Food

9.18.12

Purple, red, black: the progressive color of my fingernails over the past few days. It would seem it is the end of the season for all good produce in Romania and so we have gone to work canning, juicing, drying, jellifying, and preserving in every form possible. It started with a few bags of plums then an innocent question. There were way too many plums to simply eat them. There had to be a plan. My questioning was answered: “We are going to make jam.”

 
I had made jam many times with my mother. You squish the fruit, boil it with sugar then put it in jars and hope it seals. Sounds easy, but it’s actually quite a bit of work. Plums, however, are different than the fruits I am used to dealing with, mainly because of a large seed inside that needs to be removed. It took hours, and that is no exaggeration, to remove all the seeds from those plums. I went through two assistants in the process, but I was determined to see it finished.

 
Thankfully, plums are quite pleasant to the eye as well as the taste buds. The outside is a deep purple hue, but once you break into it, you find a beautiful yellow flesh. The seed is about as big as an almond, which explains why it must be removed. Mrs. Copu makes her plum jam without any sugar, which I find quite amazing. A jam you can use without the guilt of sugar? Yes, ma’am. She simply cooks it in the oven for a few hours, adding only an herb of which I am unsure of the name. Then, once all traces of bacteria have been killed twice over, she scoops out the jam into jars, puts them under a towel and lets the jars seal themselves shut. The only hard part is removing the seed, the process of which left a purple stain under my fingernails for nearly a week…until it was replaced with the red and then black.