I’ve been doing quite a bit of canning this summer. So far: blueberry-lime jam, spiced blackberry jam, dill pickles, apricot jam, which ended up having to be refrigerated because I forgot to add lemon juice, and strawberry freezer jam. (I have a LOT of strawberry freezer jam; something like 10 half-pints.)
This morning I was writing the date on the jars of pickles (pickles! I can’t believe they’re so easy!) and remembered that my grandmother was born in ’11, ie 1911. And that her birthday was in August. So I looked it up: tomorrow my mother’s mother would’ve been 100 years old.
FWIW, she was a city gal, more about store-bought butter cookies than canned anything. Born in NYC, died in southern CA (2005). Lived most of her life, as far as I can tell, in the pleasant suburb of Arcadia. Both of my grandmothers grew up as city girls, as it happens, dad’s mom in Pasadena, even if she spent her last years in the middle of nowhere Arizona.
I have vague recollections of mom making jam when we were very little, but it wasn’t something that lasted, although we did have a vegetable garden most years. I don’t really come from “country” people, honestly, so I always laugh a bit at the advice to not eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. Even my great-grandmas spent a lot of their lives in urban and suburban settings. (Although I’ve got one on each side from Indiana. Huh.) I even have one set of great-grandparents who apparently tried ranching or farming in south Texas and decided it wasn’t for them; they moved back to NYC.
Don’t really know where I was going with that thought, except that all this homesteading-type stuff is kinda new and weird to me.
Blueberry-lime, sounds good.
It’s pretty tasty, a little thick though. Could’ve done with less pectin or a shorter cooking time.