From Apple Jam to Crabapple Jelly

We've been listening to George Harrison's All Things Must Pass a lot recently, including its largely improvisatory Apple Jam sides ("Out of the Blue"!).

 fig. a:  George's Apple Jam

But, when it comes to making tasty jams (or jellies, as the case may be) of our own, we've been singularly focused on crabapples of late.

 fig. b:  crabapples

In part, that's because there's nothing quite like crabapple jelly:  that colour, that tartness, that natural set.  Most other jellies are either notoriously finicky, or they're just not nearly as pretty.

But, mainly, it's because we've had access to a particularly fruitful crabapple tree.  When the wild turkeys haven't been shaking it down (literally), we've been free to harvest this tree to our hearts' delight.

 fig. c:  crabapple tree

 fig. d:  freshly picked crabapples

At work, Michelle makes large quantities of crabapple jelly to serve with terrines, mousses, and pâtés.  With these crabapples, she makes small batches of jelly to spread on our toast.  Either way, the method is essentially the same.

Crabapple Jelly à la Michelle

Stem, clean and sort through the crabapples, removing any that are rotten. 

Place in a medium/large pot, depending on how many apples you have. 

Just barely cover with water.  You should be able to press down on them, getting the water to cover them when you do. 

Cook for 20-25 minutes at a simmer until your crabapples are falling apart and fragrant.
Pour through a chinois and let drip.* 

For every 10 parts juice, add 6-7 parts sugar, depending on the tartness of your crabapples. 

Place the juice and sugar in an appropiately sized pot, bring to a simmer, and cook at a simmer until you reach the gel stage. 

A drop of liquid should come off the spoon in a sheet rather than a droplet. 

Place in sterilized jars and seal according to proper canning procedures. Or simply pour into any clean glass container and let set, then store in the fridge.   

Voilà!

* You can also use a jelly bag for this step, but Michelle prefers to use a chinois because it speeds up the process.

And, either way, the results are beautiful--to the eye, and to the palate.



 figs. e & f:  crabapple jelly for breakfast

Of course, it pays to have homemade bread on hand to enjoy your jelly with,

 fig. g:  pain de campagne

but that's another story.

Act fast:  crabapple season is already in full swing.

aj

Cape Cod Capers

 fig. a:  geography

Ah, Cape Cod!  Your sandy features and abundant coastline hold so many opportunities, so many pleasures!  And your lobsters are so disproportionately large (and tasty)!

 fig. b:  nostalgia

We're already so nostalgic for you.  It's only been a little over a week since we returned, but it feels like decades.

fig. c:  dunes


We miss your sand dunes and your foliage,

 fig. d:  ark

your quaint little towns and villages with their whimsical sense of style,

 fig. e:  shells

and your abundant beachcombing opportunities.

 fig. f:  lobstah & chowdah

But most of all we miss your seafood stores and markets.  Places like Hatch's, Mac's, the Chatham Fish Pier Market, and George's (motto:  "George's plaice has sole."), with their lobster rolls, their beautiful fresh and smoked fish, their briny, inexpensive Wellfleet oysters, and their luscious littlenecks

 fig. g:  steamahs

and succulent (and sometimes even sandless!) steamers.  Because of you, we ate plentiful seafood each and every day, and in every possible way:  raw, steamed, grilled, pan-fried, etc.

We knew we'd miss your seafood, so we brought some home with us

 fig. h:  sea food

in those lovely lined bags of yours.  We brought back delicious flounder and smoked bluefish, but we were especially excited to be bringing back clams:

 fig. i:  littlenecks

both littlenecks

 fig. j:  steamahs

and steamers.  You see, we had it in mind to make some real clam chowder, so we made sure to pick up the other essentials that are so critical to good, old-fashioned chowder-making:

 fig. k:  bacon

smoky bacon (from New Hampshire),

 fig. l:  potatoes

seasonal potatoes (from Quebec), and milk and cream (from Vermont).

You can find clam chowder all up and down the Cape, of course, but it's a little difficult to find one to our liking.  The regional preference is for starchy, even stodgy, clam chowder that's heavy with thickeners, but we prefer ours thinner and lighter, with any and all starchiness coming strictly from the potatoes and any crackers or pilot biscuits you might choose to top it off with.  The trick is to chop up your potatoes "thick/thin":  in irregular shapes that are narrower at one end and that cook irregularly.  If you chop 'em and cook 'em just right, the potatoes themselves will thicken your chowder just so.

Clam Chowder 

36 littleneck clams*
125 ml high-quality clam juice [like Bar Harbor] (optional)
4 strips smoky bacon
1 sweet onion, finely chopped
water or high-quality clam juice
9-10 small-medium potatoes, cut thick-thin
1 1/2 cups whole milk
1/2 cup cooking cream
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
common crackers (optional, but highly recommended) 

If you want a particularly rich clam broth, pour 250 ml of clam juice in a large pot, add the clams, cover the pot, and bring to a boil.  When the liquid comes to a boil, lower the heat, and steam the clams until they've all opened (about 6-10 minutes). 

If you don't have access to a high-quality clam juice, just use the same amount of water instead, and follow the directions above. 

When the clams have opened, use tongs to place them in a bowl.  And when the clams have cooled enough to handle, remove the clam meat from its shell and chop finely. 

Strain the liquid in the pot along with any broth in the bowl through a fine strainer lined with a paper coffee filter, or just pour it off carefully, leaving the grit behind. 

Fry the bacon in a pan until crispy.  Pour the bacon fat into a pot and sauté the onion until translucent.  Meanwhile, dice the bacon.   

Measure the amount of broth and top off with water or clam juice to make a generous 2 cups.  Add this to the pot with the onion, as well as the diced bacon.  Add the potatoes, bring to a simmer, and cook until they are still firm but done.  Stir the milk and cream into the broth and add salt and pepper as necessary.  If your clams are fresh and briny and if you've used clam juice, you shouldn't need much, if any, salt. 

Bring the broth back to a gentle simmer and add the clam meat.  Do not let the chowder boil.  Cook the chowder at the barest simmer for another 2-3 minutes. 

The chowder will be at its best if you age it briefly, keeping it warm, but not hot, for an hour or so.  Afterwards, just bring the chowder bring it back to temperature, adjust the seasoning, and serve, preferably with common crackers (especially common crackers that have been split and toasted in the oven.) 

Serves 4-6 as an opening course. 

[recipe based closely on a recipe from John Thorne's Serious Pig] 

* You can also make a nice clam chowder with steamers, but we saved our steamers for, well..., steaming.

The other revelation of our Cape Cod excursion had to do not with fruits de mer, but with fruits du bord de la mer.

Michelle had read about Cape Cod's legendary beach plums years ago.  When we we got an invitation to vacation there, she tried to find out some more about them and discovered that we'd be there at the height of their season--mid- to late-August.  The thing is, how do you go about finding a fruit that's totally wild and that you can only procure from foragers?  Especially when the foragers in question are known to keep their sources secret--like mushroom hunters and their troves of prized chanterelles and morels.

We had no idea how we'd find beach plums, but we were determined to keep our eyes peeled for them.  And, in the end, it took us less than 24 hours to score both beach plums and another wild coastal fruit we had no idea even existed:  wild apricots.  But we found in them in a most unlikely spot:  at a flea market (!).

We'd been told that the weekend flea market at the Wellfleet Drive-In was a must--and it was!--but we had no idea that there'd be a grizzled old hippie selling foraged fruit along with his carved wood C.R.A.P.**  God bless him!  He had an amazing array of carved driftwood whales and other folk art treasures, and his beach plums and wild apricots were beautiful (much, much smaller than we would have imagined, but beautiful nonetheless).












fig. m:  wild beach plums & apricots

When we got them back to our beach house,











fig. n:  sorting



Michelle set about sorting through them.  And the next morning she made an exceedingly precious

 fig. o:  preserves

small batch of wild apricot and beach plum preserves.  Fresh, both fruit were a little too tart to be pleasant--but sweetened and cooked, they turned into the deepest, most delicious preserves.  The beach plums almost had a wine flavour to them, while the apricots were redolent of almond.

We brought back numerous souvenirs from our trip to Cape Cod,

 fig. p:  souvenirs

 fig. q:  ole no. 69

but there's no question the most highly prized were those two jars of beach house-made preserves.

Of course, there are other, more conventional ways of scoring traditional Cape Cod preserves, like beach plum.  And some of them are quite excellent, indeed.  Take the Chatham Jam and Jelly Shop,

 fig. r:  jams & jellies

in (you guessed it!) Chatham, where you can find dozens upon dozens of house-made jam & jellies, including a whole assortment of wild fruit preserves.

We kept the small batch we made at the beach house for ourselves, but we brought back extras to stock our pantry and give to our friends and family.

Ah, Cape Cod!  We miss you so.

aj

** The acronym stands for Cape Recycled Art Project, if memory serves me right.

p.s. TY to R & MA for making this happen--such a great time!

Montreal Fruit Hunters' Local 24

With summer now in full effect, the Mile End/Outremont division of the Montreal Fruit Hunters' Association has been buzzing of late.

First, there was a wild mango tasting.  It came hot on the heels of a trip by one of our members to the 21st annual International Mango Festival in Coral Gables, FL--the same festival depicted with such affection in Yung Chang's film version of The Fruit Hunters.  Our intrepid colleague was gutsy enough to return with a suitcase full of rare breeds, and generous enough to share them with the rest of Local 24.  Now that's a true Best Fruit Friend.  (TY!)

 fig. a:  these mangoes are wild

They were all different sizes and colours and most of them were marked with strange names like Z-DW-10, Poiri, and Zebda.  They were varieties that had been collected around the world, then cultivated in Florida.

 fig. b:  Call me Ermenegildo.

More importantly, they were wonderfully ripe, and perfumed to an extent some of the Local's members had never experienced before.  The hot, muggy, July air seemed to agree with our specimens.  The effect was enough to derange the senses.

 fig. c:  the fruit sniffers

And then we started to portion them and eat them, and the experience was taken to the astral plane.  Who knew mangoes could smell and taste like a crisp Chablis, like billowing frankincense, like a sweet, fatty piece of expertly spiced smoked meat?  Apparently the range of flavours at the International Mango Festival ran even wider:  banana cream pie; crème brûlée; marshmallow dust; and so on.

Some of the mangoes we sampled were sweet, while others were "savoury"--we imagined making the most wonderful ceviche with one particularly acidic variety, but they were still so good, so enticing, that we just went ahead and ate them right there and then anyway.

Our hands-down favourite was the Poiri, a variety that had all the fruitiness, all the sweetness, and all the fragrance one looks for in a top-notch Indian mango--only everything was amplified.  It was like that mango had been turned up to 11.  It also reminded me of that old line from Spenser for Hire (or was it A Man Called Hawk?):  take the baddest mango you know; multiply it by two; add a few zeroes to that; and that doesn't even come close to how bad that Poiri was.

The moral of the story:  there's a strange and beautiful world of mangoes out there.  Seek them out when you're traveling in exotic tropical locales.  Visit a mango festival, if you get the opportunity.  And if you know someone who's planning on visiting a mango festival, beg them to bring a few back with them.  You, too, might reach the astral plane.

-----

From the transnational, to the hyperlocal...

A day or two later, we were back at it.  Local 24 had had such a great time devouring those mangoes, that we decided to reconvene to do a little urban foraging and clean an Outremont sour cherry tree of its highly prized fruit.

We considered renting an actual cherrypicker to do the job, but in the end all it took was a couple of tall ladders, some buckets, a little determination, and some nerves of steel.

 fig. d:  cherrypickin'

A couple of hours later we'd amassed a couple hundred dollars' worth of beautifully ripe fruit.  So ripe, in fact, that you could almost eat them straight.  Almost.

The very most perfect ones, we made sure to leave the stems on, we pricked each one ever so carefully three times with a sewing needle (as per Michelle's instructions), we placed them in jars, and we immersed them in a lethal combination of granulated sugar and Buffalo Trace Bourbon, then set them aside (for 30 days), in order to make Bourbon sour cherries.  Mm-hmm.

The next most perfect ones we stemmed, pitted, and doused them with a little lemon juice, then placed them in a large Tupperware container so that Michelle would be able to make a sour cherry pie.

And the rest we stemmed, pitted, and mixed with a little bit of lemon juice and a lot of sugar, so that we could make sour cherry compote out of them and can them.  We ended up with about twenty 250-ml jars of the sour cherry compote alone.

But the pièce de résistance was Michelle's pie.

 fig. e:  cherry pie

Michelle's got her own ways when it comes to sour cherry pie, but there are plenty of reliable recipes out there in the blogosphere, in newspapers and magazines (and their websites), and beyond.  Alice Waters' instructions from Chez Panisse Fruit are particularly trustworthy, and that recipe is among the original inspirations for Michelle's own pie.  Waters' introduction is sage, too.  It highlights the urgency of the matter, as well as the proper method:

The season for tender, translucent, tiny, red sour cherries is only a few weeks long, so we buy as many as we can and make cherry pie as often as we can.  We like to top them with lattice crusts so that plenty of steam can escape, allowing the filling to get nice and syrupy.

Respect is due.

Sour Cherry Pie

2 1/2 pounds sour cherries, stemmed and pitted (about 5 cups)
1 cup sugar
3 tbsp quick-cooking tapioca
1 tsp kirsch
two 9-oz pieces pie dough
2 tbsp heavy cream
1 tbsp unsalted butter 

Preheat the oven to 400º F. 

Toss the cherries with the sugar, tapioca, and kirsch.  Let the fruit mixture macerate for 30 minutes--this will plump the tapioca and dissolve the sugar.  Roll out the first piece of dough into a circle 1/8" thick.  Line a 9" pie plate, leaving a 1/4"-wide overhang around the edges.  Roll out the second piece of dough into a 13" circle; slide this onto a baking sheet and refrigerate.  Pour the cherry mixture into the pie shell. 

To make a lattice top, remove the second piece of dough from the refrigerator and cut into 1/2"-wide strips.  Arrange half the strips on top of the pie, and 1/2" apart.  Lay the remaining strips crisscross over the others (or, more prettily but more fussily, weave the strips [like Michelle did]).  Trim all the strips of dough so that their overhang is no more than 1/4", and neatly fold the edge of the bottom crust over the strips.  Pinch a wavy scalloped edge around the rim of the crust by making indentations with your thumb and fingers. 

Brush the top with cream and sprinkle lightly with sugar.  Dot the fruit exposed by the lattice with little pieces of cold butter (this step keeps the fruit from burning).  Bake immediately (to prevent the crust from getting soggy) for about 45 minutes, placing the pie plate on a baking sheet so that the pie doesn't spill all over your oven, until the top crust is golden brown and thick juices are bubbling from the holes.  Let the pie cool awhile on a rack before serving (it can be reheated in a warm oven for 10 minutes, if need be), and don't forget vanilla ice cream as an accompaniment and/or sweetened whipped cream. 

Makes one 9" pie.

[based very, very closely on Alice Waters' recipe in Chez Panisse Fruit (2002)]

But whatever recipe you choose to use, choose it quickly.  As Waters points out, sour cherry season is notoriously short.  If you're looking for the kinds of quantities you need to make pies here in Montreal, look for the buckets of fresh Montmorency cherries that come from Ontario.  They're highly prized by local chefs, so you might have to place an order for one, but it's well worth your while.  (Chez Nino at Marché Jean-Talon is an excellent source.)

Better yet, scout out a neighbourhood sour cherry tree and pick it clean.  Just make sure to get the permission of the owner if it's on private property (like we did).  Nine time out of ten you'll find that the owners will oblige you.

Trust me, fruit trees are out there, just begging to be picked.  Most city folk don't seem to notice them, though--or, if they do, they seem to be under the bizarre impression that the fruit that grows on city trees is necessarily inedible.  We got asked several times by passersby what it was that we were picking.  "C'est des griottes," we told them. "Sour cherries."

One of these passersby was a woman who was taking a break from her job at a bakery.  "Sour cherries?  We make pastries with those inside."

Exactly.

Already, sour cherry pie is in the very highest ranks of down-home desserts.  Sour cherry pie made with sour cherries that you picked yourself can be a downright epiphany.

aj