On the Joy of Raspberry Preserves

It is always with trepidation that I open the first jar, that jar with purple goo where the hot mixture of berries, water and sugar coalesces after being dribbled down the side. It is the first testing of the season's preserves.

There have been the jars full of rock-hard, raspberry candy and the ones full of liquid that could not possible settle on a biscuit with ease. Yet, I am too proud to do other than stir and attempt to judge from color, thickness and the kinds of bubbles that well up when it is ready than do the sensible thing and buy a thermometer. And so I stir and sweat over a stove when the temperature outside is already in the nineties. And I test the thickness by letting drops fall into a cup of water and judging the results.

All of this is for these jars that surpass expectations; that have just that right mixture of texture, not runny, not hard, full of flavor. And all my doing.

What is it about food that is derived direct from your source by your own hands? There were the peas that decorated my yard in spring and fall for a full years, yielding memories of home and tender seeds until the Eastern rabbits learned their taste and drove me from this field. But they were always fresher, hence better, than anything from the artificial store shelves.

Then, there is the walnut tree in our back yard that I had not noticed for years until an unplanned change of career left me home during day light with time to notice the hulls on the ground. I spent days sifting through fallen leaves. Most of the tree leans over our neighbor's yard and I would lean over the fence and grab them with one of those "garbage pickers" or use a rake to bring them closer. My neighbors did not use walnuts and for some reason, never seemed to be around when I wanted to ask permission to come over to remove them from their yard. I graduated to using a tree trimmer with an extensible pole to broaden my reach.

After a suitable drying period, they were cracked. I found that lying them flat on concrete steps and tapping firm, but not hard enough to send pieces flying, produced decent sized chunks. These are black walnuts, not the Asian varieties from supermarkets that produce large seeds that separate easily from the shell. These yield bits and pieces and require frequent use of a knife pick.

"Those were mighty expensive walnuts," someone wrote after I posted on Facebook the amount of time it took to harvest a couple of plastic bags full. And yet, I have been more inclined to use walnuts in hot cereal with these pieces than I ever have been with purchased nuts, despite having to pick shell fragments out of my mouth.

There is a satisfying lesson that food has a life apart from us; that it is not there simply for our pleasure; that it does not exist for us. It exists for itself, for its own perpetuation through the product its species; to be knocked accidentally to the ground or carried through the digestive system of some animal; and to fall somewhere on good ground.

We make use of it, but for someone somewhere, in getting the ingredients to our table, there is work by someone, that effort must be made, that there is a cost to everything, and that we are simply part of the chain.