Jam today: what to do with Wimbledon’s strawberries
With 750kg of fruit grown for SW19 destined for jars, Debora Robertson shares ideas for the sweet stuff
Let jam be unconfined. With Wimbledon cancelled this year, the organisers have diverted 750 kilos of strawberries – originally destined to be devoured with cream by tennis fans – to be made into jam.
More than 30 tonnes of strawberries – 200,000 portions – have been grown specially for the tournament by Hugh Lowe Farms in Mereworth, Kent, and now a few thousand punnets are on their way to the pans of chic jam makers England Preserves, with the rest destined for schools, food banks, supermarkets and greengrocers.
It’s a good job we can’t get enough of the stuff: our passion for jam goes back centuries. The first known collection of recipes, Apicius’s De Re Coquinaria (The Art of Cooking) from the first century AD, included soft fruits heated with honey to preserve and sweeten them. Think of it as the jam prototype. Then, through several centuries, fruit was boiled into thick pastes. In 1733, in Mrs Mary Eales’s Receipts, we find one of the earliest appearances of the word “jam”, but it wouldn’t have looked like the soft, glistening preserve we spread on toast today.
It wasn’t until the 19th century, when we had greater understanding of how to control the growth of bacteria through heating and sealing, that jam took on the luscious, spoon-droppingly delicious texture we enjoy now.
To this day, homemade jam persists in being one of the most personal and precious of gifts – the seasons suspended in a jar. Made in small batches from patiently cultivated or foraged fruit, it is as though the giver is honouring you with the gift of their time, their bounty, the essence of their garden.
It is impossible not to think of the maker as you consume it, so it helps both flavour and digestion enormously if you like them. For a similar reason, I love to bring back jams and honeys from my holidays (remember those?) because when I take a jar from the cupboard, for the briefest of moments I am cast back to easier, less frantic times.
In recent years, in part because of the drive to eat less sugar, our consumption of jam has dipped. In 2017, jam sales went down by 2.9 per cent, to £106million, losing ground to those high-protein interlopers, nut butters, the sales of which leapt by 17 per cent, nudging the £100-million bar for the first time.
Still, while we may no longer think our breakfast is incomplete without jam, most of us continue to enjoy it as a treat, whether it is spread on our Sunday toast, stirred into Greek yogurt or sandwiched in a Victoria sponge. As we may use it more sparely, we have in some cases become more discerning about the jam that we use.
There has been a rise in gourmet jam companies such as England Preserves (some of its flavours include gooseberry and elderflower; redcurrant, rhubarb and vanilla; Bergeron apricot) and The London Borough of Jam. This fashionable east London shop – possibly the country’s only emporium dedicated to jam – creates small, seasonal batches of exceptional jam, from rhubarb and cardamom, to raspberry and hibiscus, and blackberry and bay leaf.
But however you choose it, whatever you spread it on, whether it is homemade, from the supermarket, or a gourmet treat, here’s to jam today, jam tomorrow, jam always.