I wish "shitload" were an official measurement.
Anyhow, I had a shitload of Terra Firma peaches at my house, as well as some lovely green gage plums from the farmers market. I shocked the skins off the plums and peaches, then dropped them into a pot with a bit of water, 3 cups of sugar and the juice of two organic lemons.
June Taylor was RIGHT. It took forever for the jam to hold together. About fifteen minutes into the slow boil, the plums suddenly disintegrated and left a watery, pinkish goo in the pot. It looked a lot like the slime that covered Carol Anne when she was rescued from The Beast in the original Poltergeist, but with a pleasant sugary smell.
After about 30 minutes of boiling, the fruit-sugar mixture finally held together and passed the freezer plate test. Hooray! Jam!
5 comments:
Actually, the shitload did appear as an official measurement, exactly once, in my hometown paper years ago.
Here's the story, culled from a few internet sources:
Jon Young, the photographer at the Crystal Lake (Ill.) Herald had just gotten out of the darkroom after printing up a photo of a surprise spring snowfall of several inches in a couple hours. He wrote a cutline, but could not get the weather service to return his call asking for an official statement on inches. Jon took off for dinner.
The number arrived after he left, and was inserted by a rushed reporter. When Jon called later to see if there were any questions for him, he was told there were none. The cutline was pasted up thusly:
"'Arthur Loy, foreground, and his mother, Judy, used teamwork Sunday to clear their sidewalk of nearly seven inches of snow that fell Saturday evening. Though a shitload of snow fell Saturday, snowplow crews had most major streets cleared by Sunday.'
'Twas the only edition of the Herald that has ever sold out.
And it gets worse!
The staff was then instructed to use a grammar checker to avoid using phrases like this in future writings, instead opting for the more politically correct verbiage. This resulted in an article on the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima referring to the plane as the Enola Homosexual.
The moral of the story: Careful what you ask for, Jam Lady!
Har har har!
Yes. Har indeed.
I think we need some kind of conversion chart. 4 buttloads = 1 shitload. there are 10 gobs to a buttload and 10 scads to a gob. Still, I don't want to see the measuring cups.
I approve of this new measurement technique, and will implement it in my recipe conversions immediately. This seems likely to speed the loss of my blog's Midwestern readership.
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