Berries Blue

I have learned this summer that when one sees awesome fruit going for a song, one buys as much as will fit into one's recycled grocery bag and worries later about what to do with it.

Such was the case with the eight pounds of soft fruit I bought at a super-low discounted rate at my local market's 'Blueberry Festival' on Saturday. 

The tonnage piled up into a veritable blueberry butte when I heaved it onto my kitchen counter not long afterwards. However, with something like six hundred Weck, Ball, and Bormioli preserving jars at my disposal, I was confident that my mountain would be become a molehill in no time.

And, somehow, in between simmering eggs the modernist way, spinning more ice cream, attending to laboratory duties, seeing Harry Potter, and engaging in the usual weekend frivolities that punctuate our lives here a chez Fractured Amy, that's just what happened.

I took as my inspiration the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, which is a fantastic resource for American jammers suddenly confronted with a glut of summer produce. I like to think that Ball's test kitchens (no doubt decorated with embroidered samplers and gaily-colored hex signs) are staffed by sweet little old ladies whose sole purpose in life is to pass on the wisdom of ages to suburban putter-uppers like me.

On this occasion, like so many others, the ginghamed grandmas proved their worth, exhorting me to prepare my bounty in such a way as to fabricate two completely different products from the same batch of fruit. Their idea was to make syrup and jam, but I had another idea - rather like the time I was able to coax home-made pectin and thick rich apple sauce from the same bag of Sir's rejected Granny Smiths.

Here's how you make silky sweet Blueberry Jelly and thick rich Blueberry Butter from a single assemblage of fruit.

First, get yourself twelve cups of fresh blueberries. I used about six pounds of fruit to make up the volume, leaving two left over. After all, one still needs some for eating out of hand and fresh fruit salad, doesn't one? You need to put all the blueberries into a huge non-reactive pan (I used my gorgeous maslin pan, which - to its great chagrin - hardly gets any rest these days) with three cups of water. Bring the berries to a boil, smashing and smushing them all the while with a potato masher. Bubble them until they've released a fair amount of juice and the skins start to break down - about five minutes more.

Then, decant the lot into a large colander lined with a triple layer of cheesecloth. Do not press on the berries or agitate the bowl lest your jelly become cloudy and sad. Leave the apparatus undisturbed overnight.

Next morning, you will find you have lots of juice, a pile of blueberry pulp, and an irretrievably blue piece of cheesecloth. Never mind, it's all in a good cause!

Now it's time to make the jelly. Measure out four cups of the juice and dump the rest back into the pulp. Combine the four cups of juice with one-quarter cup of fresh lemon juice and seven and one-half cups of sugar (I know, I know - but believe me, you'll be glad you did!) in your preserving pan (the pan needs to be huge, as this stuff quadruples in volume when it gets to a rolling boil). Slowly heat the mixture, stirring occasionally, until the sugar has melted. Then turn the heat to high until you get boilage. Dramatic boilage. The kind that, no matter how hard you stir with your favorite wooden spoon (soon to be stained purple forever and for always) refuses to be assuaged. When that happens, stir in all at once two 3-oz packets of liquid pectin.

You heard me. Liquid pectin. From the store. It's amazing stuff. It gels things in no time, so you don't have to boil mixtures for all eternity, waiting them to get syrupy and thick. This means that your beautiful fresh fruit doesn't have to cook for a long time and thus retains its essential flavor. Some people would disagree (yes, Madame, I'm looking at you) but sometimes it pays to do what grandma says. Since the surrogates at Ball told me to use liquid pectin with my blueberries, that's what I did. Besides, I've indulged Madame's idiosyncrasies quite enough for one month.

Once you've added the pectin (stirring madly while you've done so), get the mixture to a full boil as quickly as possible (this is the stage where it bubbles up alarmingly, threatening the top of your beautiful Wolf cooker with molten blueberry goo). Boil hard, stirring, for exactly one minute.

When you've done that, remove the pan from the heat and skim the pink foam off the surface. Pour the jelly into your prettiest jars and process them for ten minutes. When they are utterly cool, you will be rewarded with something really special. We spread the jelly on some soft cheese and were in raptures.

But you are only half done! Now it's time to address your pulp and make your butter.

Dump the blueberries into your food processor - the one fitted with the blade that looks like it's out of the Pit and the Pendulum - and whizz it around until it's utterly smooth.

Return the puree to your preserving pan with the juice and zest of one lemon, three cups of sugar, and whatever spices take your fancy. I used several generous grates of nutmeg and made up a spice bag with a stick of cinnamon, several whole allspice berries, and some cloves. Heat the mixture up slowly until the sugar dissolves then boil it for half an hour or so until it is pretty thick and mounds on a spoon. Interestingly, in my case it took exactly the same amount of time as it took to simmer my thirty-five minute eggs. How's that for multi-tasking?

When think you have butter, fill up your jars and process them for ten minutes. Since I no longer employ spread on toast or scones, I shall eat mine on top of yogurt, spooned over ice cream, and as an accompaniment to cheese and salmon. I will also be giving some away to folks who still lead gluten-rich lives. They are, of course, free to do with it as they will.

The yield from six pounds of blueberries is something like three and three-quarters pints of jelly plus three pints of butter.

We'll get through it in no time.