by Natalie “Lee” Arneson
Originally Printed in March 2023 Vol. 51 Issue 6 of the Cooper Point Journal
For this installment of Feeding the Diaspora, I decided to clue you all into an interview I recently did with my mom, Maria, as part of another project I’ve been working on. While we mostly discussed gardening, we took a little detour to jam—something I remember Mom always making with whatever ingredients were growing in the backyard. When I was a kid, summers always seemed to be for gardening and jam-making.
Natalie: Did anyone like Nana, your Nana, did they ever tell you like why they gardened?
Maria: For food, basically is what it was for. Because, like when we were in Portland, I’m gonna guess it was probably to help, you know, grow food because it was cheaper to grow. I mean, it wasn’t expensive to grow all the food, the water was cheap and stuff, and it helps when you’re trying to make a dollar stretch. Because you would do a lot of canning and stuff, and can your vegetables and stuff to eat later. When we moved to Salem, we really did a lot because we would eat that like all year round, or she’d freeze it—we had a big freezer so we could freeze a lot—actually she canned most of the green beans, then she froze the corn, canned the peas, did tomato sauce with tomatoes, then I think your Grandpa Jack would go get fruit off a nearby, sometimes like plums off the nearby orchards or whatever, or like the blackberries from down behind the property in the little gully down there, and go get blackberries that grow wild, and we’d freeze all that stuff or can it. Peaches, Auntie Dewaina worked at the Peach Orchard and we’d get all that, so you can can it and freeze it so then you have it throughout the year. Because there was a lot of us and not a lot of money.
Natalie: Did you learn how to can stuff from Nana?
Maria: No, I watched her do it, but I didn’t ever really participate to really learn it—it looks like way too much work. I did learn, so like when I make jam and stuff, if I don’t make freezer jam, which I usually make freezer jam, like when I do strawberry or strawberry rhubarb, I do the freezer jam because I like the freezer jam better for that, but for other jams, I like cooked jam. But the cooked jam I did learn a thing like when you’re canning you can do the inversion method. So if you have good warm jars, you’re putting your hot product in there, you put the ring and the seal on there, and then you turn it upside down for like half an hour. So then after half an hour you turn it right side up, and because the stuff is hot, and you turn it upside down, when you turn it back the other way, it creates a vacuum and seals it. So you don’t have to do the canning process.
Natalie: Oh, nice.
Maria: You don’t have to do the water bath and stuff. Or another way to do it is they would put like, they melt paraffin wax, and then you load a layer on the top and that would seal it. Instead of canning for jams and stuff. I learned that from her.
Natalie: You learned the method you were talking about from Nana?
Maria: Yeah, the inversion method.
Natalie: Okay, yeah. But then, I know I’ve seen you make the strawberry rhubarb jam, but what is the method for freezer jam? I’m not quite sure what that means.
Maria: Okay, so freezer jam you chop up your fruit, measure it out, whatever. I think you might add a little lemon juice to it sometimes to keep it fresh. And then you’ll take the sugar and the pectin and water and cook it on a stovetop for a couple of minutes. Bring it to a boil, cook it for a couple of minutes so it starts to thicken, and you pour that cooked mixture over the fruit and stir it up. Pour it in the things so that it sets up. Well, you let it sit overnight on the counter, then you freeze it. So you’re not cooking the fruit. You’re just cooking the stuff that’s going to gel and firm it up. Cooked jam, you add the sugar to the fruit and everything and you put everything in the pan and cook it. So the fruit is getting cooked too, and then that’s so that you can can because it’s all been cooked. And you can just can it. You can’t can freezer jam because it hasn’t been treated that way. I like the strawberry freezer jam because it tastes more like fresh strawberries. I don’t like to cook strawberry jam.
Natalie: Yeah, you make good jam!
Maria: Now, blueberry. Blueberry freezer jam, I made that and I did not like it. It’s way better cooked. You have to have cooked blueberries, cooked blueberry jam. And then that prune jam I made a few years ago, if we ever get enough prunes this year, that stuff was really good.
Natalie: Yeah, I really liked that.
Feeding the Diaspora is a column created by Natalie “Lee” Arneson in March 2022 to share stories on multicultural identity and how food plays a large role in continuing and reclaiming cultural ties. Defining ‘Diaspora’; a diaspora is formed when people belonging to a cultural and/or ethnic group are living in a place that is not their or their ancestor’s country of origin.
Be First to Comment