A rainy day on the lake is heavenly. You wake up slowly to the sound of a peaceful drumming on the roof. The cottage cools overnight, a blessing given how hot the sun beats in at the end of the day. Truth is, I don’t like cool and damp and there is one quick way to better enjoy my coffee: start the canner on its boil.
Next, it’s time to set out all of the fruit I collected yesterday. Local raspberries and the most beautiful petite blackberries I have ever seen. Next come the plumcots and cherries. And then the peaches (which seem to be collecting more than a few fruit flies, indicating it’s do or die for them).
I have made so much jam over the past two years, I don’t bother with recipes now except to understand possibilities. Who needs rules? I make whatever suits me at the time using whatever fruit looked good to me when I bought it. While I started out making one-fruit jams, I prefer to have a little fun blending my fruits.
My kitchen has become my art room of old. At my all-girls English boarding school, the art room was open on weekends. Dorm rooms slept up to 10 girls at a time. We were “reminded” when to get up and when to sleep by ringing bells and thoroughly nasty matrons and senior girls. In school corridors (called “passages”) you had to walk single file to the right and no talking. At meal times, you were told where to sit. The younger girls had to sit in the middle to clear the plates. The older girls made up the seating charts. If you didn’t know where you stood in the pecking order, the seating chart was a very good clue.
I spent my weekends in the art room. Often, I was the only person there. All materials were available. No one was there to tell me, for example, what happens when you mix oil paint with acrylic (hint: nothing good), or that the glaze you put on your pot will look very different after firing. In a school that had so many rules, somehow I was allowed to be loose in the art room where I learned by experience.
There are no shortcuts to learning a skill. Yours hands have their own memory, and it is said that hands have to perform a task more than 500 times to start getting it right. The conscious competence theory is one way to express the learning progression. There are four stages, although there is some argument for a fifth.
- Unconscious Incompetence
- Conscious Incompetence
- Conscious Competence
- Unconscious Competence
Think of how you learned to drive. Moving from stage 1 to 2 is the moment you are aware that you don’t take left hand turns very well, and you constantly misjudge how to fit your car in the parking lines. Having become aware of your weaknesses, you progress to stage 3 through practice. Getting to stage 4, you drive without thinking of all of the coordinated steps necessary to driving. Stage 4, however, might lead to complacency which is the moment you get in a car tired or angry and narrowly miss a collision when someone hits your blind spot. I’ll let you decide whether there is a stage 5, an enlightened competence. Some people think it is when you can teach your skill thoughtfully to others. Others argue it is that stage where a truly great practitioner take skill to new levels in a creative burst.
Anyway, I needed many weekends in the art room to experience my own mistakes, and the lack of outside disapproval gave me license to learn from them in my own fashion. While there is a place for teachers, I am happy to find my own path.
Today I made peach plumcot jam, and threw in some local strawberries because their time had come.
I threw the raspberries and blackberries into a pot with lemon juice and sugar, simmered, and they are now dripping through a strainer.
Separately I simmered the cherries, adding a little crème de cassis to the mix.
Tomorrow I will decide whether to throw the whole lot of fruit together in a single jam. They are probably fine each to their own jam. But it is possible that the whole is greater than the sum of their parts. And if the jam doesn’t gel, it will make a fine topping for a pint of vanilla from Round Top.