A quick collection of jam and marmalade recipes, including plum jam, raspberry jam, blackberry jam, currant jam, and cantaloupe jam. Summer treats to carry over into the winter months!
Prep Time: 20 minutes
Cook Time: 20 minutes
Ingredients:
- The fruit of choice
- The same weight sugar
- A kitchen scale
Preparation:
Despite Artusi's comment that he didn't like plum jam, he did give a recipe, as did several of his contemporaries. This recipe is drawn from Il Re dei Cuochi, which was published anonymously in Florence in 1885. Though the author calls for Regina Claudia plums, tiny very sweet green plums that appear for only a short time in July, you can use almost any good flavorful plum.Take ripe plums, pit them, weigh them, and simmer them in a pot for a few minutes, until they soften. Put the plums through a food mill to remove the skins and return the fruit to the pot with 2/3 their weight in sugar. Simmer the mixture until it reaches the proper consistency -- a drop on a tilted plate will run quite slowly, and transfer the jam to sterile jars.
Use modern canning jars with metal lids, washing them if need be with boiling water to make sure they are sterile. Pour the hot jam into them, leaving a little bit of air space, and screw the lids on tightly. Let the jars cool on a metal rack. When they have cooled, tap the lids lightly with a spoon or knife; if they ring the seal is true. Should the lid of a jar fail to ring, either reseal it or use it (you could, for example, make a crostata). Store the canned jam in a cool dry place.
Il Re's author repeats the recipe with a number of other types of fruit, varying the sugar to fruit ratio somewhat.
- For raspberries, weigh the fruit, simmer it for 20 minutes, put it through a strainer, and return it to the fire with its weight in sugar.
- For currants, crush the fruit and squeeze the juice out by putting it in a finely woven bag and twisting the bag. Weigh out the juice's weight in sugar, and boil the mixture till it thickens.
- For blackberries, begin with 4.5 pounds of fruit. Crush it with your hands, then simmer it for 10 minutes. Put the fruit through a food mill, return it to the fire with 1 pound of sugar, and simmer the mixture until it reaches the proper consistency.
- For Cantaloupe (from La Vecchia Fattoria, a popular TV show), seed a ripe cantaloupe, scoop out the pulp, and weigh it. Then simmer it in a pot for about 10 minutes, put it through a strainer, combine it with 0.8 pounds of sugar for every pound of fruit, and cook the jam until it reaches the proper consistency. I might also add a touch of cinnamon to this.
