Jam session

It was the day to hand down a family tradition. Robert has been making strawberry-pear jam for many years. We first tasted it in a little restaurant in Nevada City, California and loved it. They didn’t have any jars for sale so Robert came home and invented his own recipe. A year or so ago, our grandson, Spencer, pronounced it “the best jam I’ve ever tasted in my life.”

Spencer and his brother Victor came to visit yesterday. Robert had baked fresh bread in the morning and we needed jam to go on it. The boys helped chop up the strawberries and pears. They set the pot on the stove and Robert poured in the sugar and turned on the heat. They stirred it and watched the candy thermometer climb up slowly.

Spencer took notes and wrote everything down in his cell phone. The boys tested the jam frequently to see if it had thickened to the right stage.

It is a refrigerator jam. It is kept covered in the refrigerator, not sealed in a jar. We eat it up so fast that it would be a big waste of time to go through the sealing process. Spencer took a small bowl home with him. Now he is the official keeper of the jam tradition.

I put up Robert’s recipe for a very similar jam on my blog in August, 2007. Click here and you can use the recipe, but substitute strawberries for the blackberries.