Cherry-Sour Plum Jam

Sour cherries, a treat of Eastern European and Russian cuisine common in East Coast and Midwest markets, do not exist in San Francisco.

At least that's what I hear from two friends who tried to find them here and then reported that sour cherries aren't grown anywhere in California.

Sweet red cherries made a triumphant return last week. I tasted samples of wildly divergent quality at three or four stalls before I arrived at the DeSantis stand, where I noticed women in headscarves handing over $20 in exchange for covered boxes. If there's one thing I love at the market, it's the air of insider knowledge.

"What's in there?" I asked.

"Leaves," Mrs DeSantis answered. She pointed to the women in the scarves. "That culture likes them."

"It's the Mediterraneans: I'm one of them," one of her helpers said. "Grape leaves for dolmas. Try the sour plums. We like them, too."

I had noticed the plums: pale green and hard, with a waxy skin. The tart flavor hits your tongue like acid as you crunch through the skin, then fades a bit, as if your taste buds deciphered some code. I decided to try them with cherries as a mock 'sour cherry' jam.

The rub? Now I had to pit over 100 individual fruits, with a mild hangover on a Sunday morning. And I had to do it early because swing dancing lessons in the park started at noon.



The most efficient way to do this is probably with a cherry pitter, which I don't own. The plums I slit open and scraped around the pits. In contrast, the soft, pulpy cherries were easy to pit by hand, pressing the pit through the flesh.

Time-consuming, yes. First I was annoyed with my lack of foresight. Then I got into the rhythm and thought--wait, isn't this the best part of cooking? Up early on a foggy Sunday morning, drinking tea, listening to This American Life, and making headway on a mountain of fruit?

The jam was pretty good. Not as sour as a true sour cherry jam, but with a pleasant tartness and depth of flavor.

Cherry-Sour Plum Jam
3 cups cherries, washed and pitted
2 cups sour plums, washed and pitted
1 1/4 cups sugar
A bit of water

Pit fruit and toss in a nonreactive pot. I added about a tablespoon of water because the cherries weren't particularly juicy and I didn't want them to stick to the pan, but if your chopped fruit yields a decent amount of liquid you need add no water.

Heat slowly and bring up to boil, then add sugar. I tasted the fruit first and determined that 1 1/4 cups of sugar worked well. Cook gently until the fruit falls apart and pulls back together.

All in all, the pitting took over an hour and the cooking about an hour and a half.

Straw-ber-eeee!

If you were at Alemany this morning, you heard the hams from Rodriguez Farms singing out their strawberry song: two men, three long notes, sustained for a few minutes: Straw-ber-eeee!

In 2008 I swore I’d improve on last year’s cooking strategy by rejecting the impulse toward innovation (in the guise of boredom).

I’d make some particular fruit into jam once, then forgo it for the rest of the season, because I considered myself “done” with whatever ingredient: tayberries, strawberries, green gage plums.

But you know what? In December, when the wind spit frigid rain at every turn, and my cabinet revealed only one half-pint of tayberry jam, I cursed my poor planning.

So again this week it’s strawberry, this time mixed with loquat, a fruit indigenous to China that now grows on the streets of San Francisco. With texture like an apricot, it has a slightly tart flavor.

At the loquat stand, a man in a leather jacket asked us about the fruit. Suddenly loquat experts, Maria compared it to a kumquat ("Well, they both end in -quat.'") We encouraged him to sample one, after which he dropped his pit into my hand, so that I could grow my own.

“Wow,” Maria said. “When’s the last time a grown man spit into your hand?”

Approximately never. But he did tell us the location of a meyer lemon tree in a public park in San Francisco. A win?

Photos courtesy of the fantastically talented Maria

Strawberry-Rhubarb Jam

Sunday Dan and I made strawberry-rhubarb jam at the Cook Here and Now dinner. Dan is one of my market buddies; seeing him and his daughter Mia lugging their cooler-on-wheels makes even the foggiest Saturdays brighter and better. Dan has taken a couple of classes from June Taylor, the Bay Area's most skilled jam maker, and has made several types of jam on his own.


Our collaborative effort is, if I say so myself, exceptional. All credit due to Dan, who bought, hulled and macerated the berries, and gave a running commentary on what June Taylor would do. He even did the math, all logical-like!

Dan: How much sugar should we add?
Me: Uh...until it tastes and smells and looks good?
Dan: Let me get a pencil.

the math

I convinced him to add a bit less sugar and more lemon than he proposed, to allow the the tart flavor of the rhubarb to match the sweet berries.I even picked the lemons from the tree in my backyard. California!

The fruit boiled down fairly quickly, but it took a while to get the consistency we wanted. It started out pinkish-red, like the blood of a baby seal that had eaten too much cotton candy, and finished as a deep rose.

By the way, I just checked with my friend Sonya, and she said the baby seal blood comparison was not too weird, so I'm going with it.

Strawberry Rhubarb Jam

3 quarts strawberries, sliced and hulled
1 3/4 quarts rhubarb, sliced into chunks about 1"
3 cups sugar
3 lemons, juiced

Macerate the sliced berries overnight with a cup of sugar. Toss them in a non-reactive pot with the rhubarb, lemon juice, and sugar to taste. Boil until you reach 220 degrees and the mix passes the freezer plate test.

This yielded 12 jars of mixed sizes. To get a more accurate estimate than that, I'd have to inquire with Dan.

Hello, My Name Is

Today was the day of conversation, introductions and asides at the market.

I went with Maria, who celebrated her birthday today. Halfway through our first lap, we ran into Dan and Mia and discussed the dishes we planned to make at the Cook Here and Now dinner tomorrow and what was on the menu for Maria's ginger-themed dinner tonight.

"Where are you eating all of this food?" a stranger asked. "And can I come?"

At the Capay stand, a woman buying kale announced that she raised laying hens in the city.

"The secret," she warned, "is that chickens are cannibals! Pecking order isn't just a phrase." Apparently her hens ganged up on a sadistic rooster and plucked out his feathers. Sounds like a reasonable strategy to me.

I marched up to a guy in a Prather Ranch sweatshirt and asked if he pronounced the name Prah-ther or Pray-ther. Luckily, he was an employee and gave me the scoop: up north where the ranch lies the locals have a distinct accent, so it's Pray-ther. But he says it Prah-ther. Apparently he'd been listening in to one of our conversations as well; he wished Maria a happy birthday.

The first organic strawberries of the seasons appeared today, and tomorrow with Dan and his wife Amy, I'm making strawberry-rhubarb jam at the Cook Here and Now meal. A post tomorrow with a recipe.

Marmalade at Marco's

Saturday started off fast: we skidded over to Marco's apartment on a motorcycle, which was a hairy undertaking for two reasons:

1. I had never ridden on on a motorcycle.
2. I had an awfully bad hangover, which didn't help matters.


After a year of chat and business, finally we resolved on simultaneous bread and marmalade lessons. I'd been excited about the prospect of strawberry jam, but still the fruits of the market were unimpressive. No organics were available, and the fat, punch-colored conventionals offered little to compel. Instead we went for Lisbon lemons and crafted a pretty straightforward marmalade.

Marco and Allison's kitchen is ideal, from the light filtering through the waxy leaves outside to the smell of fermentation within. Alternating between cappuccino and Advil as fuel, I sliced lemons into thin strips, removing the seeds.

"Aaaaaah!" I moaned, still, around 1 p.m.

"You can't mix gin with beer," said the Roman. "It's like mixing Parmesan with...with...I don't know. It doesn't even exist, it's that bad. It's just wrong."

To avoid bitterness with citrus, you can scrape out the white pith, but these lemons had little. I tossed them in a non-reactive pot, covered with water, and boiled the mess until the peels were transparent, which took less than an hour. Then I measured the fruit and added about one part sugar for four parts fruit.

Put everything (liquid, peel, sugar) back in the pot and boil down to make marmalade, tasting to see if your sugar ratio works.

Because Lisbon lemons are exceptionally tart, so is this marmalade. You can add lots more sugar to smooth out the flavor, but then why use Lisbons? Let them be as they are.

About eight sliced lemons called for one cup of sugar; after tasting I added about a third cup more. We tried and liked the finished product on wheat bread, with a bit of butter.

Now that I've finished writing this, I remember some details: the wheat pancakes we forgot to try with marmalade, the two Winesburg, Ohio poems I read. I wonder when I'll ride a motorcycle again. I wonder if I'll add more sugar next time.

Recipes are stories. You rewrite them a little every time.

Voila--A Practical Application

Usually I give away the jams I make, but I keep a few jars around the house. Last week I made a pizza with fig jam, today I was cooking for some friends and finally perfected it, with help from Marco.

Best-Ever Fig Pizza

• fig jam

• garlic, chopped
  
  
• rosemary, chopped
  

• olive oil

• dolcelatte gorgonzola cheese, chopped
  

• arugula, washed and torn
  

• Marco's pizza dough

Roll out pizza dough and spread a thin layer of fig jam--mine is pretty thick, so I spread it on the dough with my hands. Sprinkle chopped rosemary and garlic, then diced bits of dolcelatte (a sweet gorgonzola). Add a pinch of salt, then dose with a bit of good quality olive oil.

Toss in the 500 degree preheated oven for six to eight minutes, until the crust is nicely browned. While it's cooling on the rack, throw on some arugula leaves.

I Made Marmalade

...because Mrs DeSantis told me to.

Not sure what to get, I questioned the matriach of the citrus stand while trying to snap her picture. She described how to candy the thick peels of blood oranges, then decided I should make marmalade from the exceptionally tart, orange-skinned rangpur limes, which are a cross between a mandarin orange and a lemon. You read that right: no lime involvement in this "lime."


Charming DeSantis naming conventions usually require a bit of research. The family is from northern Italy (Istria, I think?) and often letters in the names of their strange fruits are appended or discarded. The sign said "rangpure," so I google-tested for "rangpure" and "range pure" before landing on rangpur, apparently a fruit of Indian origins discovered by Sir Joseph Hooker in the foothills of the Himalayas and transported to Florida, where someone thought it was a lime.

Only appropriate then that we transform it to marmalade through another Floridian. Adapted from a recipe by Mrs Everette Rogers of The National Hotel in Leesburg, Florida:

Rangpur Lime Marmalade
6-8 rangpur limes
Sugar

Wash the fruit and slice thin, discarding seeds and pith. Cover with water and boil, covered, 20 minutes. Measure the fruit and water mixture (I got 3 cups) and add 1/2 c sugar for each cup of mixture. Over medium heat, cook rapidly until the syrup gels. Seal in hot sterilized jars.