Before the drought we had occasionally picked local wild blackberries and had turned them into most acceptable jam. Picking blackberries is idyllic when you are sitting near the bushes sipping champagne, nibbling cucumber sandwiches, and watching. The actuality of struggling through the prickly brambles that tear at you from all sides as you reach for the fruit is different. When we saw thorn-free blackberry canes for sale at our nursery we had to have some for the raspberry patch. We ignored the old wives’ tales; ‘never plant raspberries and blackberries together’. The tales didn’t say why; we could only guess that you might get green hair or that cane toads would surface in your porridge at breakfast time.
The ten canes were planted and then split into twenty big healthy plants. They bore 120 kg of big bright fruit, perfect for jam because they were a little bit sour and had ample amounts of pectin to produce a firm gel. As advertised they had no thorns. The down side was that they were seedy, not with the soft seeds of boysenberries that provide a nice texture, but with seeds that were like tiny pieces of gravel. The tasty jam could result in a mouth full of loose enamel and a dental bill of $500. People bought the product but I was embarrassed with its imperfection and decided to let the fruit disappear into the ice lining the walls of the freezers.
As the drought stretched into its fourth year and production of raspberries and boysenberries dwindled to a trickle we had to find a way to convert those old blackberries into an acceptable jam to keep the punters happy. Somehow we had to remove those seeds. She refused to pick the seeds out one by one and we couldn’t afford a centrifuge. We could try to strain them out using a pair of old socks, underpants or the muslin curtains that old folk peer through as you pass their place. A piece of fine nylon mesh material that was strong and could withstand heat was rummaged from the rag bag. It would work if anything could.
I put 8 kg blackberries in the pan, heated them to simmering and cooked for half an hour with the lid on till the fruit was broken down and the seeds were separating from the soft parts. I hung a colander by its handles into a plastic bucket and spread the dampened nylon mesh inside the colander so its edges hung over the outside of the bucket like a death veil. I poured the boiling mix into the veil and waited. Juice trickled into the bucket. Around an hour later I had a pile of solid seeds in the veil like sand in a bag and 4.5 litres of purple and scented liquid, as thick as coagulating pig’s blood, in the bucket. All I had to do now was reinvent it as jam.
Years before I had bought an amazing book for $1 on a second hand stall. It was Bulletin 43 from the Department of Agriculture, Victoria, price 1 shilling. It was published in the 1940s and was instructions on how to preserve and use all fruits and vegetables that were in common production at that time. It had a section on jellies. That was what I needed to make, a blackberry jelly. It all seemed fairly complex, particularly the part about sterilising utensils like recycled metal kerosene cans for cooking in, and on maintaining the correct heat over a wood fire. I decided to adapt the methods to our kitchen and start with a 2 litre batch of our juice. The key part, which I didn’t believe, was that the extracted juice should be boiled rapidly for only one minute after the sugar (50:50 by volume) was added. I knew some people who boiled their jams for more than one hour. The instructions also said that pouring into the hot jars should be completed within three to five minutes because setting would start in the pan very quickly.
Though I boiled for 3 minutes, it all happened as the book described. The wobbly gel was a lovely deep red verging on black, with an unusual more-ish sharp flavour, better than wild blackberry jam. My heaped store of frozen blackberries could be turned into money after all if I could chip them from the ice. The rosellas loved the large piles of seeds scattered around the garden like blooded cow pats and fought over them with purple beaks to eat the most.
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