Threads from Alsace

DREAMS OF A CHERRY ORCHARD
Cooked black cherry jam again yesterday. I love jam making it has its own rhythm, watching the cherries get ripe over two months, tasting and deciding the time to pick, standing with baskets under the tree deciding whether to leave the stems on or not. There is a crop every two years.Is that the natural cycle? or  because last year the last frost came late, caught the blossoms in the springtime and arrested the fruit?

John holds the higher branches down and I pick, wearing a large straw hat because the sun is  beating down on us. He cannot get a ladder firm against the tree and breaks two branches whilst grasping the glistening ripe red fruit. The cherry tree is fragile and we have planted it on a steep bank so it is also quite inaccessible, we must share its harvest with the birds.
Later I sit on the terrace with mounds of fruit in different containers and stone the cherries. I am plugged into my i-pod listening to a podcast on pastoral literature which makes me think of 17th c painting, French pastoral scenes with shepherdesses wearing white wigs and sweeping dresses with huge blue bows and ribbons attached to their crooks.

I sit there for hours,  juice squirting into my face onto my arms and shoulders; its in my hair and down my cleavage. We have masses of fruit. Yet I still glance towards the top of the cherry tree ,tantalised by the fruit I cannot reach, whic peeps out from green leaves beckoning to the crows.

We weigh the fruit and put into our huge copper preserving pan with lemon juice.It heats slowly, we stir slowly,breaking up the cherries.We use  my mum’s old recipe written out by hand in German. We stir and break up the cherries, already there is liquid, we let it reduce in the pan and then pour in the pectin sugar. The tension rises. Will it set? Bubble bubble toil and trouble, we stir until the gloop has  a rich dark  colour. The edge of the bubbles are purple, .these are morello cherries ,sharp, tart and delicious bubbling in a hot mass in our copper pan.

Whilst J stirs I sterilise the jars , pouring boiling water over them ready to be filled.

We have to do it twice,the first time it didn’t set. We poured the mass of syrop and broken cherries back, boiled it up again to reduce it more and tried again. We tested by putting some liquid on to a cold plate, anxiously waiting to see if a skin forms, how much it slides down the plate until we decide its there, its setting, its on its way to be jam.

The boy next door came in the afternoon and hooked his little basket on a branch of our cherry tree to pick the higher fruit,we couldn't reach. I longed for him to climb to the summit but he carefully placed his ladder against the tree and climbed as far as he could,  but none of us reached to the sky.

I stoned again as the evening shadows lengthened in the field, we cooked bubbling liquid as darkness fell and a storm rose in the sky.

Today we stand proudly counting the jars of cherry jam, their lids tightly sealed in rows ready to be labelled.

They will be presents for the people we love, their favourite jam,

I look out of the window, the cherries are still there at the top of the tree. I look out at our field, and dream of a cherry orchard, watching  the grey mists covering it in the winter-time.