Sunny Friday: June Taylor captures the essence of fruit
Friday, October 17, 2008
Home-preserved food conjures up strong feelings for me. When I was little my grandparents had a big garden, and my grandpa would bribe my brother and sister and I with promises of root beer floats at the A&W drive-in to get us to pick all the strawberries. I remember the thrill of hunting for flashes of bright red in the rows of green.
We’d eat our fill in handfuls and in shortcakes, then a little while later the strawberries would re-emerge as grandma’s beautiful preserves, rows and rows of mason jars glowing bright red-pink on the kitchen shelf. I didn’t properly appreciate this at the time, but now it’s one of my fondest memories, and I wish I had Grandma Dietz’s recipes.
The other day Victoria and I were discussing her upcoming story on preserving the bountiful harvest she’s had in her garden this year, and I told her how I couldn’t wait for plum trees and strawberry plants of my own so that I could try my hand at carrying on my grandparents’ legacy. This morning she thoughtfully sent me this video featuring June Taylor, an artisanal baker and jam and marmalade maker whose focus is on capturing the essence, flavor, and color of the fruit she’s working with.
I love June’s passion and respect for the fruit she’s working with. New preservers often ask her for precise recipes, but she says “there’s not certainties in food.” She judges when each batch’s readiness based on how it pours and how it feels.
Using fresh organic fruit and natural pectin from Meyer lemons, Judy and an assistant can produce about 150 jars a day. “I haven’t seen a way to scale this up without, in my terms, compromising the quality of the work,” she says.
Small producers of high-quality foods form the backbone of the decentralized, local, fresh food system that we need to build. And preserves can easily be made at home by anyone with a big pot, a few hours of time, and a lot of fruit on their hands. As Judy says, “Let’s remember, this is just preserved fruit, and there’s nothing stopping us but our imaginations.”
I’ll let you know when how my first round of preserving goes. In the meantime, enjoy this video, and let us know about your adventures in food preservation in the comments.
Comments are below.
Oh, I’m so glad you posted this Megan. Watching June handle fruit and speak about the process of making marmalade inspires me to want to experiment more with fruits and vegeatbles that I have planned to pur up. Last month I mad a good fig conserve(fruits and nuts), just cooked them down with a little honey, plain sugar, and pinch of sea salt. Their flavor was kind of dull and watery though. I decided to add nuts, almonds and walnuts which I toasted first then added to the figs. The final conserve was good but not great.
I later thought about the condition of the figs. HAlf of them I had picked a day after a hard rainfall. So that’s why my conserve was watery w/ not too much flavor; those ripe figs had swelled up full of water, and the flavor the was diluted. What would I do next time? Well since I’m not a marmalade maker, fruit ripeness is not as high of a priority to me as it is to June Taylor but I would try to pick the fruit before a rain or add more honey to the figs while cooking next time.
Paying attention to how fruit grows, develops and matures can certainly make me a better jam maker. So much depends on one’s curiosity to become familiar with the world of plants.
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