Introduction

While this quote from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland always makes me smile, it also strikes fear into my heart. A world without jam is a terrible one. No jam for toast, cakes or scones? And, by extension, no chutney for a cheese sandwich or pickles for a burger? A sad world indeed.

Joking aside, a world without jam would be entirely different: the quest to preserve food is age old. In the past it was borne out of necessity, a means of furthering summer gluts through winter scarcity and bringing variety and nutrients to the winter diet, though the use of sugar also made it a luxury. As Michael Pollan writes in Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, ‘Harvest’s work is to hold off, at least temporarily, earth’s corruptions, the spoilage of our spoils . . . Cooking, canning, freezing, acidifying . . . sugaring – the culture’s time-tested prophylactics against nature’s rot, ingenious tools of the “kitchen garden”.’

These days we are lucky enough to be able to preserve because we want to rather than have to, yet jam making often gets a bad press. It is often used as shorthand for a small-town, small-world, small life, as if it is impossible to make jam and be engaged in international affairs at the same time. This book, in which I hope to inspire you to both garden and preserve, is hardly going to challenge jam making’s image.

However, making jams and chutneys – and growing the fruit and vegetables to go in them – brings a connection with the seasons and nature that is not to be sniffed at. With the year-round availability of all manner of fruits and vegetables in a worldwide economy, the changing seasons are easily lost. That sweet, heady whiff of fruit on opening a jar of home-grown strawberry jam on a dull winter’s day brings with it the promise of the summer and garden bounty to come. Even when fresh, an out-of-season strawberry just does not compare: there’s a reason jam is known as bottled sunshine.

A home-made preserve has an inherent connection with people and place as well. Different seasons will produce variations in the crops – even from the same plant – depending on the sunshine, rainfall and all the other factors that go into creating the flavour of fruit and veg, and therefore the taste of the preserve. On opening a jar we can, like discussing vintages of fine wines, recall the superlative raspberry jam of ’03, and hope for a similar result next year. A family member, perhaps living on the other side of the world, can be instantly transported home by the taste of their favourite jelly received in the post. A jar given to a friend is a gift that is always welcome (perhaps where the fresh produce might not be!), for it is personal, not generic or made by machine.

When I started growing and preserving, I would gather any and all harvests possible from anywhere I could, partly out of a desire to avoid waste and partly out of the love of preserving. I ended up with a lot of jars of courgette chutney that I did not really like and now I am more selective. There is no point in growing a crop that you do not actually like to eat and, if you have, there is definitely no point in preserving it! Give it away and do not grow it again.

Growing and preserving should complement each other – two cycles perfectly in sync. That which we grow but cannot eat gets preserved to be eaten later when the plant is no longer cropping: we avoid waste and extend the harvest. By the time we have used up the preserve, the new season provides us with a fresh harvest again. When you preserve, there is no such thing as a glut.

Yet there is more to preserving than simply making something last longer. The fruit or vegetable – whatever it might be – is transformed in an alchemical process into a food that is more than the sum of its parts, and is a completely different entity from the original crop. It is possible to enhance the pure flavour or make it more complex. That said, in this book I have kept my focus firmly on my garden: using where possible fresh, home-grown ingredients such as herbs and flowers to add subtlety rather than exotic spices.

‘The teeming autumn, big with rich increase . . .’

William Shakespeare (Sonnet 97)

Ultimately I make jam because I am greedy. It is not enough to savour the kitchen garden’s harvests there and then; I have to have more to eat at a later date – and I always overestimate how much I will actually want through the year (though that does mean I always have plenty to give away). A line of gleaming jars on the kitchen shelf brings as much pleasure as a line of crops in the garden: there will be jam tomorrow and today.