One of my earliest memories was of climbing down the steep ladder into Great-grandpa Thompson’s root cellar in the tiny West Texas town of Amherst.
Though I was just about 4 or so, I still can feel the cool, damp air and smell the musty earth in that cramped, dark chamber. And in all these years, I still remember what seemed like hundreds of Mason jars lined up on narrow shelves against the walls.
Each jar was filled with treasure from my great-grandparents’ prolific garden that didn’t just feed my great-grandparents, but lucky family, friends and neighbors who would be loaded down with as many pints as could be carried away.
My great-grandparents’ tasty trove would include black-eyed peas, pickled beets, green beans, carrots, new potatoes, creamed corn, chow-chow relish, peaches, pears, and lots of jams and jellies.
My mom has carried on her family’s food traditions, even if it has been more of an occasional pursuit and not one of necessity to feed her family through the cold months. Growing up, I remember Mom always finding a bountiful crop somewhere – a thicket of wild plums alongside the road, peaches from my grandma’s tree, a friend of a friend with too much fruit for one person. And she set to making her jam.
One of the best parts of her jamming is that she often gives away half-pints as gifts. And she always reminds the lucky recipient to be careful of the occasional “lucky” pit that may be hiding inside.
I’d never taken much interest in her canning, and frankly I was never asked to participate – Mom says she never really thought about it either. Canning in her family was never a hobby, just an end-of-summer labor that brought even the men into the kitchen. It was work, not play.
I found out how much work it can be when I went home to Texas for a week this summer to learn how to put up jam.
My parents have had a 640-acre spread outside Childress, Texas, for a few years now. Along with the mesquite, sagebrush and a few giant old oaks, the rolling ranchland offers several big wild plum thickets that, barring late frost, start showing their ruby-red fruit sometime in June every year.
In the middle of this past July, my parents, my 3-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son piled into my parents’ six-person all-terrain vehicle and chugged over cow patties and cactus to find the thickets that were still worth the picking. Despite the 90-plus-degree morning heat, we pulled on long-sleeved shirts to protect us from the thorny brush and started filling buckets with wild plums. Of course, in that part of the country, we told the kids to stay in the ATV cart, and not to step foot out of it because of the rattlers lurking in the brush. OK, so maybe I exaggerated the warning, but I didn’t want to chance a snake bite in the middle of nowhere.
In the end, the only one who got bit was me. Overzealous to pick a big, ripe plum that hadn’t been snipped by birds or shriveled in the mid-summer heat, I jabbed my hand up into a bush. Then, without warning, my right middle finger was shocked with a sharp, searing pain – and the zaps kept coming. Dazed and screaming like a baby, I dropped my half-full bucket of plums and ran before realizing my instantly swollen finger and nauseating pain was from three yellow-jacket bites. Lesson No. 1 when picking fruit: Don’t try to pick a hornets’ nest instead.
We spent an afternoon and a morning gathering the wild plums, which are much different from the store- bought variety. Wild plums are about the size of a large walnut, a brilliant red and very, very tart. But that’s where the jamming comes in.
Day No. 3, we went back to my parents’ home in Amarillo to start the process of putting up jam. All told, we spent seven hours over two days putting up 48 half-pint jars of wild plum jam. We washed and sorted, simmered, mashed and strained out pits, cooked, and then poured the sweetened, syrupy goodness into jars before their processing bath. It was two labor-intensive mornings, but it was worth every minute.
In my mind, my homemade jam is better than Smucker’s for sure, but more than that, I’m glad to have labored outside with my parents and in the kitchen with my mom. It feels good to carry on a food tradition that has been lost in our modern lives of two-hour work commutes, competitive soccer practice for 5-year-olds and $6 cups of coffee.
Who knows? Maybe the key to a long life is slowing down long enough to make preserves. Great-grandpa Thompson could can with the best of the women in his family. In his old age, he was known to take afternoon naps on the front porch in his rocker. That’s where they found him one summer day after he had peacefully died in his sleep.
I’d like to think when he sat down that afternoon, he still had a sweet taste on his lips and a smile on his face from a job well done.
Jennifer Starbuck is a freelance writer who lives in Centennial. She is a former Denver Post copy editor and page designer.
