photo by Lisa McKinnonI recently won my first blue ribbon at the Ventura County State Fair for a an organic plum sauce in the dessert topping category! Very very exciting. As Chris and I were entering jars (and thank heavens for his good handwriting or the labels would have been illegible!), I noticed the tense feeling in the room. Those doing intake rarely smiled and didn't give away too much information.
Jelly Jars All A Quiver at the Judges Table And some people entered every single category they could, a year long dedication of canning, jarring and stewing. I knew I'd stepped into a world where perfection and tight-lipped pride ruled and well, I was daunted. You see, I fail anytime I even get close to perfectionism -- matter-of-fact, I might be clinically allergic. I can charm and create beautiful moments with the best of them but the minute my 'better than' ego takes hold, the project is doomed -- all must come from the heart.
My plum jelly and sauce making has a long, sorted past that started with the perfection of our great great aunts in Mississippi. This month my latest memoir in Edible Ojai tells about this experience of my sister and I attempting our first jelly-making.
Since that event, I have had several other jelly experiences from pots boiling over and staining much of my kitchen a deep, sticky, plummy hue,
to jelly that gels too much, hardly willing to leave the pot it was cooked in, or gels too little because I refused to add more sugar once the flavor was perfect and well, there you have it --Plum Sauce was born. In all fairness, once opened and in the fridge, it does have a gelled consistency but three weeks after being jarred, sitting waiting to be judged? it was considered sauce.
So from plum sauce to plum hockey pucks, I've seen it all, even once or twice have we pulled off "just so" but that is our Moby Dick, our impossible whale to land so we revere it when it happens . Please enjoy the story of how this all came to be, the journey of Gone Plum Crazy Jelly by the Sisters Grimm.
The following memoir is currently available in the latest Edible Ojai.
GONE PLUM CRAZY: The Flight from Perfectionist Imperfections to Just So
By DK Crawford
Watching my great, great aunts from Mississippi bottle homemade jam and roll out buttery half-moon Parker House yeast rolls from scratch to spread it on was pure heaven. The aunts’ blackberry jam and fig preserves were legendary. The smells that emanated from their kitchen were intoxicating and watching their exacting culinary practices was akin to studying master craftsmen.
They were fiercely intellectual, independent-spirited women my mother dubbed “the three furies.” Products of both the Reconstruction and the Great Depression, they rarely minced words. They commanded respect and demanded perfection. They rode stallions and tended a magical sunken garden. One of the three aunts, Myrtle, regularly challenged me well into her late 90s with lightening-speed mathematical tables and grammar challenges, impatiently tapping her cane on the ground when I took too long.
My grandmother and namesake, Dorothy, grew up under the aunts’ loving yet intense Victorian tutelage. She shared a room with fierce Myrtle much of her life and together they helped mold her into the exacting person she became. By the time I was born, my grandmother was a reserved, lion-hearted scientist who patiently taught me about the natural world.
Her scientific nature shone through almost everything she did, especially in the kitchen. Everything was just so and I honestly can’t remember her ever making mistakes or blunders. Everything she (or her cook Laura) touched turned out well due to tried-and-true recipes and techniques.
One of my grandmother’s culinary coups was her plum jelly. It was a crystalline clear, claret-hued concoction, slightly sweet and lightly tart. Her jelly honored the plum’s essence and subtly enhanced what nature had rightly created.
Though I am my grandmother’s namesake, I am far from exacting or perfect. In fact, the harder I strived to be so, the less possible it became. I used to struggle to hide my mistakes, culinary and otherwise, but finally learned that as a creative, I have more highs and lows than I do steady accomplishments. It took me half a lifetime to accept that I am destined to be perfectly imperfect.
Decades after my grandmother’s death, in Ojai (the valley of the moon), my sister, Lys, had the brilliant idea to step into our culinary legacy in homage to our Grandmother Dorothy by recreating her plum jelly. The tiny plums on the trees outside my sister’s cottage appeared to be just the right variety. Our plan was to bottle and send jellies to our Mississippi relatives for Christmas.
As we waited for my sister’s two laden trees to ripen, I had a crisis that caused me to move from my serene single gal’s pad in downtown Ojai to a fixer-upper in Meiner’s Oaks. With the fixer came three dogs, two cats, a man, a child and one tiny air conditioner in a house that turned into a sweltering, un-insulated coffer in the summer.
My male roommate, Rich, quickly realized he was living with a Southern princess who needed a modicum of climate control and made all sorts of future plans for ceiling fans, attic insulation and yes, more window units.
Meanwhile, with the onslaught of Ojai’s summer, my sister’s plums were starting to shrivel. She had bags of them in her fridge and I had some in mine. One morning we discovered tiny bits of mold on the top of two plums and panicked. Mother Nature had decided for us that, ready or not, by Jove! It was time to jell.
Lys showed up with an urgency usually reserved for medical emergencies. As we rushed the plums from her car to my kitchen we felt the stifling heat starting to build and quickly closed the door. Our goal was to honor the plum’s essence, as my grandmother had, by making the jelly not overly sweet, leaving a bit of tartness and making it that gorgeous, clear consistency.
Lys had ordered organic sugar so we had our precious, crystalline bags that would most resemble the pure sludgy sugarcane flavor of our youth. We’d also decided to use the metal-screw-top jars rather than face paraffin. We rinsed the plums, removed the few that had gone bad, and put them in large soup pots on the sea-foam green antique Chambers stove I’d recently rescued from a local curb.
As the kitchen started to warm, the heat outside started to build and I attempted to adjust the vents on the air conditioning unit in the living room. We added a third less sugar than called for and hoped the jelly would still set. We watched the plums slowly melt down to a soupy, sticky stew. I cleaned the jars and lids and left them simmering in another pot on the stove.
I did not have enough pots and pans, nor counter space, so we had to drain the plums in stages. Every pitcher, bowl, pot and surface was filled with the scalding hot sugary syrup. If a drop got on you, its heat would travel deep below the surface of your skin and the sugar would make it hard to get off.
We let the slow-dripping sanguine liquid fall willingly from the pulp-filled colander, waiting patiently for every precious drop. The literature we’d read said you could squeeze it through cheesecloth but it might make the jelly cloudy, so we coaxed it but tried not to press.
As we poured the strained fruit back into the pot and added the gelatin, we dried the jars and lids quickly. We funneled the deep plum liquid into the Ball jars, wiped the threads and hand-tightened the lids. As the water started to boil, so did we. Between simmering plums, a simmering pot of lids and jars and a boiling pot of water for sealing the jars, it was like a sauna. For survival, with each added degree of heat, my sister and I started shedding layers of clothing.
Jelly making without the proper equipment is challenging and can be a bit dangerous. Filling the jars with the hot liquid is touchy. Lowering them into boiling water and keeping them from tipping over is tricky. After they boil, you then must find a way to pick them up, from the still boiling water and set them on the counter. As they cool you listen for the ping, ping, ping! of the jars sucking on their metal lids—the glorious sound of a successful seal.
Not having jelly jar tongs or silicon gloves or a jelly rack is asking for trouble and it’s a miracle if you don’t get burned. The combination of needing to remove clothing to keep cool(er) and the splattering, boiling, often-sticky liquids invited plenty of skin-scalding opportunities. Just as we were negotiating some of these challenges, my new roommate called and informed me he was coming home.
“Ummm… can’t you come home a bit later?” I asked in a frantic tone as I glanced at my sister hopping in her underwear and apron at the stove trying not to get splattered. And with that question Rich became exceedingly curious. The more I tried to suggest he not come home, without wanting to explain that two crazy Southern women were cooking in their skivvies, the more determined he became.
Finally he insisted he was coming. I dashed around the house looking for the lightest decent layers I could muster. When I explained to my crimson-faced sister we were going to have to put some clothing back on, she glowered at me.
When Rich got home, he charged into the kitchen like it was on fire. The wall of humid heat hit him. He looked at our flushed faces and went into action mode, dragging in a system of fans to try to channel the airflow from the living room air conditioner, oh so far away.
My sister and I took to wetting our hair in the shower and using damp towels to wipe down. Kindly, it wasn’t until much later that evening when Rich asked why we’d chosen a 107+ degree day to take this on.
When my roommate’s child, Noah, arrived home from school, in a fashion similar to his father’s, he charged into the kitchen. He’d been told the Southern sisters were up to something mysterious when his father picked him up.
Upon opening the door, he gawked with his 10-year-old mouth wide open. Watching our sweaty, haphazard production line and the sticky liquid drips everywhere was probably the closest to an I Love Lucy moment he’d ever witness. After the shock wore off, he begged for a bite. I gave him a large jelly-coated wooden spoon to lick and he declared it “the best jelly ever!”
My imperfections don’t stop in the kitchen—they also extend to the realm of social graces and thank-you cards. My grandmother and mother practically had thank-you notes written before they’d even enjoy a gift and always mailed packages and letters on time. My siblings and I have always been slower. We are flawed and often run late. I do email, text and call, but in the Southern realm, that’s not the same. You must send something wrapped or handwritten, that physically leaves one place and arrives at another (preferably on time) to make a genuine connection.
Of course Lys and I intended to send our plum jelly as Christmas gifts but, as might be predicted, our jellies remained throughout the entire holiday season on the pantry shelf. We’d not forgotten; just failed to post them in time. As we opened our thoughtful gifts and cards from relatives, lamenting this fact, my astrologically esoteric sister proposed we send the jellies as Chinese New Year gifts.
We got busy buying tiny boxes and making address labels. While labeling the jars, we came up with a name that appropriately summarized our jelly-making experience: Gone Plum Crazy. We checked to make sure each jar was sealed, signed festive cards as “The Sisters Grimm” and gleefully sent them.
In short time, we began receiving beautifully handwritten notes from our relatives thanking us for their Chinese New Year gifts. And one of cousins wrote that the jelly was clear, not too sweet and reminded her of our Grandmother Dorothy’s. Then, further down the card, she used those words—perhaps the highest praise in Southern expressions—she described our jelly as just so!
Now I can’t quite imagine our grandmother getting scalded in her skivvies making her pristine plum jelly and I’m not even sure we ever managed to send our thank-you notes for gifts received that Christmas. But in one sense, in our own perfectly flawed sense, we had represented. It was the closest we’d ever come…
DK Crawford specializes in food writing and food photography. Originally from the bayou country of Southwestern Louisiana, DK now lives in Ventura. Her most recent work can be seen in the VC Reporter, Ventana Monthly, www.ojaipost.com, and online at her food blog: www.thefoodsavantblogspot.com. She is a longtime member of Slow Food and the Southern Foodways Alliance and received two special mentions in 2008 & 2009 from the Symposium for Professional Food Writers.
All photos and text © DK Crawford 2010 and cannot be reproduced without my permission.
