Of all of the traditional 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 sort 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 scorching 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 a bit of retail menu accompanied the test, itemizing the jam on the market, in fact I used to be taking some house. My server went all the way 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 time taste.”
It doesn’t essentially comply with that if an individual loves fruit, they can 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 almost 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 your entire area’s apricot hopes. We didn’t do freezer jam—one thing I thought of then an unserious shortcut. We had a Hazard Evaluation Vital Management Level (HACCP) plan, and dammit, we have been going to make use of it to make the true stuff. Cooked in inventory pots for hours, painstakingly canned, probably toxic in case you don’t do it proper—these have been preserves with stakes! All it took was a dab of Diltz’s free 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 shouldn’t be restricted to, the Amish and Mennonite communities who dwell in and round Lancaster County in South Central Pennsylvania. Frequent floor between these non secular communities and the secular individuals 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 countless jars of preserved produce vital for farm-centric dwelling.
It will not be as previous as scorching 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 metallic for freight practice automobiles on the Berwick Forge. Once they have been youngsters, 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’d wind up consuming half of them,” Diltz advised 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 mentioned once I caught up with him on the telephone at his 6-acre natural farm and restaurant, the Blind Pig Kitchen, in Bloomsburg. (You may order his freezer jam on-line for native pick-up.) Crimson and black raspberry canes have been the very first thing he planted on his homestead—simply so he might make freezer jam. “Whenever you put the work into rising fruit the correct method, you wish to preserve these flavors intact, and the freezer jam is the one method to do this.”
The luminous strawberries within the freezer jam I had at Elwood have been from Toby’s farm. He additionally seemingly made that individual 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 almost normal throughout the 4 generations. “I really had to purchase a second freezer,” Adam Diltz mentioned—sufficient house to maintain a 12 months’s value of jam correctly chilled.
The jar I took house 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 mentioned toast. I waited a decent two days earlier than sprucing off the remainder of the jar.
