Of all of the basic Pennsylvania dishes to grace the desk throughout afternoon tea at Elwood in Philadelphia—cubes of venison scrapple, smoked catfish crackers with bitter cream and caviar, shoofly cake—one of the best amongst them was merely a condiment. Served within the form of shallow china saucer you’d use to feed an aristocratic kitten and paired with biscuits and butter festooned with flower petals, the shiny, spoonable, seed-stippled strawberry jam was as sizzling pink as a flamingo pool float.
The fresh-fruit taste was simply as vivid, too, a physics-defying transfiguration of the sweetest strawberries I’ve ever eaten. So when just a little retail menu accompanied the verify, itemizing the jam on the market, after all I used to be taking some dwelling. My server went right down to the restaurant basement and returned with an 8-ounce glass jar smoked in frost: “Freezer jelly,” Elwood’s chef-owner Adam Diltz defined once I complimented him on its vibrancy. “It’s by no means cooked, so it retains that contemporary summer season taste.”
It doesn’t essentially comply with that if an individual loves fruit, they will even love jam. That is comprehensible, since contemporary fruit loses a lot of its effervescence when it’s simmered so long as a pot of beef bourguignon. However for me, the thick, sticky, concentrated preserves are simply as interesting, whether or not on toast, with cheese, or encased in crostata. At Inexperienced Aisle Grocery, the previous Philly market and canning line I owned with my brother Andrew, I made preserves professionally for practically a decade: fan-favorite Blueberry Cardamom, layered red-and-black Raspberry Roulette, 5 Spiced Peach, Apricot Sumac Sage within the uncommon season an early frost didn’t sprint the complete area’s apricot hopes. We didn’t do freezer jam—one thing I thought of then an unserious shortcut. We had a Hazard Evaluation Essential Management Level (HACCP) plan, and dammit, we had been going to make use of it to make the actual stuff. Cooked in inventory pots for hours, painstakingly canned, probably toxic if you happen to don’t do it proper—these had been preserves with stakes! All it took was a dab of Diltz’s unfastened magenta jam on a biscuit to annihilate all my convictions.
Diltz and his youthful brother Toby grew up immersed within the foodways of the Pennsylvania Dutch, the catchall for the German-speaking immigrants who fled to the state beginning within the late 1600s to flee non secular persecution. This contains, however will not be restricted to, the Amish and Mennonite communities who dwell in and round Lancaster County in South Central Pennsylvania. Widespread floor between these non secular communities and the secular folks of the Pennsylvania Dutch lineage was discovered of their recipe collections: rooster and ham pot pies, whoopie and shoofly pies, scrapple, pork with sauerkraut, and infinite jars of preserved produce mandatory for farm-centric dwelling.
It might not be as outdated as sizzling water bathtub canning, however freezing was the popular course of for preserving peak-season fruit on Diltz’s great-grandparents’ farm in Hetlerville, 100 miles north of Lancaster County, the place their grandfather, Elwood Andreas, labored steel for freight prepare automobiles on the Berwick Forge. After they had been children, the Diltz brothers would forage wild raspberries and Harmony grapes or go to the U-pick farm to gather strawberries for his or her great-grandmother, Leola Andreas. “We might wind up consuming half of them,” Diltz informed me. With the remainder, “Grammy Oley would make her strawberry shortcake on biscuits with strawberry freezer jelly.”
Toby Diltz, in the meantime, remembers Grampa Elwood doing extra of the jamming. What the brothers do agree on is the unsurpassed taste of their childhood jams: “You simply can’t discover something that tastes like that wherever,” he stated once I caught up with him on the cellphone at his 6-acre natural farm and restaurant, the Blind Pig Kitchen, in Bloomsburg. (You possibly can order his freezer jam on-line for native pick-up.) Pink and black raspberry canes had been the very first thing he planted on his homestead—simply so he may make freezer jam. “Whenever you put the work into rising fruit the suitable manner, you need to preserve these flavors intact, and the freezer jam is the one manner to try this.”
The luminous strawberries within the freezer jam I had at Elwood had been from Toby’s farm. He additionally doubtless made that specific batch of jam. Or perhaps Adam did. Or their mom did? Nobody really appears to know which member of the family is liable for which jar, however the recipe is sort of commonplace throughout the 4 generations. “I really had to purchase a second freezer,” Adam Diltz stated—sufficient area to maintain a 12 months’s price of jam correctly chilled.
The jar I took dwelling didn’t final lengthy. I ate the primary third on grainy toast and the second third off the again of a butter knife moments after ending stated toast. I waited a good two days earlier than sharpening off the remainder of the jar.
