would do.

She was quick to gather our buckets and get them picked over, as I'm sure a bunch of giddy hungry kids probably weren't the cleanest berry pickers. They needed to go in the pot asap, the clean jars were lined up on the counter, ready for the ruby red jam.

And then the sugar would be stirred in. And the simmering would begin. We were almost comatose with hunger by this point, trying hard to be patient, and then the unmistakable tart smell of raspberry jam was enough to make us faint. We would be shushed outside to play while she finished up in the kitchen, with the promise of some biscuits and warm jam, and a bottle of milk, fresh from the barn, nice and cold.

And how little we knew. That was an old woodstove, jumping off the floor in the heat of an August afternoon, with Kathleen and Debbie constantly feeding it wood. A lot of kettles needed to be boiled to sterilize those jars. They must have been so tired, but no one ever complained. Except us kids....................

But the wait was always worth it. We would all be huddled around the big farm table, dangling our dusty little legs with anticipation as a plate of Kathleen's delicious biscuits would be set before us, and she would help us butter them up. Then to see the little bowl of gorgeous red raspberry jam, still warm, and a dish of little cubes of cheese.......oh my god, a feast not soon forgotten!

Well, those days are long gone. Both Kathleen and Art have passed on, the farm house burned down, and memories are what we have.

Nothing triggers those memories quicker for me than the simple smell of raspberry jam simmering on an August afternoon, and nothing can take them away.

It makes one wonder, is there anything we could be doing to foster and encourage happy memories for our own kids and grand kids? Kathleen did it without planning, it was just part of her life. And for me, I attribute a lot of my gifts to the kind and patient examples she set. I don't know if I ever thanked her enough.