Confiture d’abricots

Forget everything you’ve ever heard about jam-making taking all day. It doesn’t! A few jars of apricot jam, for example, can be made in less than an hour, setting you up with a burst of summery flavor all year long. The key words being ‘a few jars’. If you make your jam in small batches, you can fill your cupboards as the seasons unspool. So far this year, I’ve made strawberry and apricot. I’ll go on to plum and fig jam (one of my favorites).

Confiture d’abricots / Apricot jam

When I discovered the French method of jam-making during my first summer after moving to France, it was a revelation. This was back in 1975. I was spending a few weeks at a friend’s place in the Cévennes, a gorgeous region to the west of Provence. Chirping cicadas, olive trees, wild lavender, the whole shebang. The garden was overflowing with fruit of all sorts. No way could we eat it all as it ripened. The answer? Make some jam.

The French do this the simple way. All you need is the fruit, sugar, two large pots, a wooden spoon and some empty jars with screw-on lids. No need for paraffin. You sterilize the jars in boiling water as the jam is cooking. You then ladle the hot jam into the sterlized jars and screw on the lids. This forms a vacuum that will preserve your jam perfectly.

French recipes for apricot jam differ widely, notably on how much sugar to add to the fruit. Many call for equal weights of sugar and fruit — i.e. for two pounds of fruit you need two pounds of sugar. I tend to use less. For example, my apricot jam recipe calls for five parts fruit to three parts sugar — i.e. for one kilo (1000 g) of fruit you need 600 g of sugar. With American measurements, this works out to 2-1/4 pounds of fruit and 3 cups of sugar.

Using less sugar means that you need to cook the jam a little bit longer, but I find this to be an acceptable trade-off for deeper, tangier fruit flavor in every mouthful. If you perfer your jam sweeter, then you can simply add a bit more sugar and reduce the cooking time.

Another question is which type of sugar to use. Some recipes call for unrefined raw sugar — cassonnade or demerara. Some call for honey. I prefer to use white sugar, which I find allows the full flavor of the fruit to come through most clearly.

I generally do my jam-making in the morning, when it’s still cool. Five to ten minutes to pare the fruit, half an hour to let the apricots steep in the sugar, 15 minutes to cook the jam and sterilize the jars, and five minutes to fill the jars and seal them. Easy peasy. One hour and you’re out of the kitchen and ready to enjoy the day.

For one kilo of fruit, you will get 3-4 jars of jam. That may not sound like much, but if you do it several times a summer with different types of fruit, you’ll end up with enough to last the winter. I missed the red and black currant season this year, but plums and figs are yet to come, and with any luck I might find some blackberries in the autumn.

Meantime, I’ve started updating the Menus section of the site for summer. When you’re wondering what to make for lunch or dinner, you can check it out to find everyday and weekend menus — for omnivores, vegetarians and vegans.

Happy cooking.