Greengage Jam: A recipe

These are my hands, somehow making stoning plums and caterpillar checking look more elegant than they were.  Spot the cheeky carrot  

In August in England we get a joyous thing called a Bank Holiday, a nice little work free day to go out and enjoy the August sunshine and fight with the hoardes of people in the shops and on the beach and generally bunging up all the road systems.  So as usual this year Bank holiday Monday dawned and it turned out to be one of those apocalyptic rainy days that leave you staring out the window, regularly commenting on the intensity and wondering why you don’t keep an inflatable boat for occasions such as this to blow up and man the helm of as you sail down the road.  I was going to go to a Prairie garden but funnily enough I didn’t fancy it.  A free day appeared needing to be filled so we made jam.

2 Pounds of plums or an hour hour of my life I will never get back

As much as the greengage can be seen as being a king among fruits, superior to other plums, anybody would struggle to eat hundreds.  Normally many are eaten whole but after the caterpillar outbreak every plum had to be dissected for stowaways leaving us with stewed plums for crumble and jam as the best usage options.  This need for dissection significantly slowed down production and after an hour of plumming we finally found one little friend, not in a plum but wriggling around in the bottom of a container and one rather dodgy looking plum that was just thrown away intact.  And here he is, just to completely put you off making jam yourself.  He is the caterpillar stage of a plum moth.  I think you can tell this caterpillar has such refined taste in grub through his rather red and fruity appearance.  If you find them in plums they just want to be thrown.  Ours were inspected with a fine tooth comb and while the early ones had fallen foul, the bulk had avoided becoming dinner.

The most beautifully red caterpillar I have ever seen, just preferably not near my plums

I love jamming my preserves, especially when all it really requires me to do is de-stone plums and then sit at the table and record the method while somebody else actually makes the stuff.  In my defence I was feeling a little delicate at the time following a night on the town.  I do not handle hangovers well.

So onto the method:

2 Pounds of stoned plums

8oz of water

5oz of sugar- We didn’t have any sugar at the time so somebody was sent out to buy the biggest bag I have ever seen.  The mother seriously overestimated our sugar needs

A large saucepan

Jam jars

A plate

Biggest bag of sugar. Ever.

Stone 2 pounds of plums, put in a large pan, cook until soft (I wrote mush at the time but have since been told not puree- still want pieces)

Add 8oz of water- we only added a scant 8oz as the greengages were decided to be particularly juicy

Bring to the boil and then turn off the heat and chuck in the sugar (preferably warmed in the oven but we skipped this step).  The key step in this whole process is all the sugar must dissolve, every last grain.  If when stirring it sounds gritty on the bottom, do like the mother and panic. 2 minutes later it should all have dissolved.  She even swills the jam up the sides of the pan to capture every last grain to avoid crystallisation.

We stopped at this point for a tea break before bringing back up to the boil but that is not a compulsory step.

At some point you want to have washed old jam jars in soapy water and placed upside down in the oven to lightly bake ready to take the jam.

Boil the jam for twenty minutes, you could bring it to a certain temperature using a sugar thermometer but we found that checking after twenty minutes worked better. 

Having placed a plate in the freezer to cool, after twenty minutes of boiling place a spoonful onto the plate and stick back in the freezer.  Good luck avoiding spreading it over the contents of your freezer in the process.

A few minutes later check for a crinkle, stick a finger in and see whether the jam wrinkles- the only time in your life you should be pleased to see a wrinkle. 

If no wrinkle boil for longer, if wrinkle whip out warm jam jars and pour in the jam, spreading most over the work surface in the process if you are anything like us.

If super prepared place wax circles on the top and then screw on lids.

Label: that will not look like jam in a years time.

Making a royal mess

While not a huge fan of the greengage on its’ own, as jam it is entirely another creature.  It could replace raspberry on my very short all time favourite jam list of one as the favourite.  Having made it we concurred that the sugar volume, which horrified the mother at the time could be lowered and still make a particularly fine jam.

Do not use old pickle jars, your jam will taste of vinegar.